At least with Spotify and Netflix there is some kind of rev share thing in place. It's not very fair of course and a bit biased towards rewarding content creators that I don't necessarily like (or are in need of more money). But it's better than having to cherry pick creators. Somehow publishers have resisted creating such a thing for written media. We have this broken model of ad supported media and media outlets taking most of that revenue and paying really shitty wages to journalists, many of whom are working on a freelance basis and get paid pitiful amounts per word. Why do we have all these middlemen?

You are not the only one consuming a given podcast or YouTube channel, and even if you don't subscribe to their Patreon, maybe someone who likes it even more will. Sure, some content creators will not get enough income to continue, but is that really a big problem? We have no shortage of musicians, blog authors and podcasters, and if you don't care enough about a podcast to give a little bit of money to it, then maybe you won't miss it that much if it disappears.

Advocating for a different market structure than the ad-tech fueled one will of course change the supply side and I am not claiming otherwise. I just don't think it's necessarily going to be a problem, on the contrary it will optimize for content that people love rather than content that just stimulates them.

I'll just say that looking back on my life consuming media (that started long before the consumer Internet was around), there has never been a better selection of media that I enjoy than now.

I've never watched reality shows or sitcoms, the kind of stuff that dominated mass media for a long time... I have interests that don't necessarily fall into the mainstream, so finding interesting or quality content was hard, and shows/films/docs were few and far between..

But now? The current system, while imperfect, at least allows for every possible topic and niche to be somewhat sustainable.

The sheer quantity of media has absolutely grown exponentially so there's definitely a lot more bad media, and media that isn't for me, but in terms of choice for myself, it's incredibly good.

Obviously YMMV and this is just my anecdotal experience, but I don't consider the system to be broken (even though, again, it's certainly not perfect).

If you offer content for free I'm not going to pay for it. I don't tip, I don't buy micro transactions in games, I don't pay for discord nitro or buy "collector's edition" versions of games or twitch subscriptions or anything like that.

Simply, if I don't have to pay I don't. And I certainly won't waste my life watching ads just so someone can earn a fraction of a cent.

I don't feel any need to justify that, I don't feel bad about it. These tactics earn tons of money, and if that ever stops they'll stop doing it and do something else instead. Until then I'll happily take advantage of all the free stuff. Someone else wants to donate to subsidize me that's great, go right ahead. I'm gonna keep my money.

You justify with 'if you offer content for free, I'm not going to pay for it'. Agreed with microtransactions and stuff. But with youtube videos? The content is not actually offered for free. It precisely relies on ads to exist. So the content is offered with ads/with subscription (i.e. not free), and you are using an adblocker to bypass this. So you are just leeching out of the other users, and is not sustainable.

As long as I can use youtube for free with an ad blocker (and sponsorblock, amazing plugin) I will. If google doesn't like that they better figure out a solution. Not my problem.

The thing with ads is: it's not free money. We pay for it. All of us. It's part of the price when we buy goods and services.

If advertising wasn't possible, items would be cheaper and we would have more money to pay for content directly. Cutting out the whole advertising industry out of the content payment loop would save so much money.

And yeah people would still buy stuff they need because they need it. And stuff they didn't need? Well good then that they're not buying it. Saving natural resources and money.

For videos and podcasts I subscribe to content creators on Patreon. I currently have four subscriptions for a total of around $12, and I give roughly the same amount to each.

I also avoid services that are monetized by ads elsewhere and pay for Kagi to get ad-free search. I will avoid all services that offer free tiers with ads and paid tiers without ads as I just fundamentally do not believe that the business model can work at scale without causing harm.

I also host my own email as I do not believe that it is possible to provide free email to people without somehow also doing things with their data or attention that goes against their interests.

A vocal minority doesn't outweigh hard numbers in this case. But that's one of the causes of enshittification, everything becoming metrics-driven.

The funny part is we should have all learned our lesson from the cable television days. Perhaps it's been long enough that everyone forgot, or maybe most of the market is just too young now, but there was a time in the US when cable television was ad-free. Commercials started sneaking into that with some regularity even though part of the draw to paying for cable tv was that it was commercial free. My brain wants to say this happened around the late 1980's? I might be wrong on that time frame, but at some point, like a frog sitting in a pot of water, the heat slowly rose and we found ourselves boiled to death with more and more commercial interruptions in our paid cable tv channels.

Then we watched the same thing happen with the Internet in the mid-2000's. Needless to say, I am a heavy user of ad blockers and Pi Holes. I especially loath sites that want to detect my ad blocker, and throw up a message trying to to guilt me into turning it off. The thing is I am not just blocking the ads, but also trying to block all the tracking that comes with those ads.

It's not really just about being annoyed by ads this time around. It's also about the right to privacy.

Not so much of a problem on modern TVs / set top boxes, as they usually offer that feature (though things get complicated if you want to do some channel flipping to e.g. quickly check how a sports game is going), but it was definitely a pretty big deal back in the day.

None of this applies to on-demand, of course.

I believe the metrics exist; I don’t believe they tell anyone useful information.

- Rent seeking is not behavior I care for, and so much of the subscription service stuff is exactly that.

- I'm more than happy to pay for quite a few patreon/similar things.

- But _ultimately_ I don't just want to "consume" content, I want to share it. In fact I believe sharing the cultural artifacts I engage with is an essential part of a culture, and that getting in the way of that is morally wrong. So if your paywall gets in the way of _that_, I _will_ work around it.

Edit: also, the other side of the problem is that there are too many websites now. When it was Netflix and nearly everything there, I payed for it. I no longer pay for shows and movies, because things got _completely_ nuts. Similar thing with news. Reality is I pay _way_ more for Patreon than most people I know - not because of any moral reasons, but because I can actually afford that. And a typical news site asks as much as what I give to some of my favorite writers and painters.

Though, I dislike that Apple News now runs ads in it's offering and would happily pay a little more to completely get rid of them, but I like the idea that I get access to a number of sources for one payment.

But the curve of how many subscribers need to go premium, how much subscription to charge them and how many/few ads do both sides find acceptable has to be discovered by experimentation (like Netflix's 'Standard with ads' tier).

See also recent articles on "Apple TV+ is a failure despite making great content and $20b investment, Apple is about to make cuts".

(The comparison is not great because premium streaming of original content and long-form text journalism on current affairs are different things with different audiences and pricepoints and viewing patterns.

By the way I only just realized that Netflix releasing Squid Game Season 2 on Dec 26 is probably intentional strategy to reduce January and February cancellations.)

Also why many services release episodes weekly instead of giving them at once.

Does it make great content? I've only watched 3 series and then cancelled because it was annoying (but all three were fairly popular), and the more they progressed, the more underwhelming they got. The premise was always good, but scenario was meh and getting meh-er by the episode, everything was kept superficial. Kind of like to tick a box "we talked about X", but without actually exploring the topic. And it was the exact same thing over and over again in 3 separate series - be it the gay footballer in Ted Lasso or the relationship with religion while in climate catastrophe in Extrapolations. No real depth, no real thought provoking discussions, no nothing. Just a quick mention, and jump on to the next topic to gloss over.

It seems to me that they spend a lot on big name actors, had some good initial ideas on what to do, but the actual execution was pretty meh.

Having watched Presumed Innocent on Apple TV, I have had very similar thoughts. <spoiler> Supposedly it is detective fiction, with some intertwined stories, so called unreliable narrator. But then instead of tying everything together they throw all those parallel stories and draw gotcha card. Cheap novel wrapped in shiny production. </spoler>

I'm almost certain this exact thing used to exist, and The Verge was a part of it, and then it all fell apart. I can't find it now - it's impossible to search for.

Apple News (or the original Newsstand) might work well for traditional, smaller publishers who are almost struggling in the digital age (most magazines in Apple News would quality), because Apple News brings them traffic and revenue that they may have lost or never get in the first place. Bigger publishers have enough influence to just build their own platform and avoid paying Apple rent. Verge is another such example.

Same reason for Xbox Game Pass, Kindle unlimited, etc. You gets lots of fun games from independent publishers, but never expect something like Hogwarts Legacy to launch on Game Pass on day 1 unless it is a first-party studio (and you have the most expensive version of Game Pass).

If I want to stretch this a bit more, same thing with app stores. Spotify and Netflix are big enough to say "if you want to use our app, go through the pain and pay on the web. We are not offering IAP". Most app developers can't do that. Meanwhile, Epic is big enough that it can pick a fight with Apple.

For me it wouldn't even need to be all-I-can-read.

I'd be very happy to pay a reasonable fee pr thing I read, and I'd frankly be excited about it. I was a vocal supporter of the original Blendle for this exact reason.

It either need to be

- (almost) everything at one price like Spotify or Apple Music,

- or it needs to be a reasonable price with reasonable terms, say about the same price, (adjusted for inflation) as what it used to cost back when we bought it on DVDs or CDs.

> I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads.

> I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either.

While some content creators do it for love, art, whatever, others do need an income stream to keep going. I'm fine with blocking annoying ads (pop-ups, forced interstitials, autoplaying audio, …) but basic image-and-some-text-on-the-page adverts are fine, as are sponsored sections (if correctly identified as such) in content (if I've heard it before I can just skip manually). There must be a middle ground somewhere that doesn't irritate most viewers but nets the content makers some income.

I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world. I wouldn't want Amazon following me into the pub to say “I saw you looking at poo bags the other day, take a look at these beauties” in real life and I don't want it online. Over the top advertising is annoying too, but not nearly as disquieting as the feeling of being followed by hundreds of little corporate drones everywhere I go.

I don't mind paying a small amount for things either, like a couple of the podcasts I regularly listen to (though some of those are somewhat unrealistic, I'm not going to pay to a TV subscription or two worth for an ad-free slightly-longer version of a weekly podcast!), but like the point of the article I disagree with paying and still getting adverts probably with the tracking that this implies.

We had some text ads, maybe a banner at the top/bottom of a site, and that was it... that was "the middle ground", they got the ads, we didn't have to block them. Then they added more ads and more ads and more ads, and animated gifs and more of them, and videos, and videos with sound, and overlaid ads, and overlaid ads with unskippable video and audio, and more and more... and in the end, a lot of us blocked them.

They had their chance, they decided that the option they wanted was to abuse the viewer with a huge amount of very bad ads on every goddamn site they visited, and now (for some of us), it's over, we're blocking ads.

If they stayed at the one, two ads per site, I wouldn't even notice them,... now, when I do (because there's just too many of them), I immediately install an adblock on every machine (parents, relatives,...) that I have to use a browser on.

They track you like an animal across the entire web to learn your conscious and unconscious desires and insecurities and weaknesses so they can most effectively take your time and money and attention from you.

Why should I be expected to tolerate that even for a moment?

> I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world.

The ideal is for the advert to be served from the main source, much like a sponsored segment in a cast is just in the cast, no extra external access to do any tracking from.

If the site I'm actually visiting itself starts serving malware like shite, then I go from not trusting their “partners” and being wary of them by association, to really not wanting to be there at all and adding them to my DNS blocklist just-in-case.

Then they should find a business model that doesn't involve psychological manipulation. Ads are predatory. I have as much compassion for those who cry about ad revenues as I do for people complaining that they worse off for not being allowed to rape and pillage.

makes the widely hated app store look generous by comparison

they're just not widely used because it's the usual winner take all

people are also going to be queuing up to peer with Google so they don't have to pay for transit

unlikely to be the case for their competitors

I basically only keep them because I used my real name and don't want anyone to steal an account/personnal info I might have created with that gmail address and impersonate me.

I don't really see what is difficult in operating without a google account.

Just about the only thing I can think of is Google Docs. But if you need that for work, chances are you're using your work account for that, not your personal one.

Fortunately there's many ways to financially support the workers whose content you appreciate: patreon, ko-fi, etc. I still wished there was something much more friction-free, something like flattr

That is a concern for the "content creator" not for anyone else. We have way more "content" than we need, especially "content" compromised by ads.

Part of it, the rest goes to Google to reinvest in their ads business.

As for the article, well, ads are everywhere now aren't they?

"Accept all cookies or pay £3 a month for ad-free" is what we're getting on most media sites in the UK. I'm guessing there's some company I've yet to discover that's selling this platform ("tech") to all the newspaper/magazine sites.

No we don't, and we never did. The whole "GDPR" thing is a sham - unfortunately this is the case in many countries, but especially so in the UK. The ICO is one of the most useless "regulators" I have ever dealt with, somehow even worse than telecoms regulators.

This isn't some sort of subtle and concealed breach of the GDPR that everyone puts effort into keeping quiet. It's blatant, obvious, and in the face of everyone who visits major news websites. If it was enforced, the practice would've quickly stopped.

It's about as subtle as committing murder on live TV. If you don't get arrested for that, it's clear that the law you've broken is not being enforced.

> You should report sites that do that

But let's hypothesize and see what it takes to actually do this:

As per the ICO's requirements, you must first contact the organization that has wronged you and give them time to address your concern.

They have 30 days to do respond, and could extend it potentially indefinitely by engaging in pointless arguments. They could also make technically flawed arguments in how they're not actually tracking you or collecting personal data, and those will successfully work because there's no technical expert on the ICO's side to review it and call bullshit. You need full-time admin staff to deal with these matters.

Assuming you finally get to a stage where you have grounds to make a complaint to the ICO, what are they going to do (if anything)? Well at best they will send a letter, which is not legally binding in any way and will promptly get ignored by the recipient, which is fine because the truth is, both sides are complicit and just want the matter to go away - whether the underlying problem is solved or not is not their concern.

In practice, even if the ICO wanted to act (they don't - don't bite the hand that feeds), what would they do? This isn't a single, small offender, this is the entire newspaper industry. They not only have a lot of lobbying power but outright control the narrative. They know it, and that's why they have no fear putting evidence of their GDPR breach on their homepages.

Are you ready to hire a full-time admin team to do this (and end up absolutely nowhere, except maybe collecting evidence of this "regulator"'s uselessness)?

--

GDPR enforcement in the UK (and sadly in a lot of other countries) is and will remain a sham until the issue becomes politically important. The regulator on its own, even with the best of skill and intentions will not succeed in this battle. The only way I can potentially see this changing is if we see continuous and recurrent data breaches of politician's personal data and dirty laundry, but even then the likeliest solution is a two-tier system where politicians are allowed to have privacy while everyone else doesn't.