On the same note, it is amazing how people complain about quality of journalism, but get mad if they see an ad or have to pay a subscription to news sites.

[–] TheFogan@programming.dev 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I do have to second that concept there. Giving everything away absolutely free is not a sustainable business model. If we don't like ads, and we don't like paywalls, we need to actually start figuring out a sustainable model. And no tiny ads that are nowhere near where anyone looks, do not actually generate revenue, because people don't fork over much money to put up ads in places where few people will see them.

So we either need a system to have people give money directly to avoid ads, or we need a system of ads that... well are appealing both to those who want to post ads, while being acceptable to end users.

[–] NENathaniel@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago

Yea I dont think people realize how little those tiny lil ads around the corners of the display pay. It's very little

[–] planish@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

There's always Web Monetization, where you can put some fixed money in and it is supposed to be streamed to the sites you visit by your browser. But I've never seen it actually implemented as a requirement for a site.

[–] chocobo13z@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago

I don't have much money right now to donate to help fund my favorite content creators, though I absolutely would, but I do have a lot of technical knowledge and I could donate compute time, disk storage space, and/or bandwidth to host redundant copies of data for a given web service (akin to seeding Torrents, or ZeroNet zites)

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

There are some things like that. For Podcasting there is the value for value method (I forget the name) you watch / listen to content which sends you credits, you can also purchase credits. If you like a channel you can send them your credits. So it is direct support rather than ads giving portion of revenue. If cash is difficult they ask for value for value by donating your time to help in someway, completly optional though. odysee and LBRY were setup that way also, but too bad LBRY CEO was charged with securities fraud

[–] 31337@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I've noticed that right-wing propaganda outlets generally do not paywall, but "center" and center-left outlets usually do.

[–] Haywire@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

That's because the content is not the product.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 points 1 year ago

The opposite is true in Australia. All the Murdoch papers are hard-paywalled—they usually can't even be bypassed by tools like 12ft. The slightly-less-right-wing papers from Fairfax use a soft paywall that can be bypassed with Incognito mode.

The rigidly centralist ABC is required by statute to be freely available, and left leaning media like the Guardian and the Conversation use, at most, a modal requesting donations which can be dismissed.

[–] Vittelius@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

That's because those propaganda outlets are generally bankrolled by billionaires who profit through tax cuts enacted by politicians voted into power by people radicalized by the propaganda. Different business model