Do you prefer ads or paywalls?
Do you prefer ads or paywalls?
I started to notice that more sites are turning into paywalls, and I don't like that and would prefer ads over subscriptions.
I am curious, what does the general community think about that?
Paywalls, but the content has to be absolutely stellar for me to consider paying for an account.
Neither; use FOSS!
But in all seriousness, ads. They may be filled with trackers from big tech to try to know my every waking thought and sell them, but I have handy dandy software to deal with that.
Most types of ads can be blocked with uBlock Origin, while only some kinds of paywalls can be skipped with Bypass Paywalls Clean. Ads are the most privacy invasive monetization solution and with ad blocking becoming more common, I don't think ads are a sustainable way to fund content in the future. Still, I would prefer to see voluntary subscription and donation options rather than hard paywalls.
I keep telling people but if they keep using ad blockers, then they can expect less content to be available for free. Yet they all want to act like they're not responsible for this trend even though they are.
they can expect less content to be available for free
Less corporate content. But if big business wants to fuck right off the internet forever, it's okay by me.
I keep telling advertisers but if they continue using intrusive ads that send information to Facebook or appear after content has loaded forcing us to misclick, then they can expect more people to use ad blockers. Yet they all want to act like they're not responsible for this trend even though they are.
It's not that simple, unfortunately. Even if you were concerned about the impact of using an adblocker, the ads are not like billboards, merely visual distractions, but rather ads now include invasive tracking and surveillance, and other malicious code that can freeze or make a website unusable. Ads often create an accessibility nightmare for some users. They also tend to use up data, making the internet less accessible to those in third world countries where internet access is slow and large data are a bigger problem.
There have been some half-hearted attempts to create standards for advertisements, but the reality is that greed has always undermined attempts for the private sector to self-regulate on this issue, so short of some kind of legislative action to curb these problems, you are going to get people trying to protect themselves with adblockers.
No.
You.....realize good journalism costs money, right?
Yeah, "good journalism" is definitely what you're paying for with ads or paywalls.
To be clear, I support journalists - and they deserve to get paid for their efforts.
But (a) OP didn't specifically mention news sites, and (b) the revenue from websites via ads or paywalls is going directly into the coffers of the ultra-wealthy. Find me a news outlet that successfully implemented a paywall and then started paying their journalists and reporters vastly more money.
You won't, because they don't.
You realize that if newspapers offered a federated service (pay once, you get them all), they'd make money hand over fist?
But noooo...each newspaper wants you to pay.
I'd pay upwards of $20 a month if that guaranteed me access to the major newspapers (NYT, WaPo, LA Times, etc.) and my local one with one subscription.
I prefer ads, as I can block them.
Beat me to this comment
Ads, because there are too many separate sites implementing paywalls, I don't like any of them enough more than the others to subscribe.
Reader supported without subscription model is my favorite though - I will and have thrown $5 to Wikipedia, the Guardian, etc. If there was some monthly umbrella one I might consider it, or a $0.25 pay per article but absolutely not $100 a year for one site absolutely no.
Basically I think my overall budget for all sites would be sustainable at $10/month or so, sure. But not that much for ONE site, no.
I'd accept paywalls If I could pay for a 'package' where I have access for all these paywalled websites and each gets money proportional to how often I've used them. There's no way I am going to pay for all these separately.
But there's no such thing, so I just block ads, and whenever I see a paywalled website I just close it.
Ad’s. If a sites using the paywall approach, they’ve made an enemy for life with me.
Now I’m not saying I like ads, but as long as they aren’t aggressive I will tolerate them. If they get to aggressive, I’ll block them.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand it’s a business, but I’m a human with a low tolerance for being jerked around.
I would rather have ads. If I were to subscribe to every website that asked me to subscribe I would be paying $1,000 a month.
False dichotomy, I'd rather see other funding models like Patreon/Kickstarter. Paying gets you early access/bonus stuff/whatever, and you don't need intrusive technologies like ads/paywalls.
Yeah, I want to pay you directly. I, admittedly, pirate things. When those things are good, I make an effort to go send money to the creator directly. Sometimes it's hard, especially with things like books. I don't want to buy it on Amazon. And unless someone is self-published, they're getting peanuts. I'd much rather Venmo an author money direct. When Radiohead released In Rainbows way back when and put it out for "pay what you want," I gave them five bucks I think.
I understand it can't always be like that, and that the people between a content creator and me do serve some purpose.
You may want to clarify, as patreon and kickstarter are often used as paywalls. Do you mean people can donate to a cause, and everyone gets the benefits?
The latter, but I also don't really mind paywalls in the form of "get early access" like SMBC comics or "get exclusive special content" like a lot of bands do.
You can just straight paywall with those too, but you don't have too. A band I like crowdfunded a music video and you can watch it free on youtube, but if you didn't crowdfund it you missed out on perks that go all the way up to being in the music video
I wound not mind ads if they met the following conditions (in no particular order).
- Actually vet them, no scams and viruses.
- minimal obstruction to what I'm there for. A bilboard on the side of the highway is fine, but when they put in the road, there's a problem.
- Mix it up. YouTube playing the same ad 500 times in a row is obnoxious.
- No yelling/loud shit. Play your ad, don't blow out my speakers.
- If on a silent website, video ads must be auto muted.
- if I'm on data or a metered network, don't auto play ads and keep the total data usage to a minimum.
- Medical and health ads aren't allowed. You can have PSAs about conditions and that there are treatment options, but it should your doctor researching and recommending specific medicine not a patient going in with some ad.
Globally disabling autoplay in my browser brought me so much sanity. It's worth the small fraction of sites that behave badly because of it
Add political ads to the last one too.
99% of the time it’s either an outright lie or stretched exaggeration of the truth. No one is getting any correct information from a political ad except either side’s specific spin on it and it causes a lot of average people to incorrectly believe they are informed on who and what they are voting on that they don’t need to do more due diligence before heading to the polls.
Also favors rich politicians and more well funded campaigns over less well off politicians and less well funded organizations and causes.
thank goodness most browsers disable autoplay with sound now
Paywalls for news. It makes it easy for me to know that this is not an important news article and can skip reading it. Time saving.
I don't like ads, but for paywalls I just close the page like it was a 404 error.
I mean, to be honest a lot of us prefer ads because we use an ad-blocker. I have mixed feelings about either option.
There is such a thing as a tasteful implementation of advertising, but it's very often overdone and a nuisance. So because so many of them are a nuisance, my general attitude is to block everything. If you want to support a particular cause or creator, you can allow filters in your ad-blocker so you only see ads on that website.
As far as paywalls go, it does resemble the traditional newspaper/magazine subscription model. In theory, I don't mind financially contributing to a service I use because it means the service continues to prosper. Practically, these fees are often overinflated and a disproportionate amount of the proceeds go to the executive class. Also unlike newspapers, you usually can't buy just one article, and instead you're locked into another subscription.
Yeah, I used to not block ads but they're so invasive these days. If 2 banner ads pop on at the top and bottom of the screen with a full screen app on top with ads between every paragraph and a PIP video ad on top, yeah, I don't even bother reading the article.
And I sure as hell am not subscribing to a $10/mo subscription because someone linked to a paywalled article either. It's so crazy those sites just assume every visitor is a recurring visitor that might subscribe. Definitely wish there was some sort of micropayment thing, like pay 25 cents to view it or something.
This is the worst thing about it, they're only offering subscriptions. Newspapers kind of faded away from popular use before I was really old enough to be likely to get them, but I did used to buy some print magazines, they were great. If I had some time to kill or knew I'd be on a flight I could choose to buy ONE issue for one article, and by virtue of my tastes the rest of the magazine would be stuff I'd want to read as well and could come back and read anytime. They often had ads in then even though I'd paid and other than the fact that a proportion of the pages I'd paid for didn't have readable material, those were fine too, you just skipped past them. They were "relevant" in so far as they were paid for be advertisers who correctly presumed people who read this or that publication would probably be more interested in these products and services, but they didn't have any ability to literally spy on me in ways that frankly would and should have been illegal using equivalent tools to have done so at the time.
I am not going to subscribe to your random website or online publication because I wanted to read about this one topic and I hate the damn ads that make reading it impossible and require deliberately allowing things that you should never allow on your device for the ads to work how the publisher wants them. This is difficult because it makes me part of the problem, as I'm blocking the ads and either bypassing paywalls or mentally deleting having even encountered the website that presented one to me and immediately closing the page.
To actually help fund the service I'm going to need a way to make ultra small payments of a few cents for individual articles, (probably wouldn't work because of processing fees) or more likely something like a subscription but not to a publication, to a service that will allow access to a range of publications and doles out money to them based on which content I consumed over a time period. It's just no longer realistic, if it ever was, to expect me to want to religiously consume media from one specific publisher. This idea kind of sucks for media companies who are currently getting squeezed by social media and search giants and who sit between them and their audience and suck up all the ad revenue for the content they didn't even produce and now with my idea you'd have that and an additional third party sucking up subscription money they would have traditionally courted directly from the consumer but I don't realistically see much of a choice.
I can block ads 100% reliably, and haven't seen one, except in streams where the streamer had to watch one, or someone else's device, in years. Paywalls are much harder to circumvent and need a whole plethora of extensions and 3rd party sites, instead of just uBlock + FF.
The question assumes that you will have to experience whatever you choose, so without ad blocking, what would you choose?
You assumed that, along with assuming your binary is true.
If that's what you meant, then that's what you should've posted.
Your binary isn't true, and there will always be ways to block ads.
Honestly, paywalls. I'll just not use anything not FOSS then. Ads are much more annoying and 99% of times brainrot.
Banners! I was fine with banners, you can look at them or not if you want, you can click them or not.. guess they weren't profitable anymore.
Companies didn't vet them, and outside to other as companies. Turns out they didn't do any due diligence, and let viruses leak through. That's when people really started blocking them.
It depends on the implementation, in both cases. I can somewhat tolerate:
- ads that are visually distinct from the actual content, not personalised or targetted, not obstrusive or obnoxious
- paywalls that apply to recent news, but don't get in your way while you're looking for older stuff
Go past that and I'm avoiding your ads with uBlock and your paywalls with archive links. And, more importantly: there are other financing methods, such as Patreon.
Funny that changing your UA to like Googlebot means you can see the content since website owners want search indexing
Ads over pay wall BUT with the option to pay to remove ads for a reasonable price. Then I have a way of supporting the content of I enjoy it enough
Ads, because even though they waste my time, I still have my money. Also:
Ads. I was born in the 1900s so I’m used to it.
I wouldn't mind paying but once more and more site adopt the subscribtion model, then prices like $10 a month becomes unsustainable when you need dozens of subscribtions. I believe that microtransactions are the future of the internet. All content should cost for you to view but only a little bit so that it adds up to like 20 - 50 bucks a month and the money goes mostly to the creators rather than platform.
Ads, tastefully. Many websites have too many in too many places, pretty much asking for the viewers to use an ad blocker.
Ads, better to see ads and make the information available to all, than have a portion of the population unable to access the information at all.
Ads. It's way easier for me to block ads than bypass paywalls.
Ads. If done well, I may even see it. I am talking about the ad just being an embedded GIF with a href set on it so that clicking it goes to the advertiser's site. Simple privacy-respecting ads.
Example: https://lowendbox.com/
Look at the right and scroll down.This is a complex and nuanced question that is not as black and white as the binary choices you give. Both paywalls and ads, as they are implemented currently, suck and erode away at the usefulness of the Internet.
Paywalls
They typically tease content in the hopes people will be interested enough to pay for the content and other content. Sounds good on the surface, because the people putting in the effort to write articles should be paid. The problem is, the quality of journalism has also eroded to the point where it’s not worth paying for as much as it used to be. Excessive SEO has poisoned search results in such a way that paywalls content crowds out other valid search results. Throw in the fact that there is a possible future where articles may be written by AI, and it’s especially not worth it.
Ads
Ads are intrusive, they can contain malware/viruses, may be inappropriate for an audience (e.g., porn or violence related ads shown to kids). I’ve even had ads redirect the webpage to another website. Using fingerprinting to target “relevant” ads is a privacy nightmare, intrusive, and still is mostly irrelevant to the user. Those cookie pops are annoying as fuck — my guess is it’s malicious compliance with the EU — even when using a site that is based in the US that targets only US citizens. Certain browsers are blurring the lines between useful browser functionality and increasing ad revenue.
Either way you look at it, these companies are eroding public trust in search of the almighty “engagement” dollar. And then they’re all shocked pikachu when people find ways to circumvent paying for content. So they double down on making things as difficult as possible for the end user, which makes the user double down on hating these companies and their malicious practices.
Ads and paywalls can work, but everybody (from publishers/content creators to advertisers and ad networks) need to sit down fix the glaring problems:
- No PII or fingerprinting in any analytics
- Search engines need to either remove paywalls content from results, or flag the result as paywalled and allow users to filter them out
- Journalists need to step up their game and stop writing garbage nobody wants to read
- Ad networks need to be more hands on with making sure ads are appropriate and not malicious in any way
- STOP CROWDING OUT YOUR CONTENT WITH ADS!
I’m sure we all could come up with more solutions. But we all know that all parties involved won’t do a damned thing to make things better for us.
And yet no matter how bad it gets, it still somehow is profitable. So pirating material doesn’t seem to be an effective means of protest because it seems there are enough people out there willing to pay for all of this garbage.
Ads. I've been online since the age of Gopher. I've gone through every kind of ad or a pop-up you can throw at me. Even though I use an adblock, even without it I can subconsciously filter out ads so well that they won't bother me.
Hard agree. Ads, what ads? Those are just swaths of color in my peripheral vision. I watch old-timey television too, and those ads are my free time to do whatever else, like pee or get snacks.
I prefer pay walls if I can buy a single article. I hate how everything is a subscription now.
Neither. Give me an easy option to donate. Even better, make it possible to donate based on how many times I visit the website, then give me an overview at the end of the month and let me split my budget.
Ads. But only when the ad doesn't stan.
The ones that invade privacy, I feel, are taking too much advantage.
I honestly think services like Apple News plus would be worth subscribing to if they didn’t charge so much and didn’t have ads. Having a “newspass” service where you could just pay $5 to bypass paywalls across multiple sites would be worth the money. The problem is that providers are addicted to that sweet ad revenue, so even paying a subscription fee on most sites means you’re still seeing annoying ads.
The question is a bit loaded, since "prefer ads" means you see the content, whereas "prefer paywalls" means you don't.
A fairer framing would have been: "how do you prefer to pay for content?"
Because, contrary to many opinions here, there is a price to pay when you watch an ad. At the very least, you're paying with your sanity. And very possibly you're paying with your wallet too, later, when you buy some product or service you don't really need. If ads didn't work, there wouldn't be so many of them.
Next, in a world where content is funded by advertising, the people who control our tech have an infernal incentive to spy on us - so we all end up paying with our privacy.
Advertising is the lifeblood of consumer capitalism. It's what powers the pseudo-needs and pseudo-desires and status competition that drives all that material throughput of JUNK that is killing our planet. That price tag is gonna be pretty hefty.
Advertising is sheer poison. But paywalls are not the enemy. It is not immoral to pay for things that have value.
It depends.
Ads for something I use rarely or am not quite sure about.
But I pay for Netflix, and I suppose that's a paywall.
What's super annoying is when a website has both, and they autoplay. Like most news sites, and if you pause Netflix, something else will start playing, with sound even. I want to pay for what I use... but dayum.
I prefer ads because I can block them. 👍
Depends on the site. Ads don't bother me because ad block. I support paywalls in the case of sign up for some services, like InsaneJournal. Though, I otherwise have no preference either way since I usually don't go places with paywalls and when I do, I usually find a way to bypass them.
Make your content good enough and be a good enough person so that people are willing to give you money voluntarily or for token rewards. Let those with the means subsidize those without.
Occasionally you see something and the comments are full of "let me throw money at you". Maybe at least partially try that as a goal rather than searching for infinite growth at the expense of anyone who isn't an executive.
The question isn't really "ads or subs" these days, it's "your data or your dollar", and in this situation there is no good option (since your dollar is the perfect identifier for your data!).