> Sounds good for upper middle class population. If your wages were $50,000/yr (aka US median wage) then you would think twice or may be thrice about anything that has word "subscription" in it.
Garbage content is not an improvement over no content, no matter what your demographic. I'm also skeptical that there's a very large demographic for whom even $10/mo in subscription fees would break the bank.
> If all internet websites enforced subscriptions then you won't be browsing around so often.
Sounds great to me. Most of the time I spend on the internet is spent looking for decent content, and most of that time is spent sifting through garbage.
> Finally, anyone who had been in media business for long enough knows that subscription is terrible business model.
Excellent. I really hope the Buzzfeeds of the world go out of business.
Advertisers and the garbage they fund make the world a worse place. They prop up businesses that provide negative value. They drain resources from businesses that provide value but have to advertise to the level of their competition's advertising. They introduce insecurity and complexity to our infrastructures. They waste the talents of thousands of brilliant minds who could be solving real problems. They sell people things they don't need or want, for prices they can't afford. Worst of all, they poison the collective consciousness with ignorance and outright lies. They deserve to go out of business.
People are willing to pay for what they actually want, and people want good content, so creators of good content will be okay. The creators of garbage who need ads to legitimate their sorry existence, on the other hand, can burn.
> Garbage content is not an improvement over no content, no matter what your demographic. I'm also skeptical that there's a very large demographic for whom even $10/mo in subscription fees would break the bank.
I wholly disagree. You think from the perspective of an US citizen but there are other places on the map where 10$ would be a great deal. This would restrict these people's access to information that they might need just as mush as you do. The side effect would be effectively closing off parts of the internet to a great array of people. You'd eventually get at the same impasse the film industry is now. Bad distribution, unserrviced areas, article piracy would pop-up.
My father earns ~300 EUR/month. How would you convince him to pay 10$/month for a website that publishes maybe ~5 articles that seem interesting to him a month?
And your information staple is not just _one_ provider, but many providers, and you'd probably have to pay them all.
The presence of paywalls would not necessarily exclude the existence of rubbish. Look at newspapers before internet, bad press also existed then, tabloids existed then. And people paid for them. No, the reason bad content exists is not because of the payment model, it's because people _like_ it. They enjoy shitty articles, they let themselves emotionally manipulated by factless press. We, as a collective, are pretty weak.
But open, even ad-based access to information can improve this. Open access leads to a more diverse information stable and eventually, people settle for the, it not best, at least better information alternative. Thing that would not happen if you were stuck in your information bubble, as is with a sole or few information providers.
Garbage content is not an improvement over no content, no matter what your demographic. I'm also skeptical that there's a very large demographic for whom even $10/mo in subscription fees would break the bank.
> If all internet websites enforced subscriptions then you won't be browsing around so often.
Sounds great to me. Most of the time I spend on the internet is spent looking for decent content, and most of that time is spent sifting through garbage.
> Finally, anyone who had been in media business for long enough knows that subscription is terrible business model.
Excellent. I really hope the Buzzfeeds of the world go out of business.
Advertisers and the garbage they fund make the world a worse place. They prop up businesses that provide negative value. They drain resources from businesses that provide value but have to advertise to the level of their competition's advertising. They introduce insecurity and complexity to our infrastructures. They waste the talents of thousands of brilliant minds who could be solving real problems. They sell people things they don't need or want, for prices they can't afford. Worst of all, they poison the collective consciousness with ignorance and outright lies. They deserve to go out of business.
People are willing to pay for what they actually want, and people want good content, so creators of good content will be okay. The creators of garbage who need ads to legitimate their sorry existence, on the other hand, can burn.