Ads are broken and we need different funding models
⚠️ This entry is already over one year old. It may no longer be up to date. Opinions may have changed.In February Mozilla posted that they started searching for alternative funding models for the web and working together with Scroll, a service that let’s you visit selected news sites without ads in exchange for a few dollars per month.
I believe the ad business is broken. Publishers sacrifice their visitors privacy while increasing dependency on monopoly companies like Google. Additionally providing everything for free and using ads to monetize content leads to quantity and clickbait over quality. It also means that visitors get used to the fact that everything is free and lose the willingness to pay for good content.
I’m excited what Mozilla decides to come up with in the future! They currently tease a “$5-per-month ad-free news subscription”.
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/02/25/exploring-alternative-funding-models-for-the-web/