> advertising is a huge deal for the health of the internet, despite its vilification
This is basically tautological though. Yes, the status quo is that advertising drives the revenue that dominates most of the content and app creation that exist today. Who can say what it would be like if advertising were removed? I don't think this is easy to answer, and I'm default skeptical of research since the conflict of interest seems likely in many funding scenarios.
Not a tautology. Just insufficiently creative thinking.
Don't most of us here remember the olden days of the web? When internet advertising was a waste of time and most websites were funded from the pockets of the creators. I mean, even today that's partly common - how many bloggers and podcasters are asking for topup funding.
It's silly and wrong to think the internet would die without advertisers. Big content producers could make fairly priced single article access (don't you remember micropayments? instead we got subscriptions), and generally return commerce to the olden days when people anonymously purchased what they wanted from a shop, instead of signining away access to their bank account and email address (password collection points abound in the modern internet, deliberately or not, and everyone who encourages us to create a password is damaging the personal security).
Amateurs could use such platforms as well as advertising driven tools that are merely less effective at stalking you.
Really it's only the stalkers themselves who would be hurt by such a change.
No? I don't think I've ever seen a working pay-per-single-article system, rather than a subscription. The amounts involved are too small, doing a payment for anything less than about a dollar isn't viable.
Honestly, I don't think it'd be possible to return to an internet without advertising, at least not in the sense of people paying for content via microtransactions or what not. Like it or not, many people now see content as 'free' by default, so their interest in paying a creator to access something is pretty much gone.
It's like the situation on smartphones with apps. Many people and companies have tried to get people to pay for them again (like Nintendo with Super Mario Run), but the audience wasn't having any of it, since they'd gotten used to 'free with in game purchases/ads' as the default. So the attempts faltered, and most went back to the exploitative models instead.
This is basically tautological though. Yes, the status quo is that advertising drives the revenue that dominates most of the content and app creation that exist today. Who can say what it would be like if advertising were removed? I don't think this is easy to answer, and I'm default skeptical of research since the conflict of interest seems likely in many funding scenarios.