It is fundamentally anti-consumer and is a proven, sure fire way to annoy your visitors and encourage them to use ad blocking --- which more than half now do according to some recent stats.
Personalized ads are the dumbest idea since the invention of advertising. When more than half of your target audience actively refuses to engage and cooperate, you might be doing something wrong.
If nobody wants to pay for it, and you don't want to make it for free, maybe there's a case to be made that it just doesn't have to be made at all?
Ads just force a market to optimize for clickbait and readership, not quality. Having fewer websites, each more expensive and intentional, would probably drastically increase the signal to noise ratio of the web.
We could probably lose 80 to 90 percent of the current content on the web and not miss most of it...
The realest web creators, after accepting this fact, will continue to do what they've always done. Whether it's a recipe site, a blog, or both, they'll do it because they enjoy it. Thankfully, even if they don't earn any money through their website, websites are so cheap to operate these days that they're practically free.
A cryptocurrency plug-in that lets visitors purchase 1 USDT on your blog and then give 1 cent to every read they enjoy. It will be quick as you don't have to invoke your bank every time you donate to a blog and it will be fast barring the initial purchase of the cryptos because the plug-in is also a wallet which you can send from. This plug-in is powered by Cryptocurrency Micropayments Company and can be installed and used on all blogs.
And the sites that use it like: https://blog.codinghorror.com
Single ad per page. Let sites monetize, but 50% ad space is stupid.
If I disagreed with the customer experience of a physical store, the solution would not be to go into the store anyway and just steal the merchandise so I didn't have to communicate with customer service. I would go somewhere else. If enough people did that, the store may decide it is worth their while to change.
And businesses are best when they do.
As long as consumers are getting their money's worth.
And the internet was better when most websites did not monetize, since there was no need.
For about the first decade, major ISPs automatically provided you with enough web space for a personal home page on their server, when you signed up to be on the internet with them.
Perfect for a text blog (nobody called them that yet) or something like that, and the normal state of affairs, as intended, was that most people with an internet account could post a web page at no additional cost, so there was no need to monetize anything. If all you wanted to do was have a website, that was expected of everybody eventually once they were on the internet to begin with. All you had to do was upload a well-formed index.html file to your personal web address space according to your ISPs generic procedure.
The main reason to monetize a website (a good one too) would be for online business use. Almost all other websites were never supposed to rely on a monetization strategy just to cover costs. That way an online outreach or business could at least be launched without the need for any further financial resources. Obviously the right thing to do. It was expensive enough just being on the internet.
And there was no need for ads or financial consideration at all on non-business websites, which made up the vast majority for a while there, and coexisted perfectly with Amazon when it came along as a purely commercial website. When ads show up on websites that otherwise have nothing unique to sell, it still instinctively feels so unnecessary. Rather than triggering positive consumer response, it feels more like you're not getting your money's worth for some reason before you even buy, reducing your inclination for spending even further below the non-motivated level you had when you first came to the non-business website.
When it comes to monetized websites worth visiting, I still enjoy the ones best that are the online part of an ambitious business, rather than having the website be the business itself.
Either way, as long as consumers are getting their money's worth, I can't complain.
But there used to be so much more refuge for non-consumers and information surfers.
And by now with the cumulative joy that has been lost on the path to a fully-monetized online experience, it's quite disgraceful by comparison.
Disagree. Users who can't tolerate ads are already using an ad blocker.
What we really need is a decent, ubiquitous micropayment system. I don't have any hope that it would be viable unless one of the big players (Google) got on board, and why would they when they make a killing from serving ads and hijacking people's attention? The enshittification continues.
Then that textual content would be locked behind paywalls and subscribers would pay a monthly fee to access vast quantities of high quality textual content without ads. Authors would get decently paid if they have the audience.
Cheapskates would be stuck in the swamp with ads, scammers and AI slop, until they pony up.
I live well from affiliate marketing. I don't need to pitch anything; I merely mention available options where relevant. I wouldn't consider these mention to be ads as they don't affect the content at all. That allows me to work on the website full time, so it works.
Donations don't work. At all. Even the people I personally assist over multiple emails, the people who tell me that the website saved their lives don't donate. Donations are around 1% of my income, if that.
I considered state funding, since I'm doing their job for them. I seriously explored that option, but my contacts who get such funding made it very clear that it would be a waste of time.
So what's left? Bringing customers to businesses, and getting a commission for it. It's the only option that leaves me fully in control.