Why is it unthinkable to progressively make ads irrelevant/ineffective/nonthreatening?

[tripu]

§ 1. The Impossible, Inescapable Reform of Advertising:

“While other business models do exist and should prosper, they are simply insufficient to make up for the loss that eradicating advertising would cause.”

Specifically:

• How do we know that the internet/web could not thrive on different business models?
• Shouldn't we focus on better revenue models? Like:
  • Less threatening, opt-in ads (Brave)
  • Platforms to tip content creators (Brave, Tipjar, Tipsmack, Patreon)
  • Other ways to do easy+quick+cheap micropayments (cryptocurrencies, Interledger, web payments)
  • Subscription-only content (paywall is an uglier name for that)
  • Freemium models, where some content/features are only for subscribers (some paywalls again)

[brusshamilton]

"The internet" is an extremely heterogeneous place. There is definitely a place for those other business models, but they are not sufficient for all use cases.

• Optional tips or opt-in ads have the issue of falling prey to the tragedy of commons situation where no user wants to bear a cost that has no marginal benefit to themselves.
• Subscription/Freemium paywalls threaten to break the web, which was based on hyperlinked content between related pages. Further, paywalls effectively wall off whole sections of the web from indexing, making the content less accessible. Some of the paywalls currently work around that by picking certain crawlers and allowing them access, but that significantly increases the barriers to entry for anyone that tries to make a new indexing service .
• Other ways to pay have been tried. "Google Contributor" was created, which allowed users to buy out the ads, but was shut down when adoption was low. But this seems like one of the more promising options if there was a standard that all ad platforms would support.

[tripu]

@brusshamilton:

Optional tips or opt-in ads have the issue of falling prey to the tragedy of commons situation where no user wants to bear a cost that has no marginal benefit to themselves.

There are lots of examples of successful services thriving on voluntary donations only, or mainly on donations: the whole Wikimedia suite, The Internet Archive, icanhazip.com, etc — and lots of open source libraries, tools and apps.

Subscription/Freemium paywalls threaten to break the web, which was based on hyperlinked content between related pages. Further, paywalls effectively wall off whole sections of the web from indexing, making the content less accessible.

Having all content online to be accessible for free and indexable by anyone is not an integral requirement of the web as a technology or as a force for net good for society. When my hospital makes my medical history accessible to me on the web (and only to me), is it contributing to “break the web”? Ditto about my bank, my employer, government agencies, the company that is helping me sell my property, etc. When I blog/microblog and set some of my pieces to be visible to people I follow only, am I breaking the web? If I'm working on the beta of a web site and initially give access to a bunch of friends only, am I breaking the web?

Of course not. And a newspaper can do the same. All those are legitimate and reasonable uses of the deep web.

• Other ways to pay have been tried. "Google Contributor" was created, which allowed users to buy out the ads, but was shut down when adoption was low. But this seems like one of the more promising options if there was a standard that all ad platforms would support.

I'm not saying it's easy. I'm just saying that paying money for stuff is viable in most cases, and often desirable to the alternatives.

It requires education and advocacy. And perhaps also a few more major scandals where users feel the dangers of the models based on surveillance, tracking, censorship, behaviour manipulation and bloat.