So would a lot of large content publishers. Apparently advertising revenue isn't satisfying their needs yet.
I believe you are referring to indirect ways of generating revenue, but recently, publishers seem to be heading more towards direct monetization models. Some examples: News Corp. is giving it a shot with The Daily, the television networks are working with Hulu Plus and the music labels have been selling through iTunes for a while.
Hope I've interpreted your comment correctly, but as far as I know, outside of direct advertisements and collecting data on users that can be sold, there is currently no proven/successful model for monetizing free content.
To speculate, some sort of Gillette model could have potential, but I think it's currently difficult to understand a consumers intent and the types of "add-ons" they would be willing to pay for. Perhaps hard copies of the content that contain something original &/or personalized would have value.
I wish more sites would add a Web Monetization tag so that I can support them passively with my Coil subscription. They will earn more from the time I spend on their sites than from viewing the ads.
Or micropayments :) I understand the aversion to ads but content creators(journalist, musicians, artists, programmers creating oss, etc) and the web as a whole produces useful stuff, it would be good to find a business model which supports them.
However, Micropayments are not the only alternative to Advertising, subscriptions are another choice which only need to be done once rather than repeatedly.
I'd like to see more site offer an ad-free subscription, in the way that Ars Technica or reddit do, to allow for an alternative to using ads to support content I'm interested in.
Patreon has an interesting model for creative content and one which I think will work for content producers who already have a good fan base.
How sites would make money? I'm not really thinking about that too much right now, but I suppose sites could do all the usual things they do with the current web (advertising, accepting payments via credit card gateways, Bitcoin, Patreon, etc). It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing proposition and it certainly isn't to me. Some functionality will still require a centralized service?, just not the entire thing.
Monetization of content is a business opportunity waiting to happen. Something like a network where you put, I dunno $10 per month and every article you read is charged for $0.10, as an example. Or unlimited during the month for $1
If news sites can allow us to Tweet or Fb an article it might be possible to 'coin' an article as well in a seamless manner
Google tried something like that called Google Contributor back in 2017. You could basically just put money in an account, and instead of advertisers buying ads for whatever site you were on, it just took that same money from you and gave it to that site. Honestly a pretty elegant system, but I can kind of picture why it wouldn't have worked out.
There are other ways to fund content that doesn’t involve slapping a bunch of third party trackers and running retargetted display ads.
Some examples other than subscriptions would be sponsored content and creating a product such as an ebook or selling products that are related to your content.
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