Funny that changing your UA to like Googlebot means you can see the content since website owners want search indexing

I prefer ads, as I can block them.

I’d accept paywalls If I could pay for a ‘package’ where I have access for all these paywalled websites and each gets money proportional to how often I’ve used them. There’s no way I am going to pay for all these separately.

But there’s no such thing, so I just block ads, and whenever I see a paywalled website I just close it.

The question isn’t really “ads or subs” these days, it’s “your data or your dollar”, and in this situation there is no good option (since your dollar is the perfect identifier for your data!).

Paywalls for news. It makes it easy for me to know that this is not an important news article and can skip reading it. Time saving.

It depends on the implementation, in both cases. I can somewhat tolerate:

• ads that are visually distinct from the actual content, not personalised or targetted, not obstrusive or obnoxious
• paywalls that apply to recent news, but don’t get in your way while you’re looking for older stuff

Go past that and I’m avoiding your ads with uBlock and your paywalls with archive links. And, more importantly: there are other financing methods, such as Patreon.

I wouldn’t mind paying but once more and more site adopt the subscribtion model, then prices like $10 a month becomes unsustainable when you need dozens of subscribtions. I believe that microtransactions are the future of the internet. All content should cost for you to view but only a little bit so that it adds up to like 20 - 50 bucks a month and the money goes mostly to the creators rather than platform.

I prefer pay walls if I can buy a single article. I hate how everything is a subscription now.

Ads. But only when the ad doesn’t stan.

The ones that invade privacy, I feel, are taking too much advantage.

Ads. It’s way easier for me to block ads than bypass paywalls.

Ads over pay wall BUT with the option to pay to remove ads for a reasonable price. Then I have a way of supporting the content of I enjoy it enough

Make your content good enough and be a good enough person so that people are willing to give you money voluntarily or for token rewards. Let those with the means subsidize those without.

Occasionally you see something and the comments are full of “let me throw money at you”. Maybe at least partially try that as a goal rather than searching for infinite growth at the expense of anyone who isn’t an executive.

False dichotomy, I’d rather see other funding models like Patreon/Kickstarter. Paying gets you early access/bonus stuff/whatever, and you don’t need intrusive technologies like ads/paywalls.

This is a complex and nuanced question that is not as black and white as the binary choices you give. Both paywalls and ads, as they are implemented currently, suck and erode away at the usefulness of the Internet.

Paywalls

They typically tease content in the hopes people will be interested enough to pay for the content and other content. Sounds good on the surface, because the people putting in the effort to write articles should be paid. The problem is, the quality of journalism has also eroded to the point where it’s not worth paying for as much as it used to be. Excessive SEO has poisoned search results in such a way that paywalls content crowds out other valid search results. Throw in the fact that there is a possible future where articles may be written by AI, and it’s especially not worth it.

Ads

Ads are intrusive, they can contain malware/viruses, may be inappropriate for an audience (e.g., porn or violence related ads shown to kids). I’ve even had ads redirect the webpage to another website. Using fingerprinting to target “relevant” ads is a privacy nightmare, intrusive, and still is mostly irrelevant to the user. Those cookie pops are annoying as fuck — my guess is it’s malicious compliance with the EU — even when using a site that is based in the US that targets only US citizens. Certain browsers are blurring the lines between useful browser functionality and increasing ad revenue.

Either way you look at it, these companies are eroding public trust in search of the almighty “engagement” dollar. And then they’re all shocked pikachu when people find ways to circumvent paying for content. So they double down on making things as difficult as possible for the end user, which makes the user double down on hating these companies and their malicious practices.

Ads and paywalls can work, but everybody (from publishers/content creators to advertisers and ad networks) need to sit down fix the glaring problems:

1. No PII or fingerprinting in any analytics
2. Search engines need to either remove paywalls content from results, or flag the result as paywalled and allow users to filter them out
3. Journalists need to step up their game and stop writing garbage nobody wants to read
4. Ad networks need to be more hands on with making sure ads are appropriate and not malicious in any way
5. STOP CROWDING OUT YOUR CONTENT WITH ADS!

I’m sure we all could come up with more solutions. But we all know that all parties involved won’t do a damned thing to make things better for us.

And yet no matter how bad it gets, it still somehow is profitable. So pirating material doesn’t seem to be an effective means of protest because it seems there are enough people out there willing to pay for all of this garbage.

Banners! I was fine with banners, you can look at them or not if you want, you can click them or not… guess they weren’t profitable anymore.