Journalists need to be paid. Ad revenue is in freefall, and it never really supported long form content that doesn’t endorse a product. If you want real news, it has to be paid for somehow.
As someone else mentioned, ads are becoming less profitable. Particularly in light of the whole data collection biz, I’m starting to regard paywalls as a more “honest” type of monetisation. In a perfect world, they wouldn’t need to do either, and maybe there are better options, but I don’t fault them for it.
A Firefox fork like IronFox with an aggressive adblocker setup like uBlock Origin in medium mode blocks paywalls and all kinds of annoying popups on most sites. Takes a bit of tweaking to not break some sites, but after that it’s amazing.
ewwww, a paywall.
Journalists need to be paid. Ad revenue is in freefall, and it never really supported long form content that doesn’t endorse a product. If you want real news, it has to be paid for somehow.
I don’t think writers should be paid either. We have AI to do all writing now anyway, so what do we need writecels for anyway? 😏
That’s not the responsibility of the end user. That’s the responsibility of the host. If you’re going to have people write your articles, pay them.
And how does the host pay for them?
Tons of ways, the most common is ads and partner affiliates.
As someone else mentioned, ads are becoming less profitable. Particularly in light of the whole data collection biz, I’m starting to regard paywalls as a more “honest” type of monetisation. In a perfect world, they wouldn’t need to do either, and maybe there are better options, but I don’t fault them for it.
You need to learn to jump over the wall https://archive.is/2025.03.12-190857/https://www.theverge.com/reviews/627056/bee-review-ai-wearable
A Firefox fork like IronFox with an aggressive adblocker setup like uBlock Origin in medium mode blocks paywalls and all kinds of annoying popups on most sites. Takes a bit of tweaking to not break some sites, but after that it’s amazing.