> I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read

Would you pay per view? Most people (me included) would probably hesitate to say yes, because we’re used to not paying for that. But what if it meant that ad based model is gone and everything you buy is cheaper because the price does not include the cost of running ads?

> what if ... everything you buy is cheaper because the price does not include the cost of running ads?

Except in practice we see the opposite.

There's something interesting going on with companies when they want to get paid directly versus by ads: they demand 3x - 4x or more for subscriptions or pay per view versus what they make from ads.

Easiest place to see this is ad supported non-linear TV in the years you could get without ads, or with ads. You pay significantly more to not see the ads, than they make from the ads.

Perhaps this is justified because ad-free subscriptions reduce the audience size for ad buys, but when you look at the numbers watching with ads versus paying, it wouldn't seem like the "no ads" buyers make a dent in whatever pricing tier.

In the 90s when we were young and naive, we imagined a library card model, with a library fee and then you have fractions of a cent cost to read a post, and using (hand waving) technology to uncouple viewing history from payables to content creators. That, or the British TV license model, an Internet license of some kind.

It's curious to me the ad networks haven't gotten together to preemptively offer this. Arguably Brave tried, but from an adversarial (to the ad companies) stance. It would work better from the inside with a simple regulation: if you serve ads for ad-supported content, you have to participate in the library card system at CPM rates no greater than you receive for ads to skip the ads for card holders.

The PPV model has been tried a bunch of times, and it always turns out that the rate people are willing to pay per view is not a rate that is high enough to be a viable revenue source for the content owners.

it takes a lot of $0.10-$0.25 views to make up for the loss of a $5/month recurring revenue stream that might last for years.

I would. Or alternatively I'd also pay for a Spotify style model where my monthly amount get redistributed amongst the articles I read.

You're presupposing that these blogs are producing content worth paying for. The unfortunate truth is that the overwhelming majority of blogs (99.9%+) are not.

> Would you pay per view?

Yes, but only after viewing, of else I'd pay for "editorial" or AI generated slop which would be generated like link farms pointing to Amazon etc.

And that's the chicken-and-egg problem ...

In theory that could be resolved by registering for free at reputable sites and then paying per view with micropayments. Or by a scheme where one would register and only pay when I actually did read stuff, not with the currently en-vogue monthly fee for each and every site.

How do you track the views?

Hard to say, there's no shortage of enticing looking medium articles that are superficial and worthless. I would not pay per view that trash even though there are good ones buried in the pile.

Brave Inc. gets a lot of flack, some warranted, but their Basic Attention Token allows for exactly this. Users can add credit to their wallet by either consuming privacy-friendly ads or topping it up manually, which then gets distributed to the sites they visit in the proportion they choose, transparently in the background while they browse.

It is a shame that this feature gets lumped together with claims of crypto scams, and similar nonsense. Yet this is precisely the right model that could work at scale to eliminate the advertising middleman, and make the web a safer and more enjoyable experience for everyone.

This is exactly what I want. I don't really care to subscribe to most written media (I do in some cases) but once in awhile an article grabs my attention and I would shell out to read it.