I get what you're saying, and in the beginning days of the internet, I hoped that people would adopt a payment system where a user could distribute a pool of money to the pages that they visited, in order to pay for server uptime, content creation, etc.

Of course, companies took the easy way out. Just serve ads. Until that got absolutely obnoxious and downright dangerous, then users started blocking them enmass.

Well of course, we're now in a place where the internet is mostly paid for with ads, and the content creators that want to get paid up front (substack, WSJ, FT, etc) want crazy high amounts for subscription fees. I'm not a trader, so I do not get enough benefit to make it worth while to sub to those sites.

So I guess I'll keep blocking ads for my own security, and bypass paywalls with archiver sites. Shame. It could have been different, but this is the bed they made, and they can lay in it.