Technology

59080 readers

4225 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

It’s the End of the Web as We Know It (www.theatlantic.com)

submitted 6 months ago by boem@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 7 points 6 months ago

Why, I couldn't even get into the article before it faded into a paywall.

I get people want to be paid but splashing cash on every page is not the internet as I knew it.

Speaking solely about news, the Internet as you knew it was unsustainable. For the first decade or so of online news, the ad-supported newspaper publishing business subsidized free online news, because they couldn't figure out payment.

Then Google and the other ad-tech companies took the advertising dollars, and the old publishing companies took on debt to try and switch to ad-supported online publications. And failed miserably.

Then the old publishing started running out of money, and slowly switched to online first.

The remaining published are a shadow of themselves, drowning in debt, and low readership.

There are alternative models that sort of work, maybe, but they haven't gone mainstream. They're held back by the belief that content should be free.

If platforms like flattr had taken off then the conversation would probably be different.