I hear a lot of people in here saying, "Yay for AdNauseum, they are fixing the broken ad system! If sites start charging instead of ads, I'll totally pay!"
Let me add a little perspective. A long time ago at reddit we launched reddit gold. At the time, one of the biggest benefits was that if you had gold you could turn off ads. This was in direct response to people saying, "I would rather pay you then use adblock".
You know how many people running adblock started paying? Not a lot. Sure, some did, but there were still a whole bunch of people who just wanted a free experience. The ads on reddit weren't even all that heavy CPU and bandwidth-wise.
My point is, I don't think a lot of you are being totally honest when you say you'd be willing to pay if the site removed advertising.
In a lot of cases, those sites get a lot more money from the advertisers than you would ever be willing to pay, because they simply don't provide that much value to you.
Let me add a little perspective. A long time ago at reddit we launched reddit gold. At the time, one of the biggest benefits was that if you had gold you could turn off ads. This was in direct response to people saying, "I would rather pay you then use adblock".
You know how many people running adblock started paying? Not a lot. Sure, some did, but there were still a whole bunch of people who just wanted a free experience. The ads on reddit weren't even all that heavy CPU and bandwidth-wise.
My point is, I don't think a lot of you are being totally honest when you say you'd be willing to pay if the site removed advertising.
In a lot of cases, those sites get a lot more money from the advertisers than you would ever be willing to pay, because they simply don't provide that much value to you.