Comment by rapind
2 days ago
> How will one fund the server costs for newspapers, social networks and search engines?
All of these currently exist without advertising. The problem is advertising sucks all of the oxygen out of the room, convincing you it's the only business model because it's so lucrative.
Look around at the businesses that are entirely supported by advertising and ask yourself honestly how worse off we would be if they disappeared overnight. Do you believe that the vacuum they left would never be filled by other business models? Sure, it would probably look a lot different, but that's the point. What we have now is horrible, and I don't think society collapses if we got rid of advertising.
Be careful what you wish for. I hate the current data collection paradigm but advertising allows media to pay their own way and remain independent.
I guess one other model that seems to beat out advertising is billionaire ownership for influence peddling. Still remains to be seen if this model will remain successful in the long term. We should probably eliminate billionaires though just to be safe.