From the examples of cable TV, newspaper and magazine subscriptions before that, and subscription streaming video services today, I have to suspect that this sort of thing wouldn’t yield “an ad-free Internet”. You’d pay, and get ads too.
From a business perspective, there’s always some price the business can charge that would make running adverts comparatively unprofitable. This price might be very high, but it’s not infinite. I’ll agree that many existing “subscription” services that also run adverts despite you paying the subscription, which is just frustrating.
In order for that to be the case, subscribers would have to actually stop paying once ads are introduced. Otherwise, the service gets to keep the premium-subscriber revenue stream and gain the advertiser revenue stream too.
With apologies to Kipling:
It is always a temptation to a paid-subscription station To reach out to its audience and say — ”Thanks for paying for our site! We’ll be running ads tonight; We are betting that you will not go away.”
From the examples of cable TV, newspaper and magazine subscriptions before that, and subscription streaming video services today, I have to suspect that this sort of thing wouldn’t yield “an ad-free Internet”. You’d pay, and get ads too.
From a business perspective, there’s always some price the business can charge that would make running adverts comparatively unprofitable. This price might be very high, but it’s not infinite. I’ll agree that many existing “subscription” services that also run adverts despite you paying the subscription, which is just frustrating.
In order for that to be the case, subscribers would have to actually stop paying once ads are introduced. Otherwise, the service gets to keep the premium-subscriber revenue stream and gain the advertiser revenue stream too.
With apologies to Kipling:
It is always a temptation to a paid-subscription station
To reach out to its audience and say —
”Thanks for paying for our site! We’ll be running ads tonight;
We are betting that you will not go away.”