This argument is based on false assumptions. Funding your content through advertising is hugely inefficient. Of the people who visit your site, usually only a

This argument is based on false assumptions. Funding your content through advertising is hugely inefficient. Of the people who visit your site, usually only a tiny proportion click on (or notice) an advert, and only a tiny proportion of those then spends any money. This assumes that just viewing an advertisement doesn't create value for an advertiser. It does. Look at the average TV channel or print magazine for evidence. I’ve heard Google pass as little as one twelfth onto the publisher in some cases While I'm not sure about Google, I do know that most display advertising networks pay their publishers around 30% - 50% of the gross income. But seriously, advertising is a broken method of paying for stuff. If we could unobtrusively pay for content on the Internet, I’m sure enough people would do so to more than cover costs of production. While I agree that there is probably a decent community of people that would probably pay for content online, I'm not convinced that this would be true for most people. Sites that offer a subscription to get rid of the ads, usually have very few subscribers. People simply like free stuff, and don't like to pay for content. Now this could indeed be due to the payment model, I'm not sure; maybe something facebook-connect-like for paid content would work, but I'm still not convinced that a large enough base of people would actually pay the same money as they're generating in advertising value, to make this work. Let's take a few very large sites, and imagine what would happen if they went to a payment supported revenue model, instead of advertising supported. Let's say, Google or CNN. What would happen if they started putting up a paywall? Would people really start paying for those services, or would they simply move to a competing site, which is ad-supported and for free? I'm willing to bet most people would go for the last option. People just don't mind ads as much as they mind paying for stuff. (Disclaimer: I work in online ads.)