I’m pretty sure they hate the ads even more than you do. But margins in publishing are thin, and often negative. Nobody is earning money in that business, yet p

I’m pretty sure they hate the ads even more than you do. But margins in publishing are thin, and often negative. Nobody is earning money in that business, yet people are inventing this scenario of exploitation to have something to point to when they need to justify their acts to others or themselves. Google ran a trial to let you opt out of ads and pay the difference, exactly what people in these online discussions have always proclaimed to be waiting for. They got around a hundred takers. Turns out, nobody is willing to pay what it actually costs to produce the content they want to read. Local journalism is already dead in many regions, and there’s a study out there showing that corruption tends to increase in these cities, costing several times as much as the local paper ever did, not even including the non-monetary damages of the hollowing out of society.