I notice immediately two main points are wrong: > Minimal friction. Fair enough when the site had one ad. Pretty much no site had one ad now. They have lots o

I notice immediately two main points are wrong: > Minimal friction. Fair enough when the site had one ad. Pretty much no site had one ad now. They have lots of them, which is significantly slowing down loading the page. And if you add all tracking and surveillance code, it can inflate a simple site into megabytes of data. There are common sites that load literally hundreds of outside URLs for ad and surveillance mechanics. Which brings us to point 2: > Non-regressive. Paywalls, like other fixed costs, are regressive Ad costs are regressive too - if you have weak computer and low bw connection, if your connection is unstable or expensive, if your only internet device is a mobile phone with less than excellent bandwidth - which is commonly the case in low income communities - then the last thing you want is to be hit with megabytes of ad data which have zero relationship to what you want to get. Of course, for people sitting on optical gigabit networks with latest-greatest hardware their employer paid for is not much of a problem... If it was just a paid service, you could work out a deal - maybe it could be cheaper for your country, or have some kind of library or per-provider setup that could make it easier for you to get to it - but you don't have this option, it's megabytes of ad everywhere.