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I think Patreon is great for individual creators and other small scale operations, but I'm skeptical that it can generate enough revenue to sustain larger scale

I think Patreon is great for individual creators and other small scale operations, but I'm skeptical that it can generate enough revenue to sustain larger scale journalistic operations. Organizations like NPR have been attempting a user-contribution model since before the internet, and it works to an extent, but they still have to rely partially on (minimalistic) ads as well as government funding.

simion314 5y ago
Sure. Patreon is not a solution for all, but isn't private media already "patronized" by billionaires ? And they use ads to make more money? And for smaller private media like my local radio, they will use local ads and some ads might be of interest to me, the issue most of us have with ads is not that the local car washing place put an ad on radio, but with Google or FB ads because they track you over the internet and profile you, so FB would have a profile for Bob like "middle income, single, straight man, naive, likes tech, likes watches, ...anxious,. insecure, depressive... this is a lot of data that honestly could be use for good but instead it is used to manipulate Bob to join different FB groups, to show Bob different ads for some shit that he would probably buy that is probably bad for him etc. On top of this tracking there is a ton of other JS code to try and ensure there is no bad actor that would try to inflate the numbers of clicks. If you would have some plain ads with text and non animated images then I think most poeple would be happy and not bother to hide the ad. What I think it will happen is some countries will eventually make laws to make tracking opt-in, like the do not track flag in browsers , or at best for advertisers make the user chose at first launch the default for tracking setting