There's this presumption of a false dichotomy when it comes to advertising on the internet. That you can have no ads and content that you have to pay for, or

There's this presumption of a false dichotomy when it comes to advertising on the internet. That you can have no ads and content that you have to pay for, or you must let google spam a bunch of javascript programmatically into your browser for you. Having worked many years in traditional media, the amount of time this situation has lasted has really been surprising to me. You can make the best money selling advertisements directly. Even better, once you do so, you're no longer reliant on shady third parties to deliver your ads, and ad blockers generally aren't even able to block those ads. We just never got the kind of "content aggregators" who would do this middle man work. Collect content that you pay for, categorize it into publications based on reader interest, then sell direct advertisements over the top of that publication or set of publications. People like to think we're out of the "wild west" stage on the internet. We're just _barely_ starting to pull away from it.