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> Either of those outcomes sucks for the middlemen, but not so much for anyone else. It actually also sucks for the businesses themselves, at least in my case.

> Either of those outcomes sucks for the middlemen, but not so much for anyone else. It actually also sucks for the businesses themselves, at least in my case. I'd much rather spend my time creating valuable content for everyone than creating valuable content for a few who pay me. Of course there are alternatives I can try, I can keep content free and solicit donations, I can create various merchandise or I can directly sell advertising space hosted on my own site. All these options essentially take time away from creating content in the first place. My fear is that I'll be too busy trying to make money to make good content. Ad networks at least have the benefit of a "fire and forget" and having someone manage that whole aspect of my business, leaving me to work on content. I totally get the whole point of no tracking, I'm not even really against it. I'm just trying to point out that it's not just the big business ad networks that will be affected here.

Silhouette 14y ago
I sympathise, because I also run a couple of low-traffic web sites purely to share information I've found useful or thoughts that might help others. Then again, I never expected to make any money from those sites, and I don't run ads on them either. Whatever we might ideally like as site creators, I think the reality is that small-scale, targeted-ad funding for web sites, where we create something like a personal blog or a site with some articles and then slap something like Google Ads on them to cover the hosting costs, isn't going to be a sustainable model. Instead, I think sites like that are either going to be done for love (as they always used to be), or done for profit (and run as a business, including marketing and advertising arrangements or some other revenue stream), or perhaps hosted on some sort of aggregator site that does have critical mass to run a cost-effective ad program even if its individual contributors wouldn't (which might be a business, or might simply be a bunch of like-minded individuals clubbing together to split their hosting costs). There might even be some sort of positive cultural shift over time, where people stop wanting everything for free and start to realise that you get what you pay for and good sites are worth supporting. I don't expect that many people are going to actively donate to sites any time soon, but then you only need a few who do to pay an annual hosting bill for a low traffic personal site. So while I do see your point and understand your concern, I don't think we're talking about the fall of the Internet here. Little guys like you and me will keep our sites running one way or another and still spend our time on content we think is worthwhile.

Silhouette 14y ago

I sympathise, because I also run a couple of low-traffic web sites purely to share information I've found useful or thoughts that might help others. Then again, I never expected to make any money from those sites, and I don't run ads on them either. Whatever we might ideally like as site creators, I think the reality is that small-scale, targeted-ad funding for web sites, where we create something like a personal blog or a site with some articles and then slap something like Google Ads on them to cover the hosting costs, isn't going to be a sustainable model. Instead, I think sites like that are either going to be done for love (as they always used to be), or done for profit (and run as a business, including marketing and advertising arrangements or some other revenue stream), or perhaps hosted on some sort of aggregator site that does have critical mass to run a cost-effective ad program even if its individual contributors wouldn't (which might be a business, or might simply be a bunch of like-minded individuals clubbing together to split their hosting costs). There might even be some sort of positive cultural shift over time, where people stop wanting everything for free and start to realise that you get what you pay for and good sites are worth supporting. I don't expect that many people are going to actively donate to sites any time soon, but then you only need a few who do to pay an annual hosting bill for a low traffic personal site. So while I do see your point and understand your concern, I don't think we're talking about the fall of the Internet here. Little guys like you and me will keep our sites running one way or another and still spend our time on content we think is worthwhile.