I'm not sure people are picking up on what Thompson's arguing here; he's looking at it from the business side, not the tech side, and making a prediction that s

I'm not sure people are picking up on what Thompson's arguing here; he's looking at it from the business side, not the tech side, and making a prediction that strikes me as worryingly plausible. Essentially, he's arguing that the refusal of most readers to pay for content combined with the way advertising has made the web suck -- and is encouraging an ever-larger number of people to block advertising entirely -- is creating a scenario that leaves one practical option: driving content off the open web. This is exactly what Facebook's Instant Articles, Apple News, Flipboard and similar services are betting on -- creating environments where loading times are much faster, the reading experience is generally more pleasant, and advertising is by and large less intrusive than what we're increasingly ending up with on the web: The future for most publishers is likely that of pure content production only, save for the few who are destination sites capable of selling native advertising in stream or selling subscriptions. What is very much in question is exactly how users will feel when they finally get what they claim they wish for. This ultimately isn't a question about AdBlock and loading times, it's a question about how to pay for content. If neither of the predominant payment models on the open web -- advertising and subscriptions -- turn out to be viable, if we want content producers to stay on the open web we need to come up with better answers than "hey, I'm sure there will always be people out there willing to produce everything we want at the highest possible quality level without worrying about how they'll get money for it."