alt Hacker News>How is someone supposed to pay for all the overhead that goes into research and writing these articles without a source of income.
I'm not sure, but we've been trying the online advertising model for a few decades now, and it's been terrible. Pop-ups, pop-unders, malware, I could go on and on. At some point it's fine to just say "no" to the advertisers after so much abuse.
Also, there's nothing stopping a website from hosting their own ads: these generally are not blocked by ad-blockers because they're served from the same domain, rather than a known ad-serving domain. But they never want to do this for some reason.
The site hosting the ads seems like a red herring? Do you mean they could sell or design their own ads? If so, that seems like a difficult proposition.
If we accept that most people won’t pay a subscription, and take ads off the table as an option, then I can only think of 2 other options:
* charitable patrons (this is a thing, but I guess not effective enough?) * selling other products to subsidize the free content
These both appear to have obvious problems and for a dubious goal of making another party subsidize the visitor’s consumption cost.
Having the visitor cover their own cost seems reasonable. What currency do they have other than money or attention? Maybe a small work problem that provides an abstracted service to a separate payer (a la reCAPTCHA, but for $).