alt Hacker NewsThe harsh reality is that conversion from "free" to paid is on the order of 1%. This is true for everything from patreon, to wikipedia, to kagi, to nebula, to home mailers for charity.
1% of the people pay, 60% watch ads, 39% are crusaders who conveniently are morally obligated to not pay or compensate for anything (but have their costs covered by the other two groups, who complain about ads/costs but somehow are blind to the dead weight they are dragging around).
Worst of all is that it's impossible to have an honest conversation about it, because they people who haven't seen an ad or paid for a movie in 20 years go absolutely insane when called out. YouTube creators talk about it in private, but they would never dare say anything on their channel. Ad blocking is practically a religion.
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>it's impossible to have an honest conversation about it, because they people who haven't seen an ad or paid for a movie in 20 years go absolutely insane when called out
It's generally not possible to have an honest conversation about something when one side sees the other's honest response as "going absolutely insane" :-)
Do we need more than 1% conversion though? As long as the company is sustainable then that's sufficient to justify the company's existence. I think it says more about a lot of these services in that they're so shitty that they people will only use them if they're "free"; if Google or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok aren't good enough services to justify people paying for it, then maybe they shouldn't exist?
You can't use Kagi or Nebula without paying, so I don't really see how they're suffering from the free riders you keep insisting are some horrible epidemic. Almost by definition, if you're using Kagi or Nebula, you're already a conversion...are you saying a 1% conversion from advertising?
I have a collection of four hundred blu-rays and thousands of CDs. I pay for Netflix and Hulu and Amazon Prime, I pay for YouTube Premium and YouTube Music, and I don't use an ad blocker. I don't know if that falls into your criteria of "someone who can discuss this honestly", and of course I don't really have a means of "proving" this to you, but if you can assume I'm being truthful I don't think I'm speaking out of my ass here.