alt Hacker Newshow would you want to keep having free journalism without advertising? (and we all know where any democracy goes to die). historically nothing else worked at scale minus a few exceptions.
i think the sentiment against ads from the educated bubble really completely takes a working democracy for granted. spoiler: its not and look whats happening in the US... and the budget shift from openweb/newspapers towards video (mainly google) in the advertising industry is massive...
disclaimer: i work in adtech but we do not profile users and do not track them.
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The weak point of journalism has always been the larger-tier patrons. Can't report negative things if money-man says "no".
The advertising industry at large is at fault for our degradation in journalism.
Advertising needs clicks and eyes, the providers produce highly targeted profile algorithms to ensure maximum clicks and eyes, which degrades the information conveyed into the smallest, most enraging snippets possible. Those rise to the top as the most profitable ways to convey information, and continues the cycle, further destroying news that doesn't profit in this ecosystem.
Killing most forms of advertising across the board would of course basically destroy these large tech companies that rely on them. But the same companies have completely derailed society with their "services". We'd be better off without them.
Of course this would likely hurt "GDP" and "The Economy", but that would just mean we have an unproductive economy primarily inflated by a pointless circle of advertisement.
I don't know, but is "free journalism" actually good? If the incentives of free journalism (thanks to being ad funded) are to increase engagement and avoid criticizing their advertisers is the product actually journalism at all?
People do pay for quality journalism. Democracy and the press did fine before the adtech industry thank you very much