(2017-08-21) Why Your Favorite Sites Are Suddenly Asking For Money

David Wong On Why Your Favorite Sites Are Suddenly Asking For Money

While others worry about Net neutrality (and that is a big deal!), I say there is a much more imminent threat to the "free" (as in no-cost) internet: The slow collapse of Web Ads. This is actually happening much faster than any hypothetical nightmare scenario net neutrality supporters warned us of ... and there's nobody we can lobby to fix it.

Last year, when a shitstorm hit the web publishing industry. Sites that lost money and/or made cuts included HuffPo, The Guardian, Fusion, Mashable, Salon, Medium, and lots of others. Just this summer, we saw the same happen at The New York Times, MTV News, and Fox Sports. Then Vice Sports shut down completely.

When the Dot-Com bubble popped in the early 2000s, I watched ad rates on my old site drop 97 percent over the course of just a couple of years. But those are old complaints. What is new is that A) most of you are reading this on a phone (less screen space for ads, so publishers get paid less) and B) ad-blocking has hit a tipping point (more than half of users now do it).

When browsing on a Mobile phone, though, it's kind of a pain in the ass to bookmark things, so most people either get apps for each of their favorite sites or (more likely) get all of their content through Facebook. It just makes sense -- everyone has the Facebook app, and every publisher is on Facebook, so why not simply "like" the pages of your favorite sites and then get a steady feed of everything in one place?

Soon, all traffic flowed through Mark Zuckerberg's kingdom, and publishers became so dependent on it that when Facebook tweaked its system so that users were only fed certain updates (purely of Facebook's choosing) thousands of sites got nailed. Upworthy lost 80 percent of its traffic, for instance. On average, sites lost almost half of the traffic they were getting from Facebook

It's no better over on the YouTube side, where hosts routinely see ad money vanish for unclear reasons.

I don't know if the future is letting willing fans just straight up contribute money (TipJar) to support the rest, but we're trying that, among other things. I can say that I much prefer that over a future in which every site with a professional staff is behind a Paywall, and soon they start joining forces to create networks -- suddenly you're paying $19.95 a month for the Tech News Bundle. That's the exact "cable model" the net neutrality folks were warning us about!

This will be a crisis for some. Starting next year, Chrome will start blocking ads by default, and all other browsers will soon follow.

That is, as far as I can tell, either the end of the free internet or at least the beginning of the end. It has to happen.