(copied from a private board)
Sir Tim Berners-Lee said "Two myths currently limit our collective imagination: the myth that advertising is the only possible business model for online companies, and the myth that it’s too late to change the way platforms operate" (see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/11/tim-berners-lee-tech-companies-regulations).
IMHO, he's right. The sorta-free ad-supported model prevents authors and publishers from being paid if someone posts their work without payment.
A publisher should be able to be paid a widely-agreed-upon rate or rates when someone reads their work, based on how much they read. This is typically called micropayments. At the time the web was invented there was a chicken-or-egg problem, so no-one made a serious try to implement "HTTP 402, Payment Required" .
I used to work in advertising, and thirty-some years later, noticed that the same software that does a 4-cents-per-thousands sale of ads can do a 7-cents-per-page sale of pages. As Stewart Brand said, "Information wants to be free, but also wants to be expensive". (paraphrased, see https://joshgans.medium.com/information-wants-to-be-free-the-history-of-that-quote-30e2a0511d19)
IMHO, if I as a reader spend 21 cents reading from one of your books, you and the author should both benefit. I really want that: my first book was pirated, and my next one will be too.
Back in 2024, after I retired from advertising, I wrote a description of how this can be done. And done today, by re-purposing the existing, and rather considerable, infrastructure that supports ads. See https://leaflessca.wordpress.com/2024/12/01/doing-it-righter/ for how.
