Maybe there could be a middle ground: keep most of the internet ad-free, but allow users to do explicit "commercial searches" for e.g. vacuum cleaners, or hotels, or fun things to do in their area. Then the escape room would show up there.
I've actually thought about that model a lot recently. If Google does this then it's one more step towards their goal of getting somebody what they want. Ads usually only show when you're typing a phrase which correlates with a product. Whenever you type "vacuum cleaners", that's you signalling you're likely searching for a commercial product. If not, ignore the ad.
But let's be honest, search ads are not the problem here, toxic banner ads across the web are.
Yeah, I've been saying for years that someone should make a search engine for the ad-free segment of the internet :-) Then we could use it most of the time, and fall back to Google explicitly when doing queries with commercial intent.
Advertisement-bugged content is indeed essentially content for the poor. The rich just buy an iPhone and buy the apps they use on it so they don't see advertisements.
I'm willing to pay for Mozilla Firefox and Duck Duck Go and Wikipedia. I'm not sure it should be paid in month or by amount of usage. The beauty of Wikipedia is that it is open source, same with Firefox. Not sure about DDG.
You would need to pay for such an ad-free internet in some way, other than being an ad target. This is a critical point of you expect the variety and quality of this ad-free internet to approach what we have now.
The first spam on Usenet was by a company called DEC. DEC was known for its great products (VAX, OpenVMS, Alpha) but for shitty management and marketing.
I've witnessed the Internet before Web 2.0. Yes I received Viagra spam on my mailbox as well. Amount bought thanks to all of that spam: zero. The marketeer does not care about any second in my life I wasted thanks to their spam. Neither do the assholes who hosted them. And still, that Internet functioned. Of course the bills for the IRC server and Usenet server need to be paid. Usenet access was just part of my monthly dial-up subscription though.
As far as I am concerned the invention of high quality (relatively) search engines and high quality (relatively) fact sources such as Wikipedia as well as high quality, honest reviewers could easily make up for advertising. How is such paid for? Donations and credit card.
That's only because the current business model is very closed source (proprietary) a danger RMS warned about decades ago. The original GPLv3 was meant to address that, and websites such as Wikipedia and I suppose OpenAI don't work that way.
If we were used to no advertising and paying for services, we'd be outraged by if there was advertising. Ironically, that way is more efficient. The ideal model for data is a Patreon/Kickstarter/Indiegogo-esque project where people are able to offer bounties. This way you could pick a journalist (who's self-employed) and pay them to write an article to research a subject. Such research could then save other people time and money. I mean, if only 100 people in the world pay 10 EUR each then you already got firepower to do some research already.
Advertising and 'free' (where you're the product) is a race to the bottom, and ultimately a product for the poor.
Podcast hosts (at least those I listen to) are often asked to provide a paid version of their content without ads. The answer is always the same: ads bring way more money in that a subscription would.
There are examples where subscriptions work perfectly well. Is the model perfect? No.
Podcast hosts are biased either way. Ads waste people's time while a subscription doesn't. The subscriber amount is inflated, and the quality of content is lower than it could be because of clickbait and other non-content.
One subscription-based model for news I'm looking forward to gaining adoption is essentially a Spotify for news, called Blendle. I also believe we focus too much on news, and not enough on in depth articles which is a model De Correspondent pursues.
