I prefer zero ads, thanks
The correct amount of ads for a publication that’s directly supported is zero. That’s the amount we should get. I don’t care about the rationale behind it. I’m giving you money, you decided how much money I should be giving you for your product, you don’t get to double dip and also sell my data to your advertisers and earn more on the side.
Manu is commenting on The Verge's new paywall-ish premium subscription model. I am in full agreement with every point Manu makes.
When did this pay-for-the-privilege-of-still-being-the-product model suddenly gain foothold? It seems to be popping up everywhere these days. It seems like a worst-of-both-worlds kind of compromise.
I read somewhere the other day, although I cannot remember exactly where (Update: It was Mat Duggan's excellent post Self-Hosting Isn't a Solution; It's A Patch), that privacy is a privilege that requires technical know-how and financial means. Seems to me that the premium on privacy is about to go up with the normalisation of this model. Paying for access is no longer enough to get even a modicum of privacy. There's now an explicit premium you must pay if you don't want your behavioural data to be shared with advertisers and used for profiling.
And here I was thinking that we were moving in the right direction, as far as privacy in the digital sphere goes.