The problem with selectively un-blocking individual sites is that it poses a management problem, plus it wouldn't take many bad ads to come through to cause me to go back to just blocking everything.
I'm sorry, but this really is a case of "this is why we can't have nice things." I would rather give up all premium Internet content than to have to actually manage the problem or any of the purported solutions to the problem.
YouTube would be the hardest to give up, but most of my favorite producers have Patreons and their own video-hosting sites anyway, and I might even be able to eke out a profit helping the rest move too if they needed it. I can simply curate individual "super-premium" content creators and patronize them, leaving the likes of Wired and WSJ to their fates.
I already use TheBrowser and use their micro-payment service, but I only ever put $5 on it, there just isn't that many paid articles. The content industry is extremely insistent on forcing advertising on me, sorry but no. Especially for high-volume news sites, the PITA factor far outweighs whatever insight I get from the news articles themselves.
Most sites that have ads are really just entertainment for me, even news. And there's lots of other entertainment.
It would be a shame if $FAVORITE were to disappear, they have great journalists, but I don't read $FAVORITE regularly, so if I never see a link for it on HN I probably won't remember it existed.
I pay for three outlets: NYT, Economist, Guardian. Nothing else in the world has seemed important enough for me to pay for it, and I won't miss them if I'm blocked.
The management problem is why ad block plus started their acceptable ads initiative. Websites register with ad block as having acceptable ads only, and ad block puts the sites on your whitelist automatically.... And of course, periodically verifies the website is still following the rules. There's a registration fee for organizations that get more than 10 million ad impressions per month on browsers with adblock installed. The ad industry calls it extortion.
... but it ensures your money goes to only the top tier of YouTube creators, and not the people who made the videos you enjoy. (Unless you only enjoy the top tier of creators, that is.) I hope you like PewDiePie, because if you're paying for Red, that's where the money's going.
I would never even consider subscribing to Red until YouTube promises that the fee you spend goes to the creators you actually watch.
That's the problem. 99% of the free users are middle-schoolers watching PewDiePie on their cell phones during recess. There's 100 of those for every adult subscriber to Red.
If, and only if, Google divvied up the Red money by the creators Red subscribers actually view, then that scheme might appeal to me. As-is, it does not.
I'm sorry, but this really is a case of "this is why we can't have nice things." I would rather give up all premium Internet content than to have to actually manage the problem or any of the purported solutions to the problem.
YouTube would be the hardest to give up, but most of my favorite producers have Patreons and their own video-hosting sites anyway, and I might even be able to eke out a profit helping the rest move too if they needed it. I can simply curate individual "super-premium" content creators and patronize them, leaving the likes of Wired and WSJ to their fates.
I already use TheBrowser and use their micro-payment service, but I only ever put $5 on it, there just isn't that many paid articles. The content industry is extremely insistent on forcing advertising on me, sorry but no. Especially for high-volume news sites, the PITA factor far outweighs whatever insight I get from the news articles themselves.