Sure, it would be ideal to live in a world without advertising. But if advertising is the cost we pay to monetize content like news, well, I'd rather accept that than other content models like paywalls.
Are these sites a thing (small sites that can subsist on their ad revenue)?
If I couldn't pay the bills for one of my services, I would rather introduce a paid tier, or at least a paid ad-free version. Or I would ask for donations whenever the money runs out, like Wikipedia does.
A paid tier is a surprisingly narrow business model. People aren't willing to pay for much, and not every website has such an explicit product. A lot of that is just conditioning, as people aren't used to having to pay for anything since ads. And most people see ads as zero-cost. The second you start charging a dollar, now you're the guy charging the dollar that nobody else is.
How many forums do you pay for?
And donations are almost always a joke. Else you wouldn't have to beg in a way that puts most ads to shame: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/nv9ad0..., and that's for a website that brings value to just about everyone that touches the internet.
Why do you assume you only receive accurate news if news agencies have a revenue stream? I would argue the opposite is true. Advertising increases the likelihood that your news in not honest and accurate.
How about we as a society have the balls to put faith in certain principles and remove money's influence upon the domain of those principles? The free exchange of information could be based upon this foundation.
I think we're sorely lacking in visionary utopianism and balls.
The question is will there be enough people subscribing to keep these content providers alive by subscription only?
I'm a huge fan of The Atlantic's work. I don't remember reading a single article of theirs that I wasn't blown away by the quality and interest of. But I hesitate to subscribe because there's such a glut of free content out there, growing larger every day as the barriers to creating that content lower, and I'm not sure how many hours I could devote to reading The Atlantic's articles, compared to all the rest of the free content consumption I do.
A lot of people perform a similar economic calculation and decide it's just not worth it for them to subscribe, so all that's left for them is the ethical question -- whether to effectively donate on the honor system (or at least not use ad-blockers, if they're aware of them and know how to use them), and it's pretty obvious that any ethical qualms some people may have about consuming free content don't amount to much income for the content producers or content distributors.
I like the idea of subscriptions to pay content makers directly, but I do see two issues that don't seem to have solutions right now:
1. Subscribing to every content producer directly will be extremely expensive for people. Advertising, on the other hand, spreads the costs across a large population with some amount of invisibility on who, in the end, pays for what. Only some kind of aggregation like on cable TV or others (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) have some potential to survive and pay content producers somewhat well. I'd be interested in any large scale aggregations that come at a not-too-high price yet provides an ad free and flexible experience (time shifting, place shifting, cross platform, cross device).
2. In your case, even if you were to subscribe to The Guardian, I seriously doubt if it would stop tracking you. Web sites that provide content always have analytics for their own site, but they're also interested in learning a lot more about the visitor so that they can get more data points on what their focus should be in order to maximize their impact and money making potential (not necessarily in this order). I'm guessing a lot of sites that offer subscriptions continue to track their users even without showing ads. The only difference then with a paid subscription is that they have a real name (likely), a real address (likely, depending on the payment method), and an email address attached to the subscriber that they can connect to the user's behavior. It actually seems worse, that you would pay to subscribe and yet still have to use a tracker block (like Privacy Badger) or ad blocker (like uBlock Origin).
A company called Blendle has started working on micro-payments on a per article basis across several sites, but I personally don't find it friction-less to use and see that the price per article is actually high (so I end up ignoring the email notifications with headlines).
I actually use Google Contributor for this. On many sites that I visit all I get is a simple thank you message instead of an ad. The creator still gets paid and I don't have to see as many ads.
