By far the most effective way to end ads would be to come up with an internet business model that doesn't need ads or subscriptions to stay alive.
This would be a god tier level development, and would seriously cripple Google's core business (serving ads) and youtube as well (serve ads or subscription).
Given that things cost money, I'm not sure how you want to accomplish that in a sustainable fashion. Somewhere, someone down the line is paying money, even if it's not you. And if it's not you, you're the product, as the popular saying goes. So paying a subscription fee really is the best solution.
One can imagine a different structure, where a wealthy philanthropist or organization funds the site, but that's just shifting the costs around. The other option is the government runs it, out of our tax dollars, which could work, if there wasn't a powerful vocal contingent of politicians that still buys the line that government can't do anything right.
Here’s your solution: YouTube, but backed by blockchain. Instead of hashing or whatever nonsense happens on blockchain, your “mining” actually does something mildly useful and serves videos. You get coins or something. Since there’s no real value in blockchain products and everything is completely fabricated, you can show people their coin value is going up, because why not. So they can continue to “invest” with their compute.
Been feeling inspired by the SBF case lately.
Jokes aside, distributing compute to users is one way to avoid having expensive servers, which tend to be powered by ads, if not direct payments. There is the fediverse. Not sure how well that would work here, but there’s probably some potential. And before that there has been e.g. torrenting communities that require certain seed ratios. Basically: the product is “free” but you need to participate in some form that adds value rather than just leeching. The distributed model is established, I just don’t think it will ever outcompete a centralized one, if for no other reason than distributed communities have strategy and cash flow problems. As in, they don’t really have any functional mechanism to build, fund, and execute on a competitive strategy like YouTube can. All they can really do is make a product and hope people like it. But competing on merit is never enough.
This is called peertube, and the topmost viewed video on peertube.tv sorted by "Global views" had 57K views in total.
Youtube, OTOH, used, and currently uses a number of marketing strategies to drive traffic to their site, and paid out ~$10B++ annually for content creators. GP's comment on "Given that things cost money" is not governed by compute, rather, cost of customer acquisition for the platform, and cost of content creation by creatives. Somebody, somewhere, has to pay for these. That is the merit of this battleground.
> By far the most effective way to end ads would be to come up with an internet business model that doesn't need ads or subscriptions to stay alive.
There are many! The problem is that the ads model supports the "winners take all" strategy that permeates Silicon Valley and all its copycats. There is no room for peaceful coexistence.
Peer to peer networks. "Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the World Wide Web was close to a P2P network in that it assumed each user of the web would be an active editor and contributor, creating and linking content to form an interlinked "web" of links."
This would be a god tier level development, and would seriously cripple Google's core business (serving ads) and youtube as well (serve ads or subscription).