On the contrary, you’re now trying to ‘conflate’ the pay-to-publish model into the two you argued meant that model didn't exist.

You weren’t talking about paying cash for publishing/distribution, because both your two options, paid subscription and free ad-supported, you were talking how the consumer pays and also cost money to publish, cancelling that dimension out.

In the pay-to-publish model, someone is deciding it’s worth their own pocket money (or patronage or sponsorship by powers that be) to publish. That makes it free to consume.

We were talking about the perspective of the content consumer, and for them, the pay-to-publish model is free. They are neither paying for the content, nor are they paying with their attention. Some entirely different actor not discussed in your models, is covering it.

That content, content creators support publishing, tends to be different in nature — someone is willing to spend “their own” money to share the ideas in it freely.

Pamphleteers paid the printing presses by cash too, that’s how they didn’t have to sell ads and how they didn’t have to charge a ha’penny a sheet.

> “Content both created and distributed for free is miniscule and you haven’t quoted a single example yet”

You’re both non-responsive to examples with factual data to back them up, and moving the goalposts. To be clear, I’m agreeing there is too much no-value content getting churned out as filler to advertise against. So much volume, so much noise, the valuable content is buried.

Perhaps we agree there’s too much ad-hosting filler content, and not enough inherent value content.

To keep saying “minuscule” perhaps you use a very different internet. Where are the ads on this site? Are you paying for it? No, someone has an interest in this site and its content being available to a special interest audience. It costs almost nothing to host contentful content of mostly plain text conveying information rather than eye candy to drive clicks. With light design but info rich text content, it’s easy for the ROI to work. Companies know this and publish for free without ads.

If you add “corporate” publishing into the mix, all the company product sites and blogs, combining company sites, academic sites, non-profit/public-good sites, government sites, WordPress home pages of everyone homesteading on the web, etc., it’s not minuscule.

But here’s some hard data from 2018:

“Ad-supported media’s share of consumer time will drop to 42.5 percent by 2021. This past year [2017], the number fell to 44.4 percent, its lowest point ever, per the research.” — https://www.pqmedia.com/product/global-consumer-media-usage-...

Ad-supported is less than half of media time and trending down.

In the beginning, profiting off web content was illegal. Is it impossible to imagine course-correcting this race to the bottom?

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PS. I can’t help but notice the incredibly high not at all minuscule percentage of content linked to from HN that is neither subscription based nor ad-supported, but paid for by its author, some even calling out that they’re free, such as this one from the thread on standing out as a speaker:

What does this cost?

Make your checks payable to a shell corporation I have in the Caymans. Just kidding; it's all free. I hope you enjoy it. Also, if I ever see one of your talks, it better be damn good.

I'll add to this site over time. You might be interested in watching the newest posts page.

https://speaking.io/

Once again, content published to us for free is ironically the very content worth paying for.