Here's an answer from other HN threads. No one wants to buy a membership for the following reasons (in concert):
* no unified marketplace means you have to buy a variety of memberships.
* no established micro-transaction provider means costs are going to be above minimum credit card transaction fees which makes multiple memberships expensive.
* ad block is free.
If you're an established brand, you can count on some degree of good will. People will pay for the NYT, the WSJ, and the Economist. They'll pay for the LWN for a similar reason. But for BuzzFeed? Probably not. And for Random Site K, not a chance. I mean, would _you_ pay to use SpeedTest.net?
>Why not let me pay twice what they get from the advertisers to completely disable ads?
Because the people who opt out will be the people who it's most valuable to advertise to. The people who'd opt out are almost certainly worth much more than 2x the average user. The amount you'd have to charge to make this work is probably reasonably significant.
Why not let me pay twice what they get from the advertisers to completely disable ads?
Google has some program like this for awhile anyways, but they never promised zero ads, just less.