In general I'm not a fan of advertising, but one of the most important things it does is level the playing field across income levels and countries. $5/month would be outrageously expensive for a very large number of people, most of whom are not on Hacker News, and any discussion of replacing advertising with a subscription model has to start from that basic fact.
Sure. We're not talking about Facebook here, they'll be fine. We're talking about random sites and apps. How many apps on the Play/App Store actually implement differential pricing by region?
This cannot be an afterthought—it must be the central question all advertising skeptics must start with.
If ad companies manage to set up international ad networks that show relevant ads to the user according to their home country and interests, I wonder if all that effort and hard work couldn't have instead be spent building a platform for collecting payment internationally
I'm not justifying anything, I'm merely stating what I think is an unequivocally positive side effect of advertising-based models: they have automatic price discrimination built in. Subscription models do not have it built in—developers have to do extra work to introduce price discrimination. I think this is a demerit of subscription models, though not one that outweighs the demerits of advertising models.
> an unequivocally positive side effect of advertising-based models
Democracies are bought on advertising.
Hiding the price of the user's attention is not a positive side effect to the user. Hiding who buys the user's attention is not a positive side effect to the user. Hiding how many other people's attentions are also being sold is not a positive side effect to the user. All of these are detriments to the user.
