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I think a more ethical way is to have user donations. That way the site is truly community run.

Assuming you’re running a site as a non-profit and just want to provide a self-sustaining service (which is usually the case in the Fediverse): something that could be beneficial is to publicly announce the price breakdown of everything that goes into the site: servers, domain name, etc, and also disclose how much money is being raised per month. Maybe even list how much surplus money is set aside for months where there aren’t enough donations to fully cover the hosting costs. The goal shouldn’t be to guilt trip people obviously, but simply matter of factly stating these figures gives users a sense of exactly where their money is going, which has been shown to build trust and increase donations, and also gives them a sense of how much donations are needed, as most users have an impression that an ad-free site can just keep going without them having to donate, not due to an unwillingness to donate, simply due to not knowing.

Actually some search engines like duckduckgo and brave use this method, where the ads are only based on your query (so when you search for ‘bank’ you will get ads for banks). I think this is the correct way to advertise.

This is how newspapers and magazines worked before the internet.

I think it is more important to break the cycle of consumerism and instead focus on community partnerships. Eg. On public the radio today, hosts won’t tell you how a company will make your life better with false promises. They simply say, “this programming is brought to you, in part, by [ community partner]”

This informs listeners of community shops that also believe in the value of news, without all the nasty tactics of advertising and manipulation. It is a model I can support, but it has struggled on the web were it is so easy to prey on users.

Also, sponsorships are not enough to sustain a site or syndicate with living wages. They also require individual donors, corporate donations, and charity from wealthy donors. Corporate and wealthy donors unleash a second set of nasty conflicts that need rooting out imo

Ads are distracting.

A few curated, tasteful ads which follow the topic of the website probably aren’t a problem. One of the reasons I’m there is to find links to other similar things.

Those are called context-based ads or contextual targeting.

The downside is it needs human intervention. It’s hard to automate it online, without it preserving the typical track-y nature of online ads (the ads would still be getting served from an ad server to the browser directly, and therefore still no privacy.

It works if the ads are hard coded into the webpage by the publisher server-side, but then the advertiser has no idea how many views the ad got, and therefore how much to pay for the ad space… which means the advertiser needs human intervention to decide how much to pay by a guesstimate, which means this whole scheme can’t work for small random websites in an automated fashion.

It might, and that’s a mighty precarious might, work with some kind of crazy blockchain scheme (y’know, that whole distributed consensus thing… lol… an actual use for blockchain for once?!), but unlikely, very unlikely…

Basically , I’m all for it as an alternative to donations or volunteering if they aren’t possible , but you need to actually attract advertisers that want to advertise on your website first.

Because ads aren’t any better just because your website needs them to survive.

it WAS like that. ads were sold by demographics of readership.

then NSA and CIA got involved in big tech. i kid you not.

cloudflare was a project called honeypot to detect spam and bots. dept of homeland security director called the owner and suggested their data was valuable and they should start a company. the ceo tells the history in early interviews.

I don’t think that a donation-based media outlet would be financially viable, although the idea seems appealing. But there are some good examples of media cooperatives in Europe across many countries with different revenue models, and they appear to be successful. I guess the “right” business model depends on the target market and the content, there’s no one size fits all (I worked in the media sector in various roles and successfully co-founded a magazine on my own - after my first attempt had gloriously failed, so I guess I know what I’m talking about :-))

The ads are all about tracking though.