The problem with that is scale. At the large end of things what you’re looking at is the PBS/NPR model. Optional donations, sometimes with additional material ear marked for donors only. And often with supplemental ads. Sort of a weaker version of the subscription and ad model with paywall where access is cut off or limited if you don’t pay in. The problem with that model though is in practice it tends to fail to bring in enough money. First the PBS example, as their public funding has been eviscerated over the past 3 decades, donations have routinely failed to make up the gap. As a result PBS produces less important TV, is less of a factor in culture. Employs and trains fewer people. As another example you’ve got the Max Fun pod casting network, founder Jesse Thorn came out of PBS and Max Fun follows that donation based model. And its worked rather well to support a number of pod casts. BUT I know a guy who wrote for one of those pod casts. The revenue model doesn’t allow individual pod casts or Max Fun to pay too many staffers a living wage. After years of working for them as a side job or main job. He had to give up and take a job in advertising.
Basically that model works really well for individual or very small groups of creators/workers. And has real problems scaling beyond that. But generally speaking economies are not build on collections of independent workers self funding.
She is not entitled to a “job” as a painter. She is however entitled to compensation if some one takes possession of one of her paintings. And whatever she does as a day job she is entitled to compensation for that.
What media companies are facing is the fact that they have people who work for them. These people are doing work. But increasingly they don’t have the money to compensate them for that. So you see pay rates going down, working hours going up. And everyone still struggling to make it work. Fewer people working and making less money in what are still very profitable sectors of the economy. That’s bad. When I was at college there was a healthy job market in TV, Film, and video work. By the time I got out that market had effectively collapsed. Particularly in NY. And while noone has to fund my dream of being a mid level, in house, cog in the production wheel with a reasonable middle class salary (heaven forfend, kids these days). Those jobs increasingly just don’t exist in numbers sufficient for even the people who were already doing it. In their place there are now a very limited competitive number of very poorly paid, freelance positions in Reality TV. And poorly conceived unstable, and only slightly less badly paid jobs in web media.
So its easy to say “yeah you aren’t entitled to that, go do something else”. What happens where there isn’t much else. For my part I ended up a barman in the morning. These sorts of dynamics, in media, and in other fields are how you get those curious statistics about those under 40 making far less than older generations at their age. Working far longer hours. Working those hours without additional compensation. Being more likely to work in low paid service jobs. Getting fewer benefits through their employer etc.
Stop thinking about individuals or even single companies and what you think they deserve or not. Start thinking about the overall impact to the economy and the work force as a whole. This issue isn’t merely tied to websites. There’s a direct one to one connection between web advertising and every aspect of the media landscape.
I find it very hard to believe that you would simple shrug if everything currently participating the online advertising field simply evaporated. The Times, The Washington post. NBC and most major TV operations. Google (nowhere to place ads nowhere to get ad dollars from). And where and what happens to our economy as that begins to happen.
People tend to make that argument over and over when it comes to media. “Who says its my problem if you can’t make a living?” Pick a different field and they hand wring with the best of us. Don’t leave the working class behind etc. So what about those guys I knew running union print shops in Jersey, running off books and papers. When print publishing started to collapse under pressure from these exact online ad problems. All those guys went out of business. Though curiously printing for direct mail ads kept them afloat for a while. Those guys can just find a different business model? They had millions in printing equipment they couldn’t off load. Specialized knowledge in one field. And while well off weren’t the sort of rich that lets you just pick up and start something equivalent in another industry. These things ripple out. Few things economically exist in isolation. Businesses shuttering, and ecconomic sectors collapsing tend to have wide reaching effects. Its not “so what, so and so isn’t making money off whatever anymore”, it rapidly become “holy shit a lot of people are out of work”.
You might notice that many places are trying. And people are bitching and hand wringing about it. Hell for the vast majority of companies involved this is the new business model.
(Though covering up the billboards only as I drove by would be a bit of a technical challenge.)