> The biggest barrier is that people don't want to pay for content.
Tons of people paid for content before the Web. Newspapers, magazines, books, CDs, DVDs, cable TV, premium channels.
With the Web, dotcoms were focused on IPOs (and so the appearance of possibly being a player in the future), everyone was focused on adoption, there was also a lot of finance opportunism. Then most all of the the business models switched to spying/control, or just more finance scams. For which free content still makes sense.
If you end the spying/control business model, and the current growth-oriented investment schemes, and maybe breakup a few megacorps that never should've been allowed to happen... then maybe we'll get better options for low-friction content payment, and presumably some people will resume paying for content with value.
Also, the US piracy culture needs to stop. One of the reasons that's been hard to argue, starting in the MP3 days, is that some of the most directly affected content organizations (e.g., MPAA, RIAA) had awful reputations. But to the extent that piracy culture affects legitimate economic sustainability for other content (e.g., subreddits that institutionalized pasting news article full text, or rehosting webcomics on imgur), we need to fix the culture, and make it not socially-acceptable.
> Tons of people paid for content before the Web. Newspapers, magazines, books, CDs, DVDs, cable TV, premium channels.
Sure, but newspapers, magazines, cable TV and premium channels have never really lived off of customer payments, they were always ad-based businesses first (there are exceptions, such as small newspapers and HBO).
Digital technology changes some of the economics, and perhaps some of the need for advertising revenue. For example, you could sell mostly journalism "content", without the expense of printing and distribution operation.
Tons of people paid for content before the Web. Newspapers, magazines, books, CDs, DVDs, cable TV, premium channels.
With the Web, dotcoms were focused on IPOs (and so the appearance of possibly being a player in the future), everyone was focused on adoption, there was also a lot of finance opportunism. Then most all of the the business models switched to spying/control, or just more finance scams. For which free content still makes sense.
If you end the spying/control business model, and the current growth-oriented investment schemes, and maybe breakup a few megacorps that never should've been allowed to happen... then maybe we'll get better options for low-friction content payment, and presumably some people will resume paying for content with value.
Also, the US piracy culture needs to stop. One of the reasons that's been hard to argue, starting in the MP3 days, is that some of the most directly affected content organizations (e.g., MPAA, RIAA) had awful reputations. But to the extent that piracy culture affects legitimate economic sustainability for other content (e.g., subreddits that institutionalized pasting news article full text, or rehosting webcomics on imgur), we need to fix the culture, and make it not socially-acceptable.