As for myself, I pay for virtually no sites online. I was an SDMB subscriber at one point, and I think I paid actual money. I pay for Amazon Prime–I guess that counts, sort of.
I intend, eventually, to give dailykos.com some coin. Other than that, I don’t really find any individual information sites worth it. I am not opposed to shelling out dough in principle…
The macro situation is pretty absurd. It seems that everyone has a paywall now or is at least blocking ad blockers. I don’t give in. I don’t whitelist sites. Nothing is all that amazing. If my choices end up lessening what I read and watch online, that’s probably a good thing.
Tell us how you are dealing with the online media environment and what your opinion is of it!
We have a NY Times subscription which, I believe, allows access to their website. However, I can’t figure out how to sign in. I don’t know if it’s in my wife’s name or mine, and what email is associated with the account. Never needed it enough to figure it out.
As for me, I won’t watch a video that starts with an ad, so I rarely even bother to try.
Mostly by not reading whatever’s behind the paywall. I occasionally subscribe to various sites, but there are few that can’t be easily replaced with something else.
I don’t mind paying either, but having to log in is a pain in the ass. After like the third time not being able to log in to NYTimes on some device and being annoyed with them for some reason or other, I cancelled my subscription. Tempted to subscribe to the Washington Post lately, so I might. On the other hand, I’d probably be better adjusted if read less coverage of politics, so maybe the paywall constantly turning me away is a blessing in disguise.
When I come across a site that refuses to let me read the article without disabling the ad blocker, I open the link in an incognito window, because the ad blocker plug-in isn’t active that way. But at the same time, I can’t be tracked because cookies aren’t retained.
I use outline.com, private windows, different browsers, etc.
There are a few sites that I can’t view no matter what, but it’s pretty rare. There’s a British site (The Telegraph, I think) that I’ve never been able to read more than a paragraph or two of its articles. I can’t even tell how it’s biased.
You ever notice when you go to a site and for a split second you can read the site perfectly–and then a script comes up asking you to subscribe? This is a case where blocking scripts–usually the inline scripts will work–using Ublock Origin.
Now they are closing that loophole, interpreting incognito as being in “private” mode, and now you get a blank screen and a friendly warning to disable. Yeah, so your ads and crawlers can now track my ass. Assholes.
I find that the back button works pretty well when I find myself facing a paywall. I get most of my information from news sites, and if I want the scoop on something weird in the news? Honestly, I just come here.
I pay for Washington Post. Give to Cosmoquest. WaPo is best site on web for trolling. Stack Exchage gets regular contributions. Most others get a pass if they want my VPN or ad blockers off. I can find their info elsewhere. Not sure about SDMB just yet. I’m kinda enjoying it just now. Happily Google new sometimes asks me if I’m a robot., and I can still find my old scientific papers without paying $30 -thanks to mother Russia. Naturally, that makes me a bad person. I prefer to pay ONLY for value received.
Some news sites let you read a certain number of articles for “free” per month but then block any reading after that. Some pop up a nag screen, as mentioned above. Some display the first few paragraphs of a story but you have to sign in to see the whole story.
Aside from installing one kind of add-on plug-in or another, or signing up or paying, I’ve found that one or another of these techniques work for some sites:
(1) Disable Javascript. Seems to bypass or disable paywalls, nag screens, and advertisements on a lot of sites, including SDMB. Sometimes also disables pictures on the site that you might have wanted to see. The plain text of news articles is usually just fine.
(2) Disable styles. (This gives you a very messy looking, but quite readable page usually.)
(3) Does your browser have a “Reader” or similar button in the tool bar somewhere? Try clicking on that. If the site shows you just the first part of an article, this may show you the entire article. (Examle: Yahoo news does this.) Disabling styles sometimes works for this too.
Getting totally desperate? Here’s a really ugly trick that I’ve found works sometimes when none of the above do: View the HTML source code. It’s ugly, but I’ve sometimes been able to find what I was looking for there. Sometimes I’ve also found the direct links to on-line photographs that I could not otherwise see for some reason.
I only use pi-hole and there are sites that tell me to go away. So I do.
If it’s something I really want to know about I can Google the teaser/headline and find it on another site.
I don’t begrudge sites needing to make money to stay active and pay their people. I do begrudge them pushing out 10% content data and 90% ad data. I also don’t care for having another vulnerability to ad delivered malware.
Currently my pi-hole admin console is reporting that 32% of all DNS requests from my household are to advertising and other tracking services.
I have a subscription to WaPo. I wait until they finally offer me something like a year for $30 and grab it since I think their stuff is worth something but don’t feel like I’d get $100+ value from it.
Other sites that try to stop me from running an ad blocker, etc I just leave. As others noted, it’s pretty rare that anything is so special that someone else won’t be carrying the same general content.
If the lost reader is not contributing to their revenue stream, why would they care?
As to the OP, I generally just don’t read those sites. A select few I allow the ads (Sporcle, for example) because they’re very on the ball about tracking down badly-behaved ones and getting them out of the ad service rotation. And on occasion, when I really want to read a given article, I’ll try incognito mode.
A Prisoner’s Dilemma fits the following criteria: the worst loss is to be nice when the other guy is bad; the best win is to be bad when the other guy is nice; if both are good everybody wins, just not as much; if both are bad everybody loses, just not so bad.
In this case, the best outcome for everyone is we all cooperate: decent ads that don’t misbehave, and users who don’t block them.
But then there’s always the temptation on each side to defect: ad providers want to make their sweet $$$ selling awful ads for innocent viewers to endure; users want to read the content for free with no ads.
The result is ad blockers, ad blocker blockers, and plenty of bad ads out there.
Sad but true.
The minute a site hijacks my browser and sends me to the app store is the moment that site and the targeted app lose my respect. No way I’m going to let my shields down after that.
The aforementioned “pi hole” is a pretty useful device–mine is actually built-in functionality in my Eero devices, but the idea is the same. Everyone connected to my home network gets mid-level ad and malware blocking at the network level.
Because the lost reader(s) potentially would be adding to the revenue stream if they found some other way of monetizing their content and gives them an idea of what their readership could be if not for the pay/ad-wall.
Now that you mention it, this is very apt.
What often happens to me is that someone will post a link (here on the SDMB, or on Facebook, or wherever) that looks interesting, and when I click the link, a screen pops up demanding that I disable my ad-blocker and/or subscribe in order to read the page.
Depending on my level of interest (and the possible sketchiness of the website), I’ll either stop my ad-blocker from running on that page (which seems fair, provided the ads that show up aren’t dangerous or overly intrusive) or, if it seems like too much trouble to do that, I’ll just close the tab and not read the page.