There’s a better way. Instead of advertising, choose sponsorship. Choose tools like Patreon or even Kickstarter or other crowdsourcing to pay the bills. You don’t need fancy micropayment systems with paywalls, just put the word out that you’re looking for funding for the next installment. Your supporters will gather and you’ll have more funding than you need.

With millions of fans for even the most niche subject matter, anyone who can create quality content has access to the funds they need. With some base level funding to cover expenses and payroll you can then choose if you’d like to ‘advertise’ someone else’s service or not and do it on your own terms, maybe via a curated service such as The DECK, or maybe even an old fashioned Webring. Either way it becomes an added value, something mutualistic rather than a parasitic race to the bottom.

If you’re genuinely trying to create content for people this will work for you. If your goal is to meet some arbitrary sales metric for the quarter then you’re not in the content business you’re in the sales metric business, in which case you’ll just find some other way to exploit people.

Good luck content creators. We do love you. We just don’t love the ads you hang around with.