On Google Contributor and how to fund the Web

Who pays for us to browse the web? Be wary of Google’s latest answer

Evgeny Morozov, The Guardian.comGoogle has quietly launched a new service, Google Contributor, and it’s based on an intriguing proposition: for a small monthly fee, you won’t see any ads on the websites of its partners. The fee, naturally, is split between Google and those sites – but only if they are actually visited. As Google puts it, this is all “an experiment in additional ways to fund the web”.More on Google Contributor
Do we really read/watch/consume advertising? The imagined community argument may be useful if one wished to challenge these views.