Microtransactions
Personally, I think the whole content system needs to move to micro-transactions.
If the point of your site is to have visitors read your content, and you are able to charge 0.1p, or 0.01p per article read, (the numbers no doubt will need to be finely tuned), then you can do away with adverts on a lot of sites.
The amount needs to be so low that the end user barely notices the cost, but high enough that the amount of users generates enough profit to make writing the article worthwhile.
I read maybe 10-30 articles a day on thereg, so at 0.1p that's 1-3p per day, 30-90p per month - just from me. Even at 0.01p, that 3-9p per month, just from one user.
It would support small sites quite well, and might result in a proliferation of such - and you rise and fall by the quality of your content (and, unfortunately, the quantity) - and I have no idea how this would affect the click bait - either people would be happy to keep paying for pointless articles, or they would get more discerning - not sure which way it would fall.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
