Ads, tastefully. Many websites have too many in too many places, pretty much asking for the viewers to use an ad blocker.

Ads. I've been online since the age of Gopher. I've gone through every kind of ad or a pop-up you can throw at me. Even though I use an adblock, even without it I can subconsciously filter out ads so well that they won't bother me.

Ads. If done well, I may even see it. I am talking about the ad just being an embedded GIF with a href set on it so that clicking it goes to the advertiser's site. Simple privacy-respecting ads.

Example: https://lowendbox.com/
Look at the right and scroll down.

Neither. Give me an easy option to donate. Even better, make it possible to donate based on how many times I visit the website, then give me an overview at the end of the month and let me split my budget.

I honestly think services like Apple News plus would be worth subscribing to if they didn’t charge so much and didn’t have ads. Having a “newspass” service where you could just pay $5 to bypass paywalls across multiple sites would be worth the money. The problem is that providers are addicted to that sweet ad revenue, so even paying a subscription fee on most sites means you’re still seeing annoying ads.

The question is a bit loaded, since "prefer ads" means you see the content, whereas "prefer paywalls" means you don't.

A fairer framing would have been: "how do you prefer to pay for content?"

Because, contrary to many opinions here, there is a price to pay when you watch an ad. At the very least, you're paying with your sanity. And very possibly you're paying with your wallet too, later, when you buy some product or service you don't really need. If ads didn't work, there wouldn't be so many of them.

Next, in a world where content is funded by advertising, the people who control our tech have an infernal incentive to spy on us - so we all end up paying with our privacy.

Advertising is the lifeblood of consumer capitalism. It's what powers the pseudo-needs and pseudo-desires and status competition that drives all that material throughput of JUNK that is killing our planet. That price tag is gonna be pretty hefty.

Advertising is sheer poison. But paywalls are not the enemy. It is not immoral to pay for things that have value.

The question isn't really "ads or subs" these days, it's "your data or your dollar", and in this situation there is no good option (since your dollar is the perfect identifier for your data!).

It depends.

Ads for something I use rarely or am not quite sure about.

But I pay for Netflix, and I suppose that's a paywall.

What's super annoying is when a website has both, and they autoplay. Like most news sites, and if you pause Netflix, something else will start playing, with sound even. I want to pay for what I use... but dayum.

Depends on the site. Ads don't bother me because ad block. I support paywalls in the case of sign up for some services, like InsaneJournal. Though, I otherwise have no preference either way since I usually don't go places with paywalls and when I do, I usually find a way to bypass them.

I prefer ads because I can block them. 👍

Make your content good enough and be a good enough person so that people are willing to give you money voluntarily or for token rewards. Let those with the means subsidize those without.

Occasionally you see something and the comments are full of "let me throw money at you". Maybe at least partially try that as a goal rather than searching for infinite growth at the expense of anyone who isn't an executive.