The example you gave is actually quite telling actually. There are already 25 million people who pay for Youtube Premium today. By any account that is a tremendously large number for a product that really does not offer any innovation or advantage over the ad-supported version. So people are ready.
And ad-free search products like the one Kagi is building are able to offer much more value and features than their ad-supported counterparts (which are inherinetly restricted by the nature of the business model and their customer being different than their user).
To be clear, I do not think that in two or even five years paid search will rule the world in a way that ad-supported search does now, but I think that enough people will realize that access to information that has only their best interest in mind will make them more productive and competitive in the future world, and make paying for search a much more viable option than today.
Have more thoughts about this in "The age of pagerank is over" blog post if you want to spare a moment. [1]
Never have I seen someone so succinctly articulate what the fuck went wrong with the Web.
Seeing social media, for example, go from "fun way to catch up with friends and family" to "pump ads, FUD and FOMO to our users as efficiently and accurately as possible, 24x7x365" has been an incredibly sad experience.
Seeing Google go from "I can type a question and find what I'm looking for" to "I have to append site:reddit.com to every query to avoid SEO-optimized puff pieces because Google can't be trusted" is disheartening.
I really hate having to be so overly aggressive in blocking ads and trackers on my devices because collecting this telemetry is the only way for many Internet companies to survive these days.
It doesn't help that talking about this with non-Internet-savvy people who were hoodwinked into the status quo makes me sound like a stereotypical doomsday cult subscriber.
I really hope the rest of the world agrees with the future you're describing here, Vlad.
Thank you so much for writing this. I'm proud to help support your mission in fixing the Internet.
And ad-free search products like the one Kagi is building are able to offer much more value and features than their ad-supported counterparts (which are inherinetly restricted by the nature of the business model and their customer being different than their user).
To be clear, I do not think that in two or even five years paid search will rule the world in a way that ad-supported search does now, but I think that enough people will realize that access to information that has only their best interest in mind will make them more productive and competitive in the future world, and make paying for search a much more viable option than today.
Have more thoughts about this in "The age of pagerank is over" blog post if you want to spare a moment. [1]
[1] https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over