> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible?
Unfortunately I don't think this is possible. As soon as you bring in ads you open the door to the AdTech bullshit parade. The incentive goes from making good content to clickbait because that drives hits. Subscriptions can pay hosting bills but it's not going to let anyone get paid a meaningful amount of money for co tributing let alone write full time for a site.
I think the best content is going to continue to be entirely community run Wikis. Stuff like NIWA. They aren't going to replace journalism but then game journalism has been barely journalism for decades. Most has just been/is warmed over press releases or reporting on someone else's reporting.
> I think the best content is going to continue to be entirely community run Wikis.
The challenge here is that Fandom own a near monopoly on videogame wikis. Competing with them is exceptionally difficult.
It's something myself and a few other folks have done when we forked the Path of Exile wiki from Fandom to poewiki.net, we've been officially recognised by the game creators, have acquired hundreds of thousands of legitimate backlinks and yet Google still prefer to serve Fandom pages instead of ours.
Unfortunately I don't think this is possible. As soon as you bring in ads you open the door to the AdTech bullshit parade. The incentive goes from making good content to clickbait because that drives hits. Subscriptions can pay hosting bills but it's not going to let anyone get paid a meaningful amount of money for co tributing let alone write full time for a site.
I think the best content is going to continue to be entirely community run Wikis. Stuff like NIWA. They aren't going to replace journalism but then game journalism has been barely journalism for decades. Most has just been/is warmed over press releases or reporting on someone else's reporting.