Death by a thousand likes: How Facebook and Twitter are killing the open web

The answer is simple, but it isn’t easy. We need to stop pretending that content is free. Publications need to ask readers to pay for their content directly, and readers need to be willing to give up money, as opposed to their privacy and attention. This means that publications will have to abandon the rapid-growth business models driven by display ads, which have driven them to rely on Facebook for millions of pageviews a month.

There’s a lot to be gained in this scenario.

From Death by a thousand likes: How Facebook and Twitter are killing the open web – Quartz