> What I’m trying to figure out, is whether there’s a format that people would be willing to pay for to get depth in those answers?
Individual people have questions like that every so often and rarely they _might_ be willing to pay for an answer - but who are they going to trust enough to pay up-front for an answer to a question, sight unseen? And how are you going to get in front of them at the right moment?
Never, I want them to die.
I don't think I would pay. Google is a nice example of a business that gets corrupted along the way, from "don't be evil" to giving ads instead of search results.
To be entirely fair, there's been something of an arms race between Google and the SEO bottom feeders (I'd use stronger language, but you know, civility). SEO pressure has caused at least some of the changes in Google (to be clear, advertising money is the biggest corruptor), and cheaply-written or auto-generated SEO web sites are part of the "google results are bad" problem.
I think that even if there was a subscription for "good search results" the search company would fairly quickly try to "monetize" that even further by inserting ads, and then the corruption would take over quickly. We saw this in Google search, and Youtube and now we're seeing it in streaming services. The big initial draw to Hulu subscriptions was "no ads", now they're infested with advertising.
Advertising corrupts.