I canceled all my subscriptions. I would happily pay 1 organization good money for subscriptions to the top 6-10 papers. I'm really surprised they haven't tried this yet.
Try Blendle[1]. Disclaimer I use their service and like it.
They let you fill your "wallet" with money which doesn't expire, and then they give you access to a bunch of different newspapers on a per-story basis for a variable amount of money per story based on the newspaper. So if you were spending $20/month on a NYT subscription you can put $20/Month into your Blendle account and read the stories of interest on the Times, WSJ, Post, Economist, etc and often have money left over. They have a generous "don't like it and we'll refund your money" which is quick and simple to use (I've used this probably half a dozen times when the article turned out to be just fluff). The articles have no additional advertising, render well on mobile or desktop or tablet. I dropped my NYT and WSJ subscriptions and read them on Blendle, that has cost me significantly less than the combined subscription rates.
Glad you shared. I found OP frustrating in that the core problem of digital publishing for profit doesn't seem to be the inability to price the content correctly but rather publishers' inability to deliver a product that customers would even pay for.
When a Google News search reveals multiple copies of near identical stories (let's say NYT, a wire service, and a local paper using a wire service), the value proposition to a user of paying for one newspaper is generally low.
Never made sense to me why the Netflix model (that Blendle seems closest to cracking right now) was never applied to accessing good journalism in one place.
Another option would be that news companies build an app and sell content through the app store.
I'm not in favor of this solution though, because I don't want one company to know what I read, and I don't like the idea of one company influencing what I read and I wouldn't want a near monopolist to put a tax on my news.
The TL;DR is that a tech company with enough information about its users could charge them "dynamically" based on what it thinks they would pay for news.
Should books/music/movies/tv cost more to those who can afford to pay more as well?
I recall reading a forum post some years ago where a few people had talked about the price of a product being different for the guy on the mac (>$) than the guy on windows.
Airlines are notorious for this. One-day return? Business traveller! Hit him! Searching flights on a Saturday afternoon? Private travel – let's discount. High-DPI display? Did someone say "discount"? I meant "this counts" – as a good reason to raise your prices.
I welcome alternative business models. The current trend is destroying quality news organizations and leaving consumers wanting.
Another option is the pay what you want model. This would be a lot easier to implement and would eliminate the possible backlash.
This morning I investigated the WSJ. After the intro period discount expires it's about $400 a year - a lot more than it's worth to me. Instead of getting $100 or even $200 from me they get nothing.
Pay by the article services like Blendle show promise, but they really need to work on the interface.
Pay-By-Article is, I believed, feared by publishers and journalists because they see how often the number of clicks and comments diverges from the perceived importance of stories.
Once pay-by-article is the driving force of everything, it will be incredibly hard for these organisations to resist the urge to cheat here and there. Send a writer and a photographer to Tajikistan for two months to report on the election? For the same price, you can get 120 "analysis" pieces on the effect of social media in the presidential election.
Instead, I'd be happy to see "casual" online subscriptions: I believe there's many people like me who read lots of sources at medium depth. There should be a range of the number of monthly article views (anywhere from 30 to 200 I would say) where the publication is important enough for a reader to commit to spending some money, but not important enough to warrant a full subscription.
Ideally, the publishers would band together and create an actual "netflix of news" with such packages for the top-50+ publications worldwide. There must be a huge untapped market of avid news consumers currently underserved by the market.
Why hasn't it happened? I can only guess that the publishers are weary of relinquishing the reader relationship to any middleman. I think we're approaching the point where they'll either have to do it themselves, or these behemoths (google, fb, Apple) will do it for them.
This idea is great, provided they get together and support one subscription spanning numerous publications. I'd like to read some of The Economist, Harper's, Vanity Fair, etc but am not interested enough to buy a full subscription.
If they don't do something like this, it might be the end of them. The internet is good in so many ways, but it also causes a lot of problems.
The WSJ, venerable and Wall street lauded (as in everyone reads it), got bought by Murdoch's empire.
And Murdoch largely manages to support his empire by selling attention grabbing material.
Its long since over.
Buying individual articles will be another nail in the coffin - the internet has provided competitive advantage to people focusing on hacking click and attention. The best way to do this is to play to the gallery and the human hind brain.
People act more frequently on their emotions than they act on their reason.
----
Worse - people are already building products and apps that use behavioral/skinnerian reward schemas to keep people engaged. So all the high minded discussion is redundant - the NYT cannot write an article which competes with attention heroin.
People do make the conscious decision to consume more wholesome experiences than heroin every day though, even if heroin was in front of them next to their food/drink/work day.
NYT has already carved out a profitable niche selling access to plain old long form journalism, it's one of the few success stories
Thats if people know they are imbibing heroin. I dont think half the people on HN itself are aware that most mobile games are designed and sold as differently themed skinner boxes.
What hope do normal people have to even be aware? And That's something ubiquitous and only recently being questioned and condemned by people in the industry.
Awareness of the pitfalls of simple apps is an issue. Forget the really insidious stuff being made by people with the intention to deceive and manipulate.
------
Holding up NYT as a survivor is telling.
The websites and newspapers that remain today are a small fraction of the Print Media industry which was thriving in 1985.
Holding these few existences as successes, ignores the huge survivorship bias baked into the example.
NYT was already a massive name, and worked very very hard to adapt to the new medium. It was one of the few magazines which attempted - very early on - to build interesting HTML/multi media articles. They tried making subscriptions work, a move widely derided at the time as a sure shot to failure. (if people forget, once upon a time subscriptions and pay walls were considered sure shots to failure on the web).
The powers and membership of the fourth estate has been vastly eroded, and the ability of people to get past a persons defences, or to build an echo chamber has been significantly enhanced.
The recent American elections were a low throughput event, but it showed how simply tweeting allows someone to significantly take advantage of (a particular) group think.
"A really good news service" is not what anyone wants in the information age. I want to read the best articles from the best news sources. If there were an Oracle that could find that for me, without extreme political bias, I would happily pay $1 a day.
The oracle is the publishing editor at the each news service. If you look on NYT.com for example, they carry their articles, Reuters, Associated Press, etc...
I am a longtime WSJ and Economist subscriber. My parents have been subscribers for decades (we used to also subscribe to SJ Mercury back in the day, and get the local town papers as well).
I read about 5 articles a day on the WSJ app and website, every day. It's one of the first and last things I do each day. But honestly the frequency of "big news must know" news items is pretty low, and there's a decent amount of news recycling or articles on a subject covered the day before but with minor updates.
In terms of value, I can totally understand if people balk at $400/yr.
Personally I think in terms of "news around the world affairs you can't miss", the Economist is much better than the Journal.
One could argue that we're nearly there already. There still are a few places where you can read semi-sane journalism, but for the most part the action is on the likes of Buzzfeed or Business Insider, which are an endless stream of clickbait, sensationalism, and poorly sourced rumor mongering, with the occasional fake news thrown in for good measure.
tl;dr -- Surveillance-based dynamic pricing for news articles., i.e. "making the world a worse place."
I don't know anyone who does not loathe booking a flight, and I shudder at the millions of dollars spent by the airlines tweaking ticket prices, by websites wading through that gaming, and by those sites advertising to get clicks. Maybe this is the future of employment[1], but it sounds grim to me.
Mark my words--This is the future of all Retail: Personalized pricing determined by big data's prediction of your ability and willingness to pay. And yes, it will be awful. "Log in to view the price of this item, sucka!"
I would expect that the presence of competition will make this impossible for most things. If two actors are in a space, and one has this tech, then all the above-median-price potential buyers will shop at the one without the tech. If the first sale doctrine were ever eroded, then maybe.
I think the incentives behind your assumptions wont match ground reality incentives to firms.
So They wont keep a guest price, they'll keep a bait price.
The rest of the time price discovery and visibility will be governed by their information of your financial state and habits (maybe just habits, if you have credit).
Presumably at some point you will need to pay, which, if they're smart, is tied to your real identity, so they'll hit you with your real non-Detroit price when you log in.
Until I read this comment section I didn't know Blendle existed. It physically disturbs me. Literally, as in I have this pit in my stomach.
If it takes off, it will kill journalism, at least on the Internet. I don't think I'm exaggerating much. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the like would suddenly have a tremendous pressure to write clickbaity articles at the expense of substantive ones. I presume they would be fact-checked clickbaity articles, but clickbait nonetheless.
This type of business model is all but certainly not fit for traditional news content. What do you think will get to the top, top 10 lists - or more informative but ultimately less widely exciting news stories?
On a side note, L2 did a short Winners & Losers segment about how news companies made huge mistakes in the online world. It's an interesting little watch:
Yes, and I would add that we probably don't want an "App store for news", which would mean a single gatekeeper, and we would eventually pay a tax on our news. Also, they could build a database of our reading behavior, which would be worse than the cross-site user-tracking cookies of today.
> If it takes off, it will kill journalism, at least on the Internet. I don't think I'm exaggerating much. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the like would suddenly have a tremendous pressure to write clickbaity articles
What makes you think that this isn't the case already? I work in this industry and I can tell you for a fact that none of those organizations are News organizations anymore. They are traffic brokers. Some of their authors still have integrity, but the organizations themselves don't care about quality. All they want is traffic. Pure and simple!
I've been using blendle for quite a while now. But I don't use it very often yet.
Mostly when people on twitter, or other social media, share articles which are behind paywalls, I check if it's available for reading on blendle. This way I can read a lot of stuff behind paywalls and even immediately get my money back if the article was bad.
I think they'd have pressure not to write clickbait articles.
At present, clickbait works because it makes money by driving ad impressions. Many readers don't even mind wasting time on such content, and those who do quickly move on. The downside to the publications churning out clickbait is minimal, because the readers have little investment in the product.
But once people are paying their own money to read articles (even a nominal amount), their attitude to clickbait will change. After they've been burned a couple of times by a particular outlet, they won't pay them for any more of their articles. But they will return to those outlets that provide value for money.
Presumably, most people will still stick to low quality but free sources, but I think there's a potentially substantial market for high quality content, if the price is right.
The big question is, will the amount people are willing to pay cover the costs? Real journalism can be expensive.
1) NYT, WSJ and Economist are one of the few orgs that can actually get away with a paywall. They might just sit behind a regular paywall even if pay-per-click were the norm.
2) Other news orgs are driven by ads - ergo their income is tied to clicks already. So they're already highly incentivized to produce click-bait.
3) If news orgs can actually make more money - they will produce less click-bait. They are 'for profit' but staffed almost entirely by people that want to do 'real news'. There are almost no serious editors who actually want to do 'click bait'. They do it because they are forced to by terrible economic conditions.
I think Google really doesn't want a closed system (like Amazon) for news. It is in their interest to keep the web as open as possible. Therefore, I'm hoping that Google can come up with a good open solution.
49 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadThey let you fill your "wallet" with money which doesn't expire, and then they give you access to a bunch of different newspapers on a per-story basis for a variable amount of money per story based on the newspaper. So if you were spending $20/month on a NYT subscription you can put $20/Month into your Blendle account and read the stories of interest on the Times, WSJ, Post, Economist, etc and often have money left over. They have a generous "don't like it and we'll refund your money" which is quick and simple to use (I've used this probably half a dozen times when the article turned out to be just fluff). The articles have no additional advertising, render well on mobile or desktop or tablet. I dropped my NYT and WSJ subscriptions and read them on Blendle, that has cost me significantly less than the combined subscription rates.
[1] https://blendle.com/
When a Google News search reveals multiple copies of near identical stories (let's say NYT, a wire service, and a local paper using a wire service), the value proposition to a user of paying for one newspaper is generally low.
Never made sense to me why the Netflix model (that Blendle seems closest to cracking right now) was never applied to accessing good journalism in one place.
I'm not in favor of this solution though, because I don't want one company to know what I read, and I don't like the idea of one company influencing what I read and I wouldn't want a near monopolist to put a tax on my news.
Should books/music/movies/tv cost more to those who can afford to pay more as well?
Doesn't Amazon do this in a way? I've seen prices for kindle books change depending on if I'm logged in or not, and not always in my favor.
https://steamdb.info/sub/54029/
So, it's not completely unheard of I suppose.
Another option is the pay what you want model. This would be a lot easier to implement and would eliminate the possible backlash.
This morning I investigated the WSJ. After the intro period discount expires it's about $400 a year - a lot more than it's worth to me. Instead of getting $100 or even $200 from me they get nothing.
Pay by the article services like Blendle show promise, but they really need to work on the interface.
Once pay-by-article is the driving force of everything, it will be incredibly hard for these organisations to resist the urge to cheat here and there. Send a writer and a photographer to Tajikistan for two months to report on the election? For the same price, you can get 120 "analysis" pieces on the effect of social media in the presidential election.
Instead, I'd be happy to see "casual" online subscriptions: I believe there's many people like me who read lots of sources at medium depth. There should be a range of the number of monthly article views (anywhere from 30 to 200 I would say) where the publication is important enough for a reader to commit to spending some money, but not important enough to warrant a full subscription.
Ideally, the publishers would band together and create an actual "netflix of news" with such packages for the top-50+ publications worldwide. There must be a huge untapped market of avid news consumers currently underserved by the market.
Why hasn't it happened? I can only guess that the publishers are weary of relinquishing the reader relationship to any middleman. I think we're approaching the point where they'll either have to do it themselves, or these behemoths (google, fb, Apple) will do it for them.
If they don't do something like this, it might be the end of them. The internet is good in so many ways, but it also causes a lot of problems.
The WSJ, venerable and Wall street lauded (as in everyone reads it), got bought by Murdoch's empire.
And Murdoch largely manages to support his empire by selling attention grabbing material.
Its long since over.
Buying individual articles will be another nail in the coffin - the internet has provided competitive advantage to people focusing on hacking click and attention. The best way to do this is to play to the gallery and the human hind brain.
People act more frequently on their emotions than they act on their reason.
----
Worse - people are already building products and apps that use behavioral/skinnerian reward schemas to keep people engaged. So all the high minded discussion is redundant - the NYT cannot write an article which competes with attention heroin.
NYT has already carved out a profitable niche selling access to plain old long form journalism, it's one of the few success stories
What hope do normal people have to even be aware? And That's something ubiquitous and only recently being questioned and condemned by people in the industry.
Awareness of the pitfalls of simple apps is an issue. Forget the really insidious stuff being made by people with the intention to deceive and manipulate.
------
Holding up NYT as a survivor is telling.
The websites and newspapers that remain today are a small fraction of the Print Media industry which was thriving in 1985.
Holding these few existences as successes, ignores the huge survivorship bias baked into the example.
NYT was already a massive name, and worked very very hard to adapt to the new medium. It was one of the few magazines which attempted - very early on - to build interesting HTML/multi media articles. They tried making subscriptions work, a move widely derided at the time as a sure shot to failure. (if people forget, once upon a time subscriptions and pay walls were considered sure shots to failure on the web).
The powers and membership of the fourth estate has been vastly eroded, and the ability of people to get past a persons defences, or to build an echo chamber has been significantly enhanced.
The recent American elections were a low throughput event, but it showed how simply tweeting allows someone to significantly take advantage of (a particular) group think.
Most news orgs are ad-driven, ergo, their revenue essentially is 'pay per click' already.
Wired had a pretty good article last week about the NYT's strategy that you might find interesting:
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/new-york-times-digital-journal...
I read about 5 articles a day on the WSJ app and website, every day. It's one of the first and last things I do each day. But honestly the frequency of "big news must know" news items is pretty low, and there's a decent amount of news recycling or articles on a subject covered the day before but with minor updates.
In terms of value, I can totally understand if people balk at $400/yr.
Personally I think in terms of "news around the world affairs you can't miss", the Economist is much better than the Journal.
I don't know anyone who does not loathe booking a flight, and I shudder at the millions of dollars spent by the airlines tweaking ticket prices, by websites wading through that gaming, and by those sites advertising to get clicks. Maybe this is the future of employment[1], but it sounds grim to me.
[1] http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote/john_maynard_keynes_quot...
Those who want to avoid the friction of logging in can pay a little extra (or maybe less sometimes) for the right to do so.
I think the incentives behind your assumptions wont match ground reality incentives to firms.
So They wont keep a guest price, they'll keep a bait price.
The rest of the time price discovery and visibility will be governed by their information of your financial state and habits (maybe just habits, if you have credit).
I made screenshots as proof. Reminds me now to do some more research and blog about it.
If it takes off, it will kill journalism, at least on the Internet. I don't think I'm exaggerating much. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the like would suddenly have a tremendous pressure to write clickbaity articles at the expense of substantive ones. I presume they would be fact-checked clickbaity articles, but clickbait nonetheless.
This type of business model is all but certainly not fit for traditional news content. What do you think will get to the top, top 10 lists - or more informative but ultimately less widely exciting news stories?
On a side note, L2 did a short Winners & Losers segment about how news companies made huge mistakes in the online world. It's an interesting little watch:
https://youtu.be/YbolmT6s5Xc
What makes you think that this isn't the case already? I work in this industry and I can tell you for a fact that none of those organizations are News organizations anymore. They are traffic brokers. Some of their authors still have integrity, but the organizations themselves don't care about quality. All they want is traffic. Pure and simple!
Mostly when people on twitter, or other social media, share articles which are behind paywalls, I check if it's available for reading on blendle. This way I can read a lot of stuff behind paywalls and even immediately get my money back if the article was bad.
Au contraire : if you don't like the article, Blendle has a very fast and easy way to reclaim your money.
So this will actually encourage better journalism.
At present, clickbait works because it makes money by driving ad impressions. Many readers don't even mind wasting time on such content, and those who do quickly move on. The downside to the publications churning out clickbait is minimal, because the readers have little investment in the product.
But once people are paying their own money to read articles (even a nominal amount), their attitude to clickbait will change. After they've been burned a couple of times by a particular outlet, they won't pay them for any more of their articles. But they will return to those outlets that provide value for money.
Presumably, most people will still stick to low quality but free sources, but I think there's a potentially substantial market for high quality content, if the price is right.
The big question is, will the amount people are willing to pay cover the costs? Real journalism can be expensive.
1) NYT, WSJ and Economist are one of the few orgs that can actually get away with a paywall. They might just sit behind a regular paywall even if pay-per-click were the norm.
2) Other news orgs are driven by ads - ergo their income is tied to clicks already. So they're already highly incentivized to produce click-bait.
3) If news orgs can actually make more money - they will produce less click-bait. They are 'for profit' but staffed almost entirely by people that want to do 'real news'. There are almost no serious editors who actually want to do 'click bait'. They do it because they are forced to by terrible economic conditions.