I HATE clicking on a Google link and discovering that it's paywalled.
I don't care about the newspapers "survival" problem, I personally do not derive any benefits from them. I just want my Google/DDG results clean and actually be able to read them. If a link is paywalled, it should be ranked way lower. Google cache trick doesn't work all the time.
They need to make the price reasonable, and $9.99 month for a single paper is not reasonable IMO.
For $9.99 I month I can access to a library of thousands of hours of videos (netflix, prime, discovery+, etc) , thousands of hours of music (spofity, prime music, etc) , or thousands of hours of PC Games (Xbox Game Pass)
Sorry but the USA Today is not as valuable as these services... maybe $2.99 but more likely something like $9.99 a YEAR at most $1.99 a mo would be a price point I would consider.
In many ways yes. News competes for the same time and budget as entertainment. These are both activities that people spend their disposable time / income on. They are not Food, Shelter, etc. Nor will someone refuse to go to their kids ball game because they need to read the USA Today..
No news like a movie or a tv show is something to pass the time when you have nothing else to do.
Also keep in mind Trust in news is at a all time low, in part because the news themselves treat it as entertainment by sensationalizing everything, "if if bleeds it leads" and other High Drama "news"
> For $9.99 I month I cant access to a library of thousands of hours of videos (netflix, prime, discovery+, etc) , thousands of hours of music (spofity, prime music, etc) , or thousands of hours of PC Games (Xbox Game Pass)
Do you think it'd be worth it if you had archival access to the paper? It'd be interesting to be able to read NYT from its inception in 1851, for example. I know there are some papers that have done digital archiving, but I wonder if a research pass would be a way to generate revenue, too...
hence the research pass. I could actually see that as valuable for a subset of people if it were searchable. I find the historical value of news generally higher than the current value but of course that's not why people read the paper. I might be inclined to subscribe to the times if I could read contemporaneous perspectives of historical periods I'm interested in. as it is, I sometimes feel like Chesterton, who snarkily opined he would be impressed if the news could get the past right, to say nothing of their guesses about the future.
even so I think there's a need for deeply reported careful work...and that takes money. archives might work. I also like the git diff idea in a sibling comment.
It might be interesting to read the newspapers for september 10 2001 or read the stories for the days before a big event, but other than that? It has very little value.
I built a search engine based on Bing's API. One of the core features is ranking paywalled sites lower, making their text grey (eg Hacker news), and putting a moneybag char in the link.
My reasoning is the same as yours - there's nothing wrong with Paywalls, but they're no good in search results, since chances are, a given user doesn't have an account with an arbitrary paywalled site that shows up in search.
>I personally do not derive any benefits from them
>I want to be able to read them
Uh? Being able to read is deriving a benefit. I don't disagree that the current situation is a complete mess, and that subs everywhere is ridiculous. It's perfectly possible to imagine technical/business solutions that would match reasonable budget/month for news to what people read and valued. And it's also easy to see real collective action problems, incentive issues and so on that might make that impossible. All tied together with advertising, privacy, public education issues and so on as well.
But claiming you derive no benefit from newspapers at all would be a stretch even if you didn't want to read them, but claiming you don't while one sentence later saying you do want to read them? That doesn't seem quite reasonable.
>I personally do not derive any benefits from them
Any article is plastered all over the internet in hundreds of websites. Same topic, different headline.
>I want to be able to read them
I want to be able to read ANY of those "free non-paywalled" articles instead of the one that's paywalled. I have no loyalty to NYT, USA Today or The Blaze.
I will prefer reading the same news from a website that does not paywall content. Websites pay-walling content is not the issue here. The issue is Google ranking paywalled sites higher even though the same content is available elsewhere for free. Those non pay-walled websites must also survive.
> issue is Google ranking paywalled sites higher even though the same content is available elsewhere for free
It's almost like it's not the same content. Something breaking on the Times and then being summarized elsewhere are not interchangeable, which is why Google ranks its results as it does.
I agree that if something breaks on the Times, it should be ranked higher. But 99% of the time, the news didn't break on Times or some other paywalled site. Still, Google will rank it higher - and I have to waste my time : opening it, closing it because its paywalled, open the next result and hope that it's not paywalled.
One issue is that the newspapers believe that they are providing a service by allowing search engines to link to their page.
From the perspective of the search engine (and us readers), it feels like a bait-and-switch to present the full article to a crawler robot in exchange for a better search ranking, only to hide it and demand payment from a human.
But over in Australia, old media organizations have successfully lobbied for a "link tax" which allows them to demand payment from search providers who link to them. We've still got a long way to go before we reach a consensus on the independence of search platforms and the idea that human viewers should be served the same content as web spiders.
Journalism had to adapt to the Internet. We talk about paywalls for online content in our whitepaper about how we plan to decentralize the Web economy and help monetize journalism and open source through micropayments instead: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Paywalls
The original Xanadu project had the concept of micropayments, but until now the only way to really achieve it was using lotteries (I think it was Ron Rivest in the 90s who suggested this?)
The question is, how to monetize open source or journalism - online content that can be easily copied. Any sort of effective payment system requires a network effect. People could forj the system but they’d have to start from scratch, as no one would accept their payments.
Imagine if every app and plugin on wordpress could have its own currency to earn money as people use it on various sites, and still continue to be open source. Imagine if social networks like Facebook were the ones paying for their users to read it, settling balances once in a while. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp fought for something like this in Australia and won.
Would welcome feedback and thoughts. Why the massive amount of silent downvotes?
I didn’t downvote, but I’m guessing others are doing so because this looks like self-promotion. You can mention a personal project on HN, but it’s best to do so only at the end of an otherwise interesting comment, so it’s clear you’re not just shilling.
Thanks for that link! Very useful substantive analysis
How does it apply in our case, by the way? In our case we take the payment decisions out of the hands of users and into the hands of community administrators.
Media payment systems work best with a clear transactional boundary and gatekeeper. Bundling models are vastly more successful than unbundling ones.
In a tax-supported scheme, the tax collector serves that role. In a ticketbox, it's the literal gate or door itself. For advertising-supported media, it's the publisher or broadcaster, gatekeeping in a three-way branch between advertisers, creators/talent, and audience (similarly, cable providers). In donor-based broadcasting, the broadcaster intermediates between individual donors and content producers.
As an alternative to a governmental progressive-tax-based system, a natural gateway exists at the ISP level, for which a sufficiently effective gating, revenue-collection, and content-payment system might work. I'd outlined that about three months ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26893033
There are access-based royalty systems such as ASCAP / Harry Fox, though my sense is that for more substantial text-based content (similarly: data-backed reporting, deep analysis, and probably a fair bit of serial media of the video or podcast variety), linking payment to publishers or studios, who can support a staff of creators (writers, artists, actors, directors, support personnel) would be preferred to the music/broadcast model.
Your problem is you're trying to dam a flat plain. You need to find a suitable dam site, and it's probably the ISPs. On the other hand, they're going to need systems for that service: content negotiation, payment collection, royalties or subscription payments, etc.
The distinction my model has from a traditional micropayments or subscription model is that the provision level is universal. A service subscriber pays in a flat fee, they get an all-you-can-eat plan. The payment differentiation is between the aggregator and the creating studio (somewhat similar to current cable subscriptions).
Note that total OECD content spend is roughly $100/capita. Advertising runs many times that, at ~%$600 billion for the 1 billion inhabitants of the OECD, about $600/capita. "Free online content" costs the average household of 4 over $2,400 a year.
It seems like more right-leaning sites have it easier to remain funded by advertisements while the more left-leaning sites, which I believe includes USA Today, more often than not have to go for subscriptions. And since most people are cheapskates and not willing to pay for news, left-wing voices are heard by fewer and fewer.
One of the ironies in banning right wing voices from popular platforms is that you teach their audiences that they have to more proactive in supporting their content.
Compared to a dozen or so of the most liberal countries in the world, all of which are located in Europe - fair enough.
Compared to the world as a whole today, including Asia and Africa? Almost everything in America is left wing, including the republican party and USA today.
Compared to virtually any government anywhere prior to 1800? Again, almost everything in America is left wing, including the republican party and USA today.
> Compared to the world as a whole today, including Asia and Africa? Almost everything in America is left wing, including the republican party and USA today.
That is just not true. For example, Rwanda, Burkina Faso, Iran, and Sri Lanka has universal health care - the United States does not.
You believe that a theocracy without women's rights, gay rights, free speech, or secularism is more left wing than the United States because it has universal healthcare, and that the Democratic party is conservative compared to Ayatollah Khamenei?
I mean, if you think a single issue (healthcare) sufficies for your point, then a single issue suffices for my point as well. So free speech. The United States had the most liberal (left wing) laws on free speech in the world.
But I don't think it's about one issue - it's about all of them, taken as a whole. And I think you know that and I don't think you're arguing in good faith by acting otherwise. So I'm not going to reply anymore.
So no source for the claim "Almost everything in America is left wing, including the republican party and USA today". Gotcha. I'm not going to continue this conversation since you are spreading unsubstantiated garbage.
As I said, both American parties (and USA today) are left wing compared to the rest of the world in their views on freedom of speech.
I'm not sure why you are asking for a source.. you didn't provide one for your perspective, and the facts are not really in dispute here, only the analysis.
Actually, the US free speech laws are far more libertarian, ie. classical liberalism, not the "left-wing" liberalism of today. So really, you just proved the US is in fact right-wing.
But I think the answer then is simply not paying for it, and not consuming it. Which is the interesting part to me. It's low quality, but people still want to read it for free.
To be fair they usually invest some time, energy and/or money into making sure that you want to read it. I don't want to pay for most news, but often I'm baited by an appealing headline. I'm not above being baited and fear of missing out, and they are exploiting this.
If I'm preparing food in my house and people want a part of it, it would be weird to me. But if after preparing my food I use a complex system of fans to blow a delicious odor over my neighbours while having a beautiful table set up visible through my windows, and do this every single day, I can understand that they can't stay indifferent to the situation.
And paid-up services still include ads. (Which have higher advertiser value simply because the audience is known and sufficiently affluent to pay for content.)
I think more people might part with their cash if they could fund the topics/proposals they were interested in. Something more like Gofundme and Twitch where people feel like they're directly paying for something to happen.
It’s not “with no ads,” really. It’s become that because ads are so intrusive now. Static ads, stitched into the page at the edge, with zero tracking would be acceptable by many. Those kind of ads have been around in print newspapers for decades. Ad blocking is in response to poor user experience in the same way that piracy was in response to the poor experience of physically buying a CD that had just one track you wanted.
Maybe where I personally land is that someone who produces content has the right to sell it however they like. The deal we can all make is that you can pay the price for the product and consumer it, or not.
In the digital age, there are a lot of people who decide that we get to price the content however we want. We decide that because they are trying to use terrible ads to make money, that we can just go around that and take their content for free.
That doesn't fly real well with physical products (This loaf of bread is priced at $1, but I only want to pay $0.50, so I'll just give them $0.50 and take it), but seems to be accepted with products that have infinite free reproducibility.
The analogy is more like they are out on the public road giving away free loaves of bread along with ad flyers. I take the bread and refuse the flyer.
They can put themselves behind a fence, without letting anybody in who doesn't take their flyer. That's fine, I'll just skip their bread. They can charge for their bread. That's fine, I'll just skip their bread. No hard feelings on my end, it's all fair. But what they cannot reasonably do is give away free bread and then complain that I won't take their ad flyers.
Not if there's another stall handing out slightly different bread but without the flyer. There's a lot of content available for free, depending on your goal there's always something descent to read.
I think the physical limitations of paper ended up causing a finite supply of ad space, allowing price of ads to settle. On the internet, there's basically infinite ad space. You can just make your readers keep scrolling, or chop the article into an arbitrary number of pages. With so much potential ad space, someone will budge a little and allow a few more ads to get a bit more revenue, and after everyone does that it snowballs into what we have today.
I have similar feelings about kanban boards and other team-task-trackers. Physical forms are better, because it gets very hard to deal with them when they're too full or overflowing.
I suspect a lot of it comes from the inversion of the ad marketplace.
In the pre-internet era, the media property was the centre of the ad universe. You'd call up your local paper to put in an ad, and they'd have control over presentation and pricing, and keep all the revenue. Standards were upheld, and the papers did well.
Now, they're farming out boxes on heir page to middlemen networks. They have little or no control over what ends up there, and they're getting a fraction of the revenue. What's worse, their content, being wide in scope and often full of brand-unfriendly news, isn't hugely friendly to algorithmic targeting paths. The only way to try to stay above water is to run more and more aggressively obnoxious ads.
I agree, the "with no ads" really paints consumers as only being cheap and ignorant. It is almost victim blaming.
"Intrusive" doesn't being to describe the modern ad tracking infrastructure, data collection (and attendant leak vulnerabilities), and exploitation.
The pop up ad, autoplay video/audio, and epilepsy-triggering flash ads are just the beginning of the predatory nature of this that has been deeply entrenched as the biggest companies that effectively make up the modern consumer web rely on this for their massive revenues.
It is orwellian in every sense of the word, not just dangerous for individuals in a data privacy and identity theft perspective, and dangerous at the civilization/society level in that it is a direct threat to a free, liberal, and democratic world.
Advertising was already a dangerous psychological influence back in the era of print ads. Now that we are essentially entering the first cybernetic era with our online personas and screen time, it is directly manipulating personality, mental stability, opinion, and belief.
I'm saying accusing consumers of complaining about being "shown" ads as cheap and unreasonable is blaming the victim.
It's not "showing" an ad. It's a popup ad, with a tracking cookie, with a stored identity and list of urls tracked over years, tied and shared to a dozen databases, probably shared with governments (willingly or otherwise).
I get a huge percentage of people on HN work for FAANG and are a part of this meat grinder, so go ahead and downvote. But blaming a consumer for not wanting to be tracked and characterizing it as them being cheap is shifting blame to the consumer. Which is victim blaming.
Man, that feels like a big stunt for a good-but-not-great show.
It's the kind of thing they only get to pull once, and I'd expect them to save that for something huge that would draw an enormous audience to subscribe (something on the level of Stranger Things or Game of Thrones).
Sweet Tooth was nice, but clearly a bit slapped together. They keep the CGI to a minimum, but what's there is pretty cheaply done. The practical effects are nice, but simple in a way that feels like it was done quickly. It's neat that the show was in production before COVID, though I'd be curious to know how much of it was prescient.
The acting is great and the writing pretty good. But it's not going to be a breakout hit. So I'm a bit surprised they'd promote it so hard to attract and audience that will surely say, "Hey, that was OK. Glad I'm already subscribed. But I'm not rushing out to tell my friends about it."
I agree. I use an ad-blocker for privacy and because many news sites are almost unreadable without them now. Instead of addressing the core issues with online advertising the industry just doubled down and made ads more intrusive and distracting to the point it's literally driving away consumers. If people can't read the content on your site without having to jump through hoops or feel the privacy trade-off isn't worth it, they're just not going to use your site anymore.
And that is exactly what should happen. But I don't see people stopping going to these sites. They simply find ways around whatever monetization the paper is trying (archive, ad block, etc...).
I want to support a lot of different journalists and publishers but giving 100 journalists $0.5/month each on patreon is impractical and cumbersome. Just like subscribing to a dozen high quality publications would run more per month than my car payment.
To me it's a similar dynamic to the treatment of open source developers. Journalism and open source software are (now) crucial products for the operation of a functioning society but the biggest consumers have no desire to pay for it.
I'm willing to pay but I'm not so happy about funding editorial and brand value over and above their fair share compared with reporting. I resent getting locked into a bundle that I have little control about and that despite funding it I will be sold as a product to advertisers (or messages brought to you by a strong but silent editorial hand).
Exactly! Not only ad supported sites, but advertisers themselves should be speaking out and fighting back against the abusive advertisers that created a need for adblockers in the first place, too! They did massive harm to their own industry. Instead of helping to fix the problem and calling out those who caused it, the war is turned against the very consumers they're trying to reach with their advertising.
I'd just be happy if Google didn't index paid content, and if sites like HN wouldn't link to it. Posting links to paid sites is, to me, silly, because chances are that link is effectively dead to the person that follows it.
The odds of a random reader (whether from Google SERPS or HN or similar) having a subscription are very low. I don't personally know anyone that has a subscription to the top 10 paid sites, and there's quite a few more than 10.
Just because you don’t subscribe to the time doesn’t mean other people don’t and therefore shouldn’t get to talk about some of their incredible investigations, or discuss a crazy business story in the journal. You and your friends are not the only consumers in the world.
I suppose that works if you and all your friends have an identical list of subscriptions.
It only works on HN because we use things like archive.is or browser extensions to go around it. If it weren't possible to work around it, it would die off pretty quickly as a discussion.
> It only works on HN because we use things like archive.is or browser extensions to go around it. If it weren't possible to work around it, it would die off pretty quickly as a discussion.
Some of the most interesting and informative things I've read on HN were comments on articles I did not read. I almost always read the comments before reading the article, and a significant fraction of the time I don't even try to read the article after seeing the comments.
I think there is a huge opportunity for innovation in search functionality that gives users control over the types of content they see. Imagine being able to toggle on and off paid sites, news results, or other types of results. It could be like Google Scholar or Google patents but for other interests: blogs, companies, adult content, ect
I imagine Google will eventually have to go there. If more publications move to paywalls, and the search results are almost all paywalled, surely Google would have to do something?
I would pay for a search engine that never showed me results from a set of domains that I could select. There are so many mainstream media sites that I would never read but they bury the interesting content.
I.e. "never show me NYT, Amazon, Pinterest, or any site that is a scrape of StackOverflow or Wikipedia"
Perhaps cynically, I wonder if search engine incentives have moved from helping users find the what they want as fast as possible while serving adds along the way to maximizing the number of modified searches to serve more adds
When I'm searching on Google it is because I am looking for information on some topic. Sometimes it is just idle curiosity, but sometimes it is because I have some actual need for the information to solve some real problem where the information will save me time or money.
I don't see how it would help me if Google failed to show me information relevant to my problem just because it is paid information.
Yes, well, what exists is a lot of trash for free and a few publications that charge way more than the value they actually offer and in some cases partake in the sleaziest tactics to keep you paying once you signed up.
If Reason can send out a physical magazine for $20/yr some of these other news outlets can figure out how to trim some fat and offer a competitive rate.
Most people say they want this, but they really just want headlines, and occasional in depth reporting on some long tail interest of theirs. Social media / message boards serve this and have taken over for a reason.
I mean people can wish for anything. I can wish for a billion dollars.
I don't hear anybody actually expecting free news with no ads. Everyone knows journalists need to be paid a salary. So that feels like a strawman to me.
But the idea that content isn't worth paying for is more that it's not worth paying for any single news source. I see links to news articles I read from 20+ sources a day. If somebody builds a Spotify for news where you pay $10/mo. and can access 99.9% of news articles including NYT, WaPo, etc., I think a ton of people (most, even?) would have no problem paying for it at all. But I sure as hell can't pay $10/mo. across 20 different sites, and that still covers less than half the sources people regularly link to.
I don’t think news sites can survive on the tiny slice of revenue. Musicians make most of their money on live events, so while the content creator is taking a hit compared to more lucrative CD sales, they are still using Spotify as marketing for the real product.
Journalism doesn’t have the same revenue stream to fall back on.
Newspapers in the US collectively had $19.9B yearly revenue in 2020 [1]. ($8.8B advertising + $11.1B circulation.)
With a population of 331M, that's $5.01 per person per month, or half the population paying $10/mo.
Now obviously you're not going to get half the people in the country to pay, but if you call it $20/mo/household, and compare it to the average $100-150/mo/household people pay for cable TV, I'd news absolutely could survive on numbers like this. It's not "tiny" at all -- it's ballpark.
I suspect “with no tracking” is more important than “with no ads” for most people.
People happily tolerated ads in print media for at least a century. The pivot from display ads to surveillance capitalism is what I hear most (non-tech) people complain about.
Also, per-user targeted ads undermine the value of premium ad real estate, letting middlemen (like Google) eat the content producers’ lunch, all while providing minimal value to web sites and consumers.
(Yes, they subsidize their “free” services with the revenue they extracted from the publishing industry, but that’s just predatory pricing, with the goal of precluding consumer-friendly computing stacks.)
I think even the tracking is not an issue for most people. It's just the intrusive nature of the ads. If I'm reading a news story I do not want to have to dismiss a popup/overlay every 30 seconds, have a video suddenly start playing, have a lot of blinking, flashing, and movement in my peripheral vision, have my back button hijacked to show me ads when I try to leave the site, etc. If there were static ads in the margins and a clean readable column of content in the center and no other foolishness I would tolerate that.
> Lots of people say the content isn't worth paying for, but see enough value to want to consume it.
There’s nothing fascinating about that. I’d love to drive a very expensive car too, but I don’t want to (can’t!) pay for it. This is basically just the law of demand.
Why not? That's close to how things were 20 years ago. When you searched any topic, there would usually be a quality hit within the first page of results of someone with vast technical experience writing up their knowledge as a hobby, as plain text or basic HTML. You needed the skill to discern whether the person knew what the hell they were talking about and what was their own bias, but after that you had access to a pretty great stream of information.
The influx of money-incentivized noise swamped that out, and now we're left with a continuum from aggregator sites (eg stackoverflow, forums, etc) to just straight up webspam. I'm not saying there is an easy way to get back to where we were, but there is a standard to compare to where all of those qualities existed together.
In the present, why would I believe that a news site which demands payment would be any higher quality than the ones who do not? The basic business dynamic is to market to gain a sale, and then deliver the minimal cost product that doesn't violate the expectations.
Ultimately it goes back to the fragmenting of authority. You used to be able to trust the NYT or whatever because it was all you knew, everyone else trusted them, and therefore there was little reason to break that lock step, even when they did end up misleading you. But with the modern plethora of voices, there are more opinions to choose from and we can easily see when "authorities" ended up misleading us. If you want quality news sources, this lack of authoritativeness/trustworthiness is the genie you need to put back in the bottle, not simply funding.
Information is a public good, in the economic sense that it's nonrivalrous, nonexcludable, and has low marginal (not fixed) costs of production.
In practice, every long-term viable media support model has attached a public good model for distribution to some rents-generating activity. Those inlcude patronage, church tithes (or other contributeions), political organisations, member/donor contributions, and of course advertising.
Or taxes.
The problem with each funding mechanism is that it is at the least distortionary to the interests of the funder or that funder's controlling body. In the case of advertising, the issues are well known, with a remarkably insightful account coming from the dawn of the modern mass-media and mass-advertising age, Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909), a short, highly readable, insightful, and information-packed quick read (it's based on an address given at UC Berkely by the author, himself a magazine publisher). Online at the Internet Archive:
Advertising's distortions are its drive to sensationalism (which increases the audience) and an antipathy for publishing anything which might offend the paymasters --- advertisers themselves. Holt quotes John Swinton (anonymously):
There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
Philanthropic support leads to donor-influence along largely similar lines (the Tiny Sparks podcast frequently addresses such distortions in the non-profit world: https://nonprofitquarterly.org/podcasts/)
Other options are that propagandists run media services for their own benefit or interest (RT, Sputnik, Newscorp, OANN, Sinclair), or that "news" simply panders to the minimum viable user, at the lowest possible cost, choking out all but a tiny minority of high-quality services, themselves only affordable to a few.
The free market utterly fails information goods, due to the mechanics of the market itself.
Exactly. Seems most of these big media conglomerates are leaning left. And a minority right. And then we look to what as the zero-influence news source? Not sure it can even be a corporation or organization because that’s inherently controlled by some person or persons who have left or right bias. If only there were social news networks…. Oh wait. ;)
“Left” and “right” is horribly reductive. I don’t know a single person who agrees with everything thrown into those simplistic buckets.
Take even the Supreme Court. Multiple “right” judges voted to uphold the ACA and abortion restrictions; things that would certainly be top on the list of “left vs. right”.
In principle I agree with this but you have to have a certain baseline level of privilege yo even get the choice of choosing D/R in the US. If you’re a minority or marginalized group [1] you’re basically stuck huddling around the Democrats regardless of how you think of their broader views. I’m a super liberal person so it works out for me accidentally but I have libertarian friends who would for sure vote Republican if it wasn’t for baseline existence issues like BLM or gay marriage.
Like all actual policy discussions happen within parties because of this. It’s easier to get the Democrats to be a little more conservative than get Republicans to support trans healthcare.
[1] in the colloquial usage don’t @ me with X is 49% of the population
I agree with you but I wouldn’t have used the supreme court as an example. The justices are supposed to decide whether a law is constitutional, not whether they agree with it—at least in theory, and they try to keep up some semblance of appearances.
A lot of the ACA arguments the court heard were incredibly stupid. And they still have struck down parts of the law.
What are you talking about? Right wing media space is large and powerful. Fox alone is massive anf then you have huge amount of talk radio, podcasts, journals and so on.
Sure, but I would like journalism that at least tries.
On All Things Considered on NPR a couple of weeks ago one of the hosts was interviewing someone about perceived media bias, and she seemed flabbergasted that people thought they had a bias. It seems to me they (and other organizations) might be in such a bubble they don't even realize it anymore.
It's part of their brand, I have so many hardcore liberal friends "npr is not biased". They also rarely entertain counter arguments ever, and they take a pc twist to everything.
Few years ago they were pushing that banks were biased against black people (directly and intentional) because they on average had higher interest rates. Completely ignoring the broader societal segregation that causes minority concentration in certain neighborhoods and those neighborhoods on average at the whole end up being lower income higher risk. Obviously there are many problems with the modern "segregated" neighborhoods and why the exist at all but the banks were just using their risk models. They want your money regardless of skin color..
Not that the right is any better, although they don't presume to know as often, I think the biggest issue I have with the left is the lack of internal accountability and productive discourse. I remember 2010-2015, I had many liberal friends that wouldn't here an argument unless it came from a "well respected" academic study. As if there aren't problems with the paper review process or that any ideas outside of high Academia are worthwhile. But I digress...
This is exactly the issue. I don't trust any of these organizations alone with my information diet. I can't afford to subscribe to them all, but I don't want to favor one over the other. I've opted out and used page archives, which are better because I don't have to worry as much about unlisted shadow edits to content post-publication.
I think at this point what would work better is explicitly biased journalism but with multiple samples of the same story, in the same context, on the same page even.
What doesn't work for me is this pretend "unbiased" highly biased lets turn journalism into a partisan infotainment team sport form of journalism.
I believe this is a direct by product of "rage news", where a newspaper used headlines to illicit an anger response in order to get more views / clicks
No one wants to pay a business that angers them all the time, if walmart pissed every customer off in every visit they would go bankrupt
Rage Bait has been a mainstay in "journalism" of late in part to the Ad revenue nature of the business, however in doing so they pissed off most of the customers that they now want to pay for their product.
Also, if there were an easy way to pay for just the article, say, 10¢, most people won't mind. But wherever it exists, it's not easy, and generally the big players are not interested in implementing it, even if it were technically trivial (it's not), because they prefer a smaller but captive audience which pays more (and watches ads).
IMO the problem is really committing to a single news source.
I'd happily pay for news. I just don't want to pay to, say, the NYT just to read a couple of pieces a week. (Ignoring the NYT shady unsubscribe practices)
The solution seems to be either micropayments or some form of paid news aggregation.
I pay for a Coil[1] subscription which solves micropayments, unfortunately very few sites have implemented it (and no major news sites AFAIK).
I signed up for a student-priced NYT subscription a while back and realized I didn't really use it. I trudged through their cancellation information and got on their chat. The representative threw everything at me why I shouldn't cancel and they offered me a discounted rate of exactly what I was paying currently. So silly.
They used to do that for US subscribers too, but California passed a law in 2018 requiring any subscription that is made online to also be cancellable online, so NYT added an online cancellation flow for US subscribers: https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/thanks-to-california-a-new...
I'm not so sure that golden age ever really existed. It was the height of the mass media, and because of this objectivity and the consensus were interchangeable, and no one was held much to account for their inability to comport with reality.
The internet gave the layman all the tools they needed to do their own followup on what they were told, and to access new perspectives about it. That's when cracks started appearing.
I read about 2 articles per month from each of 5 news sites. Each site wants me to pay a $10/mo subscription. I'm not paying $50/mo for 10 articles. They need to figure out a way to fix their pricing model as a group.
I think paper newspaper ads are great. Hell I used to buy papers at the newsstand in my building or gas station for ads.
The problem with my local Hearst paper’s online presence is that there are literally hundreds of irrelevant ads, pop-up videos, 40+ trackers, tabloola or something similar and other junk.
That stuff doesn’t go away when you pay.
I’m no expert on the metrics here, but since the economics of the online ad market are so awful, and the ads are mostly shit, I don’t understand why the paper can’t sell ads online like they do in print.
You still get ads with NYT, Economist, WSJ, WaPo after getting a paid premium subscription, especially in their mobile apps. I've had to install Pi Hole to get rid of them until they figure out how to encrypt them like Instagram.
I think that you underestimate how people are willing to put some time to bring the truth out ... the current news is broken anyways... look at CNN and FOX.
I think this was the idea of flattr. A little different, you set a fixed amount per month and this was splitt across the articles/media you consumed.
It was quite popular in the german podcasting scene, where you then "paid" per show you listened.
I wouldn't mind paying for a "day pass" to online news sites for a nominal price as long as I continue to have access to that day's content just as if I had paid for the print version.
That might be more manageable given the current reality of payment systems today than trying to charge on a per-article basis.
Amazon will sell you the current issue of a newspaper or magazine in Kindle format. You can get today’s New York Times for a dollar. Not as nice as a day pass to the site, but it’s one option.
Kindle books can be updated with the publisher’s changes. Would be interesting if the single NYT issue purchase would be updated throughout the day. That would make it as useful as a day pass.
$1 songs are about as dead today as $2.99 ringtones.
I'd argue we never moved past the Napster era. Spotify was freemium at birth, it was Napster with a subscription option. Nobody is paying piecemeal for audio or video these days.
Over the past decade the Internet became mobile-centric rather than desktop-centric. A generation of users grew up connecting entertainment with phones and tablets, rater than computers. Mobile devices are opaque and locked down in ways computers never were, but they're also much easier to use.
So it's not a surprise that someone today might look at you pityingly if you show them how to get something from a torrent or p2p client. They'll pull up the Youtube/Spotify link in a couple of seconds, and for them, it's the exact same thing.
Meh I'd imagine this would just lead to even more clickbait to try and get you to pay the $0.10 for an article that actually isn't worth the time to read it.
A company called Blendle tried this in the Netherlands. It didn’t work. Turns out you do not want to have to think after every headline and teaser whether you want to pay to read the full article.
The beauty of blendle was that you didn't have to think after every headline whether to pay to read the full article. They prominently had a refund option at the end of every article, so you could decide after you read the article whether it was worth the money or not.
What killed blendle was the lack of newspapers willing to sign on, and the lack of integration for the few newspapers that actually did - if I was presented with a micropayment option instead of a $10/no paywall when I clicked a link to an article on Twitter, Facebook, or hacker news, it might work. But blendle payment was only an option if you found the article through the blendle website, and their website sucked.
if they want to offer me a first-party micropayment i would also be open to that.
but my point is i'm not going to buy a $10-15/mo subscription to some regional newspaper in the middle of nowhere just because i clicked a link on twitter or hacker news to the one article they publish this decade that might interest me. i would be willing to pay to read an article, but newspapers are leaving money on the table by only offering a monthly subscription option which is obviously unsuitable for social media traffic.
Makes perfect sense. I remember going to an amusement park or fair with my family and being given a small amount of money or tokens to spend. I'd enjoy myself, but I would be thinking about how to stretch out the tokens I had to maximize my experience.
Few will have the patience for that when you're an adult. And especially when we're talking about pennies per article, for potentially a lot of articles.
This looks like a good idea on the surface but there is one factor which is easy to forget but still very important. If you have a subscription with a news site instead of paying for articles individually you might not read articles you would have read otherwise. I often find myself enjoying articles much more than I would have anticipated just considering the title. If a per-article business model will become the norm the clickbait-problem will undoubtedly get worse. Deeper and less catchy articles will fade from media outlets which hurts the industry as a whole.
That's one of the benefits of streaming services in the music industry. Nowadays it's much easier to discover artists which deviate from the mainstream because you don't have to spend any extra money to discover a new artist. I think this is healthy for the music scene and I suspect the same is true for journalism.
Also if you have a subscription you are probably going to read more articles than if you would have to purchase every article individually even if it's less expensive to do so. People reading less is hardly a desireable goal.
But with a music subscription like Spotify, you've got the whole catalog to browse at $10/mth. If I want a 90% complete catalog of journalism, what is that $200/mth across them all?
It's pretty decent imo depending on where you live and what you want to read. It includes some solid newspapers like the LA Times, SF Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald, Globe & Mail, Sacramento Bee, WSJ, etc. Plus some news-oriented magazines like the New Yorker and Atlantic. It's conspicuously missing a few of the top names though, who probably correctly think they can do better maintaining their own subscriber bases and don't want to be commodified in a bundle (NYT, WaPo, The Economist, Financial Times).
With Apple doing the bundling, the content will only be available in the Apple News app, which is Mac and iOS only.
Even worse, the Mac app does not let you print or even select text. It's taking web content and making it as un-web like as it can. I can't even share the article to Pocket!
I subscribe to the NYT and Globe & Mail. I print articles I want to read to PDF (or save as a SingleHTML file) and have them auto-synced to my tablet. This gives me a permanent copy of the article that supports annotation.
That list of Apple's partner publications does reflect a bias though. For example the news/politics section contains more lean-left and left biased sources from All Sides (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings) than it does lean-right and right-biased sources. I am guessing a number of right-biased sources either aren't welcome on Apple's platform or don't feel comfortable partnering with them. Given that Apple's own content policies implement a progressive bias (for example on trans issues), and since they have a long history of censorship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Apple), I am not sure how people can trust such a service to fairly represent all views or provide a diversity of viewpoints.
And this is the exact problem with this sort of bundle - it centralizes something that is better handled in a decentralized way, and the platform owner then gains power that they can abuse. The GP comment mentioned Spotify, and they suffer from the same issue. They entered the podcast market, acquired Joe Rogan's show as an exclusive, and then immediately proceeded to censor vast swaths of content based on their employees' ideological biases (https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/04/06/joe-rogan-spotif...).
I was part of a google program that did just that. In fact, they tried it twice but I don't even remember the name. You loaded an account with some cash and it would deduct micropayments from various news sites. I loved it but they killed it pretty quickly.
Laterpay (https://www2.laterpay.net/) has or used to have a service do allow publishers to sell individual articles. Interestingly, you‘d only pay after you had consumed 5€ worth of content which was a nice on-ramp. Spiegel here in Germany used to use. Unfortunately it didn‘t meet their revenue expectations and they went to a subscription.
> I want to pay $.10 to finish reading that one article, then $.10 to finish an article on USA today, then $.10 for something on Wall Street Journal
Investigative journalism is expensive. So out the door, articles would need to be differentially priced to avoid adverse selection. That's a new friction the newspaper would need to incur to provide this pricing. Add to that the cost of cannibalizing subscriptions and the volatility of non-recurring revenue and it's a deal only newspapers who couldn't otherwise get subscriptions would take.
Lots of comments here are talking about lowering paywall site search results since you can not view them, however, I would actually consider raising them. Free content in journalism has a race to the bottom mentality when it comes to content quality. Free content often is incredibly bias or does not actually do any research. This gets you a lot of “fake news” that can spread like wildfire.
Having papers that are more reputable by having a sustainable business model that allows them to produce better quality content, to me would be worth it over fake news sites.
I could have sworn that USA Today already had a paywall, but looks like it's just the local papers owned by it's parent company (which largely have the same page layout as USA Today) are the ones with the paywall. Seems obvious that they'd extend that to their national publication.
Did anyone here commenting actually read a copy of USA Today on paper before?
The Nieman Lab article is not about paywalls per se, but paywalls in USA Today. People forget that pre-internet, USA Today was basically a news aggregator that just happened to print other people's stories on newspaper form.
Their business model was to bulk sell these papers to chain hotels. Most of their readers had never paid for a copy of USA Today.
So, if few reader in its heyday paid direct for it, and Gannet hasn't really changed the structure or content of USA Today in the last 25 years, what makes them think that readers will pay directly for it now in the internet age?
A major USA Today revenue model has been passive consumption through hotel distribution. To the tune of $82 million/year. (Total revenues are estimated at $3.4 billion for the privately-held company.[1])
Well, the article says there's basically a 50% chance you paid for it explicitly on your room bill. Which shocks me, I always look at my bill in detail (out of curiosity) and I've never seen that in my life. Is this specific to certain types or brands of hotels, that I somehow rarely/never stay in?
For the other half... now it's got me wondering what hotels pay USA Today on average per newspaper? I'd always assumed it was free or at least nearly free, just an ad delivery mechanism. But now you've got me curious.
> People forget that pre-internet, USA Today was basically a news aggregator that just happened to print other people's stories on newspaper form.
This part you’re wrong about, USA Today has always had its own reporters, a fair number of them, although it’s probably true they ran plenty of wire service stories as well, and may have run stories from other papers run by the parent company (Gannett).
It’s true about the hotels and as far as I know few people ever bought direct subscriptions.
I don't think the data backs your claim. Sure, maybe in the 2000s after the internet began to dent its model it became a hotel paper, but in its heyday (the 80s and 90s) it was very popular option from newsstands (I'm old enough to remember dropping 50 cents for a copy).
Back in the day, it was common for people to grab their favorite local paper and a USA Today. USA Today was great at national coverage of sports which apparently drove newspaper sales.
> instead, it was bulk purchases by hotels and other places with lobbies that fueled the business.
When I was a kid I actually would read the newspaper every morning, though mostly I was just looking at box scores. I do distinctly remember getting USA Today when we went on vacation.
If you’ll forgive my ramble, one other thing I remember now was my parents always complaining about the quality of the newspaper. We moved around a lot, and they really missed things like the New York Times, which I suppose was too expensive to get so far from New York. When I was a kid, I couldn’t understand why one news paper would be better than another, I think I thought it was the quality of the writing. But we’re my parents really complaining about the political slant of Midwestern papers? Did people care about that in the 90s? The lack of investigative journalism? I’ll have to ask them next time I call.
It would be an impossible coincidence if all newspapers were of the same quality, however you define quality. USA Today and the NY Times are news for different purposes:
I think USA Today is (or was, last I read it, ~5-10 years ago) underrated. They did some important investigative reporting and good journalism, and while they can lack depth in their short, digestible format (which is their intention, per distant memory), they also can be more succinct, which is a good thing. I thought the lack of depth was a real limitation, but I thought they also suffered from projecting themselves as a simple, easy (my words, maybe imperfect) source of information: People looking for the best information don't associate it with simple and easy.
The NY Times addresses serious topics in much greater breadth, depth, and sophistication, and their investigative reporting is unparalleled (and taken for granted - if you step back and look at the stories they've broken, and think of what the world would look like without those stories, it's astounding). Certainly it has its flaws, including IMHO sometimes long-windedness - rarely do I wish an article was longer!
You mentioned the NY Times but it has peers, IMHO, in the Financial Times and, to a degree, the Washington Post.
The 90s was the beginning of the collapse of journalism in the US. Media ownership laws were relaxed, and some of the bigger players were acquired, leading to layoffs of “redundant” journalists, and their replacement with partisan shills.
Soon craigslist popped up and destroyed the market for classified ads (which used to be the primary source of revenue for local papers). Free internet news didn’t help either.
Since then, more and more ownership rules and things like the equal time doctrine (if you let one politician on the air, you need to let their opponent on as well) were eliminated.
Equal time never applied to newspapers, and the broadcasters began relabeling their news content as entertainment ("infotainment") so the rule did not apply all the way back during Reagan.
The New York Times: the paper of record. Oh, oh no, I can hear the screams of “bias” already, but: from either the right or the left, you can’t really argue that if a story is in the Times, it becomes A Story. Their investigations, their opinion pieces, they lead the national conversation, for better or for worse, and people pay for that.
The Washington Post: the paper of the seat of the power. Similar to the times, it’s…sigh…thought leadership. Big political stories break in the Post, and people pay for that.
The Wall Street Journal: the paper of Wall Street. It’s business news. It’s valuable. People pay for it. People have been paying for it for a looooong time, too—they’ve had a paywall for quite a while, and a not particularly porous one.
USA Today: the paper of…uh…the door mat at the Hampton Inn I stayed in because that AirBnB ended up being terrible? I have no idea who would pay for USA Today. It isn’t the national voice on politics or business. They do have some solid reporters, but what differentiates them from either the Post or The Times? Why would I pay for USA Today above and beyond any of these other papers?
While I agree with your analysis I also reminded myself of USA Today's launch and how the conventional wisdom was no one would be interested in such a newspaper. Fox (the TV network) was met with similar disbelief.
Yeah, USA Today and a paywall doesn't make sense, but USA Today doesn't make sense so who knows? I guess we'll find out soon enough.
Honestly, I like Chomsky a lot, but I think this quote reveals more about Chomsky than about newspapers. Or, he was describing a very different WP from the one that exists today.
I think the major newspapers need to get together and start offering umbrella subscription packages. Preferably via something like Scroll, which worked in any web browser via a simple cookie.
Surely the NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc realize that at $10 per month per paper, few people are going to maintain more than one or two subscriptions. Since the incremental cost of online distribution is nearly zero, this means that the news outlets are leaving money on the table.
Make everyone's first subscription cost $10, then provide access to additional papers for 50¢ each. Or use some other type of sliding scale—I'm sure there are numbers that would make sense.
The alternatives are either that a major tech company comes along and does it for them (as Apple is attempting), or that all the papers ultimately merge into 2-3 huge outlets. I don't like either of those outcomes.
> NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc have to realize that at $10 per month per paper, almost no one is going to pay for more than a single subscription
Plenty of people, offices and venues do. What's more likely, and the direction we've been heading for years, is we see a population that consumes paid journalism and the broader market that has ad-supported filler.
I edited my post while you were replying—I do know some individuals who have a couple of subscriptions, but not more than that unless it's for professional reasons. Businesses are a different story, and they should be charged accordingly.
Agreed, the only people I know of that subscribe to multiple publications do it for professional reasons. I only subscribe to WSJ and it's more pricey than others but worth it. I get all the major stories.
I subscribe to the NYT, New Yorker, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, and the Atlantic.
I don’t know how people think they’ll survive with a tenth of the revenue. Maybe you think three times the number of people will subscribe so then a third of the revenue?
So then what? Publications look for alternative means of supplementing income. Which means ads and skewing content towards clickbaiting.
Maybe it’s fine not trying to be for everyone when not everyone values them.
I think you're a major outlier, and that newspapers would get well above three times the number of subscribers. Magazines are a little different since they're more focused, i.e. The New York Review of Books is not a substitute for PCMag.
But it's also possible I'm wrong—I certainly have no background on this industry. For example, someone on the TWiT podcast said the reason there's no effective "Netflix for Books" is because the industry is highly dependent on a very small number of "whales" who will buy five books per week.
Even for most people who are regular readers, however defined, a la carte book purchases over the course of a year don't add up to a huge number. Reading most books takes a bigger time committment than most other media. And many who are voracious readers, among others, use libraries. I read at least a middling bit and I'm fine to pay $150/year or whatever and own my books (or "own" in the case of Kindle).
That's a really shitty outcome tho. Look at how toxicly inaccessible academic papers are. Universities pay exorbitant prices for their students and faculty, and no normal person could every afford it.
What we need is a system of pay-per-view+quality news that uses a rating system to determine how much people pay for the article. Imagine a pay scale where users pay x/log(2+x/1000) cents to the service per month (where x is number of articles read, or some similar metric), and the authors/publishers of those articles split that money based on how highly the user rated each article. This would mean that someone reading 10 articles a month would pay 30 cents/mo, someone reading 10 articles a day would pay $9/mo, and someone reading 100 articles a day would pay $40/mo. At the same time, it would mean that users have an incentive to rate articles fairly, since they're charged regardless of their ratings, but better quality articles would get rated higher and get paid out more per view, incentivizing publishers to put out higher quality content and disincentivizing click bait.
Ad supported content leads to click bait and emotional manipulation. We are living in the news dystopia and only finding a way to get rid of ad supported content will save us.
This happened in the 20s too btw. Those "extra extra read all about it" boys selling newspapers by the headline caused a decrease in news quality too. Subscription news came along and saved us then. Unfortunately, there are too many different news sources to be supported by subscription services without massively fragmenting what people can read (just like video streaming services have massively fragmented what people can watch).
I don't think you can charge per article. It makes opening a new article too high-stakes; people don't want to think about spending money each time they click on something, even if the amount they're spending is super small.
I'm also concerned that your ratings system would perpetuate the sort of think-piece journalism in which authors proclaim whatever their readers currently believe, as opposed to challenging their assumptions. We already see this sort of thing in what types of articles get shared on social media.
Just like no one wants to think about spending money each time they turn on a light in their house or take a shower? Yes, it'll be a barrier for people for a week, and then they'll forget about it like everything else we pay for individually.
> your ratings system would perpetuate the sort of think-piece journalism in which authors proclaim whatever their readers currently believe
The idea is intended to solve the problem of low-quality news, not thought-bubbles. People will always gravitate towards their own biases, this won't solve that, nor will it make it worse. It could make it a bit better for people who are actually looking to escape their biases, because those people could rate articles more highly if they actually convince them to change their views, or at least teach them about an alternate viewpoint in a non-infuriating way.
Micropayment startups have come and gone. I agree with you that pay-as-you-go has been normed with electricity, water, and probably even gas for cars. But maybe it's because people feel they need to do those things for some definitions of need. Whereas media, even newspapers, is more in the class of entertainment. Even music, which was trending towards digital purchases for a while has largely moved to all you can eat subscriptions.
> Whereas media, even newspapers, is more in the class of entertainment
But why would pay-as-you-go be bad for the class of entertainment? The vast majority of entertainment options out in the world are pay as you go (live shows, movie theaters, vacations, restraunts, etc etc).
> Even music, which was trending towards digital purchases for a while has largely moved to all you can eat subscriptions.
Music has been an interesting outlier here because people are increasingly listening to music playlists and not hand-picking their own music. Hand-picking music is time consuming and a pain sometimes, so why not let the algorithms decide what to listen to? By contrast, people still hand-pick news articles, TV shows, movies, and things like that - and they'll likely continue to do that because they're activities that generally require engagment - whereas music is generally listened to in the background while doing something else.
The movement towards the subscription model has primarily been about improving things for businesses, not for customers. The rhetoric is "customers don't want to think about paying", but we can clearly see countless counterexamples in the world. Businesses, however, like the subscription model because it makes it easier for them to predict their revenue and it puts up a (small) barrier in place for customers to stop paying them.
However, while the subscription model is great for single items (eg high-end software) where the subscription is basically just a way to pay-as-you-go automatically, the subscription model is actually a pretty bad payment model for networks of content when you think about what it incentivizes. The user pays a fixed price for unlimited content. This incentivizes the user to consume as much as they can. A user who use the service 100 times more than another user both pay the same price. This means it necessarily excludes users who don't consume a lot, and raises the price for people who consume a below average amount. There is a deadweight economic loss there.
In addition it provides no net incentive for the subscription provider to increase the options available in the system or the quality of those options. In fact, there is an incentive to release low-quality content as filler so that their high-consuming users don't run out of content (which they do anyway). Take a video streaming service for example. If they increase the number of options available to customers, they don't earn any more money but each item available in the system gets watched less, which means owners of the content would would to be part of that subscription network less and less as the content grows. Either that or they charge customers more as the library grows - which customers wouldn't pay for since most people wouldn't actually consume more just because the library's bigger.
What results is that video subscription services have necessarily fragmented and will stay fragmented for as long as people keep drooling over the subscription model. People are locked into one or two networks of content which are primarily all they watch. They don't have access to other content without paying significantly more or making a burdensome leap of ending service with one network and beginning with another (which loses them access to content they had there).
News is even worse, where individual newspapers have their own siloed subscription services. That's great if you read most of the content on there, but its terrible if you just want to read an article someone sends you ever once in a while. There's some more aggrigated news services that have come out recently, but these will also have the fragmentation issues that video streaming has because of the subscription model.
The entertainment people pay for a-la-carte is relatively high-end though. It's $5 to $10 to $100+ . People are fine with making that a conscious decision. Not so much with a $.05 for an article. I'm not justifying this pattern. Just observing that it seems to be the case (as have others).
As for video services, lots of people argued against the $100/month bundle as augmented by the $5/each Blockbuster payment. I actually prefer the current fragmented services plus a la carte even if it's annoying sometimes. Certainly saves me money.
ADDED:
>In addition it provides no net incentive for the subscription provider to increase the options available in the system or the quality of those options.
Not sure I understand that. While there's certainly inertia, if your subscription isn't providing me with value, I cancel it. (Some companies make it difficult to do so but that's a separate issue.)
I think a lot of people believe its saving them money, but in reality its actually costing more and at the same time lower quality than it would be with a correctly-priced pay-per-view model. You can't compare to blockbuster because that system was old and there have been many things that can bring the cost down these days.
> if your subscription isn't providing me with value, I cancel it
Yes, that's why streaming video services have some quality content, and its why they price them so cheaply - so its worth it despite the fact that most of the content is low quality and lacks a variety of quality content. If they increased the options available, they'd have to charge more money than its worth to cover the costs of that extra content. If they increased the general quality, same thing. There is a limit to how large these subscription content networks can get before it must fragment.
>” Just like no one wants to think about spending money each time they turn on a light in their house or take a shower?”
No, in the same way that Netflix is different from renting movies on Amazon Prime. It’s SVOD vs TVOD vs something like youtube without a subscription that is AVOD. There’s a reason that Spotify is hugely popular while it’s a lot less common to buy an album on iTunes. It’s the reason AYCE KBBQ and buffets are popular. Even if pay-per-use ends up cheaper, flat-rate subscriptions are easier for people to see value in, and they can consume without concern of overages.
> There’s a reason that Spotify is hugely popular while it’s a lot less common to buy an album on iTunes. It’s the reason AYCE KBBQ and buffets are popular.
Yes, but the reason is not the subscription model. People like variety. The subscription model actually prevents good variety in a network. Read my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27804511 . You bring up Spotify, but music is a fundamentally different product than news or videos.
> flat-rate subscriptions are easier for people to see value in
What you're saying is that people are getting duped into paying higher prices for lower quality content. While you might be right, this isn't a point in favor of the subscription model.
> they can consume without concern of overages
There is no reason a service can't help a user track their consumption and let the user configure a warning if they're hitting the configured limit. The subscription service is a very inflexible way of ensuring people stay within their budget.
The real problem is that pay-per-view content is massively overpriced. Of course people opt for subscription services when for the price of 3 pay-per-view movies, they can watch 30 movies on a subscription service. If pay-per-view content were priced commensurately with subscription services, it would change the game.
There's a lot less decision-making involved in turning on a light, or running the faucet—it always does the exact same thing. It's hard to know in advance if an article will be worth reading.
People have also had an entire century to become inured to utility pricing.
A better comparison might be data-limited cell phone plans. Even though spectrum and network capacity are legitimately scarce resources (especially in the early days), basically all of the carriers have been forced to offer some kind of quasi-unlimited data plan, where you might be throttled but you won't be charged overages, or you won't be charged on specific streaming services.
You're comparing apples to orangutans. Like, sure I get you're joking. But your joke implies that you think that youtube upvotes are at all comparable to what I'm suggesting. Its not.
Why is it different? One reason I used Youtube is that they started out with a five star rating system, and moved to the current one because it worked better. Users only ever rate things either five stars or one star, when given the choice.
The only exception I know if is Goodreads, where people seem to put a great deal of effort into their ratings (which I find super interesting). You might argue this is a better analog because the audience would have more overlap with newspaper readers, but people aren't going to put as much thought into a short article versus a long novel.
Because youtube videos aren't rewarded based on votes. People generally want creators to be rewarded for their work when its good, and they'll almost certainly put more effort into rating if they know that's how those creators get rewarded.
Also, you seem to think that youtube's voting system has failed somehow. In what way do you think its failed? You do know that youtube doesn't recommend things to people based on upvotes, right? Views are what youtube cares about, not votes. Votes are mostly just for show on youtube.
High quality public news is also still available. BBC, In Germany ARD/ZDF and even English language offering (DW), NPR in the US I believe, in reality you don't need to pay for news at all if you're an ordinary citizen who just wants to stay on top of what's going on. If you're some kind of think tank employee and read four hours of news per day surely you can afford it.
> High quality public news is also still available. BBC, In Germany ARD/ZDF and even English language offering (DW), NPR in the US I believe ...
In the US, there simply isn't enough quality news available for free, and many essential stories and reporting are behind paywalls (especially the NYT and Wash Post).
> Normal people being informed today costs 0 bucks.
Yes, at the cost of being inundated with ads and being informed by low quality "journalism" that is really just entertainment in disguise. By paying 0 bucks we need to spend more time reading things to be well informed, or we'll just accept being less informed by news that's more entertainment than journalism.
> High quality public news is also still available
Sure, but increasingly you need to pay for it or you need to be good at finding it. Not everyone has the skills to sus out good journalism, and almost nobody can avoid their time being wasted by garbage articles and click bait. This is the price we're paying.
uBlock or AdGuard Home for everything on your network does pretty well at cutting out most ads.
Cable linear TV was / still is expensive and gates trash content behind unskippable awful advertising, so paying is not always the solution. We must demand better journalism, even though everything seems to be trending toward entertainment and sensationalism.
Sure, adblock is nice, but its kind of irrelevant to the discussion. The fact that you block ads doesn't change the fact that most news is paid for by ads (that people who don't have adblock get). In fact, adblock probably reduces the quality of news even further, because the people who don't have adblock are probably less smart on average than the people who do use adblock - and thus the articles who cater to that group more earn more money.
> paying is not always the solution
You're creating a straw man here. Did I say that "paying is the solution"? No I didn't, I said ad-funded news has lead to the trashy news dystopia we live in today. The reason is not because of ads per se - its because these pages get paid on a per click basis. If you click, they get paid, even if the article ends up sucking. This incentivizes massive amounts of low quality click bait. If there were such a thing as an advertisement mechanism where low-quality content wouldn't get paid, that would solve the problem without paying.
> We must demand better journalism
Sorry, but you don't just get better things because you demand it. We live in a world where the only way to actually make your own tiny individual impact on journalism quality is to purchase subscriptions to quality news sources and to avoid clicking on anything online. Ever. If you're still going to click on things online, you're not demanding better journalism in a way that will make an impact. And how many people do you expect to do that? Very few. I doubt you'll do it yourself, even tho you care about getting better journalism.
What we need are better tools that allow people to only give money (ad revenue or otherwise) to publishers of quality journalism.
They're also leaving international money on the table. I would never get a paper version of a US newspaper, but now with digital papers, I would love to read some articles from US papers. I just don't want to have to pick a single one, especially because many of them are local.
The Economist is another for a more international English-speaking audience. FT for European finance. Maybe a more cultural magazine like The New Yorker. But 2-3 is probably the limit for the vast number of people.
In a revenue sharing scheme, they would be able to command a larger share than the others. With enough people subscribed, it could possibly give them more revenue than the status quo.
While I agree that $10 umbrella subscription make metric tons of sense even if it was not the only way online newspapers could work, I don’t see competition in it. A whole industry without competitions is generally not a good thing……
The fee could be (partially) be distributed amongst publisher based on conversion like articles read, and time spent on that. In theory this would still provide an incentive to compete on quality, similar to music streaming services.
They must take into account the loyal subscribers who are already paying the current fees. Introducing lower prices can mess up with this income stream.
It’s not easy to differentiate the product enough to collect maximum money from the both groups.
But I do agree with your thinking. For me it would be almost enough if I could get access to just those articles posted on HN for $10/month (across many newspapers and with no risk of falling to some subscription trap).
At which point someone will create another site that provides links to all the major articles (or every article) on all the major sites and how could they not have the same deal?
WSJ and NyTimes are papers that many people might read both of, they both provide different high end perspectives. USA Today is more like…I’m not really sure why anyone read it. Maybe if they wanted a very drab ultra-produced version of the news that uses more modern fonts, which is sort of the market they were going for on their introduction in the 80s. I don’t see much overlap between the high quality New York papers and USA Today.
I'm usually reading the 'high quality' publications, but USA Today in the past (I haven't read it in years) had coverage the others lacked. They were (are?) a serious paper. They are also more succinct, which isn't a bad thing - many NYT articles could be shorter.
I recall that years ago, USA Today was sort of intended to be a "generic national newspaper". It made sense for places like 'delivery to hotel rooms' where the audience wanted a general national/global news product, but didn't need the 50% of the paper that was local school board meetings and classified ads.
With that principle, I always figured that the endgame of the Gannet company would be to make their local papers USA Today with a small local supplement folded in.
Maybe the same applies online-- you'll buy usatoday.com for national news, and also subscribe to a local rag. Over time, the local papers may scale back the national/global/wire service stuff.
Interestingly, at least for a while (and maybe still in some papers) Gannet used to do the opposite -- they would tuck in a condensed version of "USA Today" into the local papers they owned.
It may have been SNL that described USA Today as the paper for people for whom the evening network news was too complicated to understand.
As the sibling notes, a lot of USA Today's were left outside hotel rooms at one point when that was common in an era where the WSJ was very oriented towards finance types and was deliberately stodgy. (There was also the International Herald Tribune internationally which was at least at one point, a joint effort of the Post and the Times.)
But, yeah, an American political junkie might get the Post and the Times today. I'm not sure why someone would pay for USA Today. It completely generic in digital form.
That SNL dig was obviously an exaggeration, but I remember when USA Today was being launched and they themselves compared themselves to TV news in printed form and that being a good thing.
USA Today was clearly a very graphical and not too taxing paper often for business travelers who didn't want to deal with the very serious, and at least somewhat NY/DC local, NYT and Post--or whatever the local newspaper was.
Wouldnt it be anti competitive? The good thing about capitalism is supposed to be competition of products and prices. The cartel/monopoly thing destroys that.
Hm, it's a good question. There's precedent in Hulu (which is another thing I was thinking of), wherein a bunch of the major TV networks got together to create a consolidated outlet. Or the International Tribune.
I’d gladly pay for 5-6 digital news subscriptions for $10 per month each. What’s harder to justify for me are the multiple 30-40$ per month subscriptions for sites like FT, Bloomberg and the Information.
I can't imagine actually paying for access to online articles beyond maybe 25 cents for a week's worth like a newspaper, at most. Does anyone actually want to read any of these specific sites that badly? Especially with the quality of modern mainstream journalism being what it is.
I subscribe to The NY Times because I like reading their articles and I hit the paywall and I find they have some stories no one else does.
“Does anyone actually want to read any of these specific sites that badly?”
-> The Times reported a total of 7.8 million subscribers across both print and digital platforms, with 6.9 million coming for online news or its Cooking and Games apps. The company added 301,000 digital customers for the first three months of the year…”
> Surely the NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc realize that at $10 per month per paper, few people are going to maintain more than one or two subscriptions.
Agreed. And furthermore, why haven't TV/film streaming services also not realised this. Is it because it isn't true? Do people really pay for Disney+, Netflix, and Hulu all at the same time?
The content on streaming services isn't a direct substitute in the same way. The Witcher isn't Game of Thrones. The news is the news. Sure some people have specific writers they like, but it's a lot easier to just read a different paper.
there is a coil.com as example of such subscription and it even integrated in imgur, twitch and some other services.
Never used it, tho. I prefer reading HN comments instead of articles, because news nowadays is huge longrid with only ~10% of usable information in it. I'm not ready to pay $10 for such thing, IMO.
Like everything else in the US, these major newspapers merging in our lifetime seems inevitable. I just cannot believe how dirt cheap the subscriptions are, and yet, I'm not going to subscribe to a single one of them because their content is too varied in quality, let alone a handful.
It seems like it would be impossible to start a news business off the ground today without a powerful investor, which means the publication would have some intentional bias.
The entire centralized model is dying and shifting towards individual journalists with a personal brand and a degree of perceived authenticity. We are still in the early stages but I find it likely these big brands will fade away one funeral at a time.
I see the news meta shifting towards individual journalists with a personal brand, like some of those on Substack.
I don't think there is anything to be done to save these larger newspaper organizations. I used to consume them but their signal/noise ratio is now so low I wouldn't read them even if they were free. The sacrifices in integrity and quality to satisfy low attention span, lowest common denominator readers signed their death warrant. No longer journalists, they transformed into ideologically reinforcing entertainment.
Yep, also I think a lot of news is a "conversation" as an event unfolds and the one way direction of most media is outdated. With the internet we can now have bidirectional conversation about/with the news.
For example much of the political reporting and conversation is being moved to longer form chat online.
The moment I see a paywall or even a flavor of heavy popup nonsense presenting some obstacles to content - I move on.
Same with ad-infested sites.
I have low tolerance to crap.
The more people will do that - the quicker this annoying business model die.
Unless your content will help me to make money (courses, tutorials, specific investment analysis) I aint' spending a penny on you.
In a controversial note - I'd totally pay monthly subscription to some pirating service that extracts content from behind paywall, strip pages from ads and provide access. This will be valuable service.
I don't want to have dozens of different accounts with dozens of different subscriptions on dozens different terms that are changing dozens time per year.
Ideally I'd prefer to have a single legit service aggregating dozens of good content sites of my choice and pay monthly flat fee to access.
But because each of them are fighting with each other and each of them have their version of infestation with ads, paywalls, popups, content restrictions, accounts requirements - I don't envision any legit service to make peace with all that nonsense.
Pirate who will equalize all this into clean subscription based content is going to make a killing and I'll totally pay for it.
I am willing to invest into clear message that I don't like their current business model. I also want ads-based sponsorship of anything to die. I'm willing to put money where my mouth is. Let them sort it out.
I'd be willing to pay more for legit service to do all above - i just don't envision it happening any time soon.
It's the same reason I still contribute monthly to my local PBS station even though we don't watch it nearly as much as we used to as my kid has gotten older.
That said, subscription fatigue is real. WaPo, Economist, Atlantic, NYT Food, a few specific interest magazines, and my local online newspaper starts to add up. I'd love to read more from some of the other major metros where I still have family, but I can't justify another $20-30 a month for the handful of articles I would actually read.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadI don't care about the newspapers "survival" problem, I personally do not derive any benefits from them. I just want my Google/DDG results clean and actually be able to read them. If a link is paywalled, it should be ranked way lower. Google cache trick doesn't work all the time.
For $9.99 I month I can access to a library of thousands of hours of videos (netflix, prime, discovery+, etc) , thousands of hours of music (spofity, prime music, etc) , or thousands of hours of PC Games (Xbox Game Pass)
Sorry but the USA Today is not as valuable as these services... maybe $2.99 but more likely something like $9.99 a YEAR at most $1.99 a mo would be a price point I would consider.
None of your comparisons get you actual, recent news. Do you see this all as simply entertainment?
No news like a movie or a tv show is something to pass the time when you have nothing else to do.
Also keep in mind Trust in news is at a all time low, in part because the news themselves treat it as entertainment by sensationalizing everything, "if if bleeds it leads" and other High Drama "news"
Do you think it'd be worth it if you had archival access to the paper? It'd be interesting to be able to read NYT from its inception in 1851, for example. I know there are some papers that have done digital archiving, but I wonder if a research pass would be a way to generate revenue, too...
It could be good for some use cases, but not for the primary one which is getting fresh food for consumption.
even so I think there's a need for deeply reported careful work...and that takes money. archives might work. I also like the git diff idea in a sibling comment.
Another valuable feature would be to have access to a git style record of all edits... which no newspaper would ever do either
My reasoning is the same as yours - there's nothing wrong with Paywalls, but they're no good in search results, since chances are, a given user doesn't have an account with an arbitrary paywalled site that shows up in search.
>I want to be able to read them
Uh? Being able to read is deriving a benefit. I don't disagree that the current situation is a complete mess, and that subs everywhere is ridiculous. It's perfectly possible to imagine technical/business solutions that would match reasonable budget/month for news to what people read and valued. And it's also easy to see real collective action problems, incentive issues and so on that might make that impossible. All tied together with advertising, privacy, public education issues and so on as well.
But claiming you derive no benefit from newspapers at all would be a stretch even if you didn't want to read them, but claiming you don't while one sentence later saying you do want to read them? That doesn't seem quite reasonable.
Any article is plastered all over the internet in hundreds of websites. Same topic, different headline.
>I want to be able to read them
I want to be able to read ANY of those "free non-paywalled" articles instead of the one that's paywalled. I have no loyalty to NYT, USA Today or The Blaze.
It's almost like it's not the same content. Something breaking on the Times and then being summarized elsewhere are not interchangeable, which is why Google ranks its results as it does.
From the perspective of the search engine (and us readers), it feels like a bait-and-switch to present the full article to a crawler robot in exchange for a better search ranking, only to hide it and demand payment from a human.
But over in Australia, old media organizations have successfully lobbied for a "link tax" which allows them to demand payment from search providers who link to them. We've still got a long way to go before we reach a consensus on the independence of search platforms and the idea that human viewers should be served the same content as web spiders.
Also strange that some people would care more about a clean search result than the survival of media being consumed.
When it comes to SEO, the content is all there but the paywalls are usually client side so it’s harder for crawlers to dock down paywalls.
Overall I agree that paywalls are annoying. But I do want quality publications to survive else we are going to be stuck with content like USA Today
The original Xanadu project had the concept of micropayments, but until now the only way to really achieve it was using lotteries (I think it was Ron Rivest in the 90s who suggested this?)
The question is, how to monetize open source or journalism - online content that can be easily copied. Any sort of effective payment system requires a network effect. People could forj the system but they’d have to start from scratch, as no one would accept their payments.
Imagine if every app and plugin on wordpress could have its own currency to earn money as people use it on various sites, and still continue to be open source. Imagine if social networks like Facebook were the ones paying for their users to read it, settling balances once in a while. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp fought for something like this in Australia and won.
Would welcome feedback and thoughts. Why the massive amount of silent downvotes?
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudia...
How does it apply in our case, by the way? In our case we take the payment decisions out of the hands of users and into the hands of community administrators.
In a tax-supported scheme, the tax collector serves that role. In a ticketbox, it's the literal gate or door itself. For advertising-supported media, it's the publisher or broadcaster, gatekeeping in a three-way branch between advertisers, creators/talent, and audience (similarly, cable providers). In donor-based broadcasting, the broadcaster intermediates between individual donors and content producers.
As an alternative to a governmental progressive-tax-based system, a natural gateway exists at the ISP level, for which a sufficiently effective gating, revenue-collection, and content-payment system might work. I'd outlined that about three months ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26893033
There are access-based royalty systems such as ASCAP / Harry Fox, though my sense is that for more substantial text-based content (similarly: data-backed reporting, deep analysis, and probably a fair bit of serial media of the video or podcast variety), linking payment to publishers or studios, who can support a staff of creators (writers, artists, actors, directors, support personnel) would be preferred to the music/broadcast model.
Your problem is you're trying to dam a flat plain. You need to find a suitable dam site, and it's probably the ISPs. On the other hand, they're going to need systems for that service: content negotiation, payment collection, royalties or subscription payments, etc.
The distinction my model has from a traditional micropayments or subscription model is that the provision level is universal. A service subscriber pays in a flat fee, they get an all-you-can-eat plan. The payment differentiation is between the aggregator and the creating studio (somewhat similar to current cable subscriptions).
Note that total OECD content spend is roughly $100/capita. Advertising runs many times that, at ~%$600 billion for the 1 billion inhabitants of the OECD, about $600/capita. "Free online content" costs the average household of 4 over $2,400 a year.
Yeah, the 2 stools nobody flushed yet.
Compared to what?
Compared to a dozen or so of the most liberal countries in the world, all of which are located in Europe - fair enough.
Compared to the world as a whole today, including Asia and Africa? Almost everything in America is left wing, including the republican party and USA today.
Compared to virtually any government anywhere prior to 1800? Again, almost everything in America is left wing, including the republican party and USA today.
That is just not true. For example, Rwanda, Burkina Faso, Iran, and Sri Lanka has universal health care - the United States does not.
Go ahead. Tell me about how Iran is more left wing than the United States. Perhaps they have especially generous rights for women?
The majority of those countries have had coups in the last decade and severely restrict basic liberal political freedoms like free political speech.
Your examples are pretty much an admission that you're wrong, afaict.
I just did. Iran has universal health care - the United States does not.
But I don't think it's about one issue - it's about all of them, taken as a whole. And I think you know that and I don't think you're arguing in good faith by acting otherwise. So I'm not going to reply anymore.
I'm not sure why you are asking for a source.. you didn't provide one for your perspective, and the facts are not really in dispute here, only the analysis.
- Current, high quality news sources
- For free
- With no ads
Lots of people say the content isn't worth paying for, but see enough value to want to consume it.
But I think the answer then is simply not paying for it, and not consuming it. Which is the interesting part to me. It's low quality, but people still want to read it for free.
If I'm preparing food in my house and people want a part of it, it would be weird to me. But if after preparing my food I use a complex system of fans to blow a delicious odor over my neighbours while having a beautiful table set up visible through my windows, and do this every single day, I can understand that they can't stay indifferent to the situation.
Free content is provided not for informational value but for propaganda purposes.
https://prospect.org/health/juul-taking-academic-corruption-... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769978)
And paid-up services still include ads. (Which have higher advertiser value simply because the audience is known and sufficiently affluent to pay for content.)
In the digital age, there are a lot of people who decide that we get to price the content however we want. We decide that because they are trying to use terrible ads to make money, that we can just go around that and take their content for free.
That doesn't fly real well with physical products (This loaf of bread is priced at $1, but I only want to pay $0.50, so I'll just give them $0.50 and take it), but seems to be accepted with products that have infinite free reproducibility.
They can put themselves behind a fence, without letting anybody in who doesn't take their flyer. That's fine, I'll just skip their bread. They can charge for their bread. That's fine, I'll just skip their bread. No hard feelings on my end, it's all fair. But what they cannot reasonably do is give away free bread and then complain that I won't take their ad flyers.
In the pre-internet era, the media property was the centre of the ad universe. You'd call up your local paper to put in an ad, and they'd have control over presentation and pricing, and keep all the revenue. Standards were upheld, and the papers did well.
Now, they're farming out boxes on heir page to middlemen networks. They have little or no control over what ends up there, and they're getting a fraction of the revenue. What's worse, their content, being wide in scope and often full of brand-unfriendly news, isn't hugely friendly to algorithmic targeting paths. The only way to try to stay above water is to run more and more aggressively obnoxious ads.
"Intrusive" doesn't being to describe the modern ad tracking infrastructure, data collection (and attendant leak vulnerabilities), and exploitation.
The pop up ad, autoplay video/audio, and epilepsy-triggering flash ads are just the beginning of the predatory nature of this that has been deeply entrenched as the biggest companies that effectively make up the modern consumer web rely on this for their massive revenues.
It is orwellian in every sense of the word, not just dangerous for individuals in a data privacy and identity theft perspective, and dangerous at the civilization/society level in that it is a direct threat to a free, liberal, and democratic world.
Advertising was already a dangerous psychological influence back in the era of print ads. Now that we are essentially entering the first cybernetic era with our online personas and screen time, it is directly manipulating personality, mental stability, opinion, and belief.
You know how you avoid all those ads? You avoid their site.
Steal their content and publish it elsewhere, such as in posts on Reddit or HN.
Trying to paint anything black or white will just lead to a model that doesn't represent reality and what people are going to do.
It's nonsensical to equate being shown an ad (even in this third party tracking day and age) with victimhood.
Histrionics aren't the answer.
It's not "showing" an ad. It's a popup ad, with a tracking cookie, with a stored identity and list of urls tracked over years, tied and shared to a dozen databases, probably shared with governments (willingly or otherwise).
I get a huge percentage of people on HN work for FAANG and are a part of this meat grinder, so go ahead and downvote. But blaming a consumer for not wanting to be tracked and characterizing it as them being cheap is shifting blame to the consumer. Which is victim blaming.
It's the kind of thing they only get to pull once, and I'd expect them to save that for something huge that would draw an enormous audience to subscribe (something on the level of Stranger Things or Game of Thrones).
Sweet Tooth was nice, but clearly a bit slapped together. They keep the CGI to a minimum, but what's there is pretty cheaply done. The practical effects are nice, but simple in a way that feels like it was done quickly. It's neat that the show was in production before COVID, though I'd be curious to know how much of it was prescient.
The acting is great and the writing pretty good. But it's not going to be a breakout hit. So I'm a bit surprised they'd promote it so hard to attract and audience that will surely say, "Hey, that was OK. Glad I'm already subscribed. But I'm not rushing out to tell my friends about it."
So how do I expect the content creators to make money? I assume there are some people who are watching their ads.
Static images as ads would work, wouldn't be blocked by ad blockers, and would be effective as ads.
If they'd fix the ad problem this could work. I'm surprised ad supported sites haven't demanded better.
The odds of a random reader (whether from Google SERPS or HN or similar) having a subscription are very low. I don't personally know anyone that has a subscription to the top 10 paid sites, and there's quite a few more than 10.
Google used to call the practice "cloaking", and would de-index you if you presented content to its crawler that didn't match what it provided to a visitor. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
It only works on HN because we use things like archive.is or browser extensions to go around it. If it weren't possible to work around it, it would die off pretty quickly as a discussion.
Some of the most interesting and informative things I've read on HN were comments on articles I did not read. I almost always read the comments before reading the article, and a significant fraction of the time I don't even try to read the article after seeing the comments.
I can use this argument against you.
Not sure why would users around the world pay for US newspapers.
They do because it’s relevant to them.
I.e. "never show me NYT, Amazon, Pinterest, or any site that is a scrape of StackOverflow or Wikipedia"
I don't see how it would help me if Google failed to show me information relevant to my problem just because it is paid information.
If Reason can send out a physical magazine for $20/yr some of these other news outlets can figure out how to trim some fat and offer a competitive rate.
I don't hear anybody actually expecting free news with no ads. Everyone knows journalists need to be paid a salary. So that feels like a strawman to me.
But the idea that content isn't worth paying for is more that it's not worth paying for any single news source. I see links to news articles I read from 20+ sources a day. If somebody builds a Spotify for news where you pay $10/mo. and can access 99.9% of news articles including NYT, WaPo, etc., I think a ton of people (most, even?) would have no problem paying for it at all. But I sure as hell can't pay $10/mo. across 20 different sites, and that still covers less than half the sources people regularly link to.
Journalism doesn’t have the same revenue stream to fall back on.
With a population of 331M, that's $5.01 per person per month, or half the population paying $10/mo.
Now obviously you're not going to get half the people in the country to pay, but if you call it $20/mo/household, and compare it to the average $100-150/mo/household people pay for cable TV, I'd news absolutely could survive on numbers like this. It's not "tiny" at all -- it's ballpark.
[1] https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/newspapers/
People happily tolerated ads in print media for at least a century. The pivot from display ads to surveillance capitalism is what I hear most (non-tech) people complain about.
Also, per-user targeted ads undermine the value of premium ad real estate, letting middlemen (like Google) eat the content producers’ lunch, all while providing minimal value to web sites and consumers.
(Yes, they subsidize their “free” services with the revenue they extracted from the publishing industry, but that’s just predatory pricing, with the goal of precluding consumer-friendly computing stacks.)
There’s nothing fascinating about that. I’d love to drive a very expensive car too, but I don’t want to (can’t!) pay for it. This is basically just the law of demand.
The influx of money-incentivized noise swamped that out, and now we're left with a continuum from aggregator sites (eg stackoverflow, forums, etc) to just straight up webspam. I'm not saying there is an easy way to get back to where we were, but there is a standard to compare to where all of those qualities existed together.
In the present, why would I believe that a news site which demands payment would be any higher quality than the ones who do not? The basic business dynamic is to market to gain a sale, and then deliver the minimal cost product that doesn't violate the expectations.
Ultimately it goes back to the fragmenting of authority. You used to be able to trust the NYT or whatever because it was all you knew, everyone else trusted them, and therefore there was little reason to break that lock step, even when they did end up misleading you. But with the modern plethora of voices, there are more opinions to choose from and we can easily see when "authorities" ended up misleading us. If you want quality news sources, this lack of authoritativeness/trustworthiness is the genie you need to put back in the bottle, not simply funding.
In practice, every long-term viable media support model has attached a public good model for distribution to some rents-generating activity. Those inlcude patronage, church tithes (or other contributeions), political organisations, member/donor contributions, and of course advertising.
Or taxes.
The problem with each funding mechanism is that it is at the least distortionary to the interests of the funder or that funder's controlling body. In the case of advertising, the issues are well known, with a remarkably insightful account coming from the dawn of the modern mass-media and mass-advertising age, Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909), a short, highly readable, insightful, and information-packed quick read (it's based on an address given at UC Berkely by the author, himself a magazine publisher). Online at the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
Advertising's distortions are its drive to sensationalism (which increases the audience) and an antipathy for publishing anything which might offend the paymasters --- advertisers themselves. Holt quotes John Swinton (anonymously):
There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
Philanthropic support leads to donor-influence along largely similar lines (the Tiny Sparks podcast frequently addresses such distortions in the non-profit world: https://nonprofitquarterly.org/podcasts/)
Other options are that propagandists run media services for their own benefit or interest (RT, Sputnik, Newscorp, OANN, Sinclair), or that "news" simply panders to the minimum viable user, at the lowest possible cost, choking out all but a tiny minority of high-quality services, themselves only affordable to a few.
The free market utterly fails information goods, due to the mechanics of the market itself.
Good luck finding that.
I do enjoy this though: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
Thanks! You just gave me my new favorite news source.
Take even the Supreme Court. Multiple “right” judges voted to uphold the ACA and abortion restrictions; things that would certainly be top on the list of “left vs. right”.
Pay attention to the specific issues.
Like all actual policy discussions happen within parties because of this. It’s easier to get the Democrats to be a little more conservative than get Republicans to support trans healthcare.
[1] in the colloquial usage don’t @ me with X is 49% of the population
A lot of the ACA arguments the court heard were incredibly stupid. And they still have struck down parts of the law.
You’re welcome. Here’s my cryptocurrency address:[just kidding]
On All Things Considered on NPR a couple of weeks ago one of the hosts was interviewing someone about perceived media bias, and she seemed flabbergasted that people thought they had a bias. It seems to me they (and other organizations) might be in such a bubble they don't even realize it anymore.
Few years ago they were pushing that banks were biased against black people (directly and intentional) because they on average had higher interest rates. Completely ignoring the broader societal segregation that causes minority concentration in certain neighborhoods and those neighborhoods on average at the whole end up being lower income higher risk. Obviously there are many problems with the modern "segregated" neighborhoods and why the exist at all but the banks were just using their risk models. They want your money regardless of skin color..
Not that the right is any better, although they don't presume to know as often, I think the biggest issue I have with the left is the lack of internal accountability and productive discourse. I remember 2010-2015, I had many liberal friends that wouldn't here an argument unless it came from a "well respected" academic study. As if there aren't problems with the paper review process or that any ideas outside of high Academia are worthwhile. But I digress...
What doesn't work for me is this pretend "unbiased" highly biased lets turn journalism into a partisan infotainment team sport form of journalism.
No one wants to pay a business that angers them all the time, if walmart pissed every customer off in every visit they would go bankrupt
Rage Bait has been a mainstay in "journalism" of late in part to the Ad revenue nature of the business, however in doing so they pissed off most of the customers that they now want to pay for their product.
Also, if there were an easy way to pay for just the article, say, 10¢, most people won't mind. But wherever it exists, it's not easy, and generally the big players are not interested in implementing it, even if it were technically trivial (it's not), because they prefer a smaller but captive audience which pays more (and watches ads).
I'd happily pay for news. I just don't want to pay to, say, the NYT just to read a couple of pieces a week. (Ignoring the NYT shady unsubscribe practices)
The solution seems to be either micropayments or some form of paid news aggregation.
I pay for a Coil[1] subscription which solves micropayments, unfortunately very few sites have implemented it (and no major news sites AFAIK).
[1] https://coil.com/
I signed up for a student-priced NYT subscription a while back and realized I didn't really use it. I trudged through their cancellation information and got on their chat. The representative threw everything at me why I shouldn't cancel and they offered me a discounted rate of exactly what I was paying currently. So silly.
The internet gave the layman all the tools they needed to do their own followup on what they were told, and to access new perspectives about it. That's when cracks started appearing.
The problem with my local Hearst paper’s online presence is that there are literally hundreds of irrelevant ads, pop-up videos, 40+ trackers, tabloola or something similar and other junk.
That stuff doesn’t go away when you pay.
I’m no expert on the metrics here, but since the economics of the online ad market are so awful, and the ads are mostly shit, I don’t understand why the paper can’t sell ads online like they do in print.
Why do we have these paywalls then?
My problem with paywalls is I don't want to buy a full NYTimes subscription just to finish reading one article.
I want to pay $.10 to finish reading that one article, then $.10 to finish an article on USA today, then $.10 for something on Wall Street Journal.
That might be more manageable given the current reality of payment systems today than trying to charge on a per-article basis.
Kindle books can be updated with the publisher’s changes. Would be interesting if the single NYT issue purchase would be updated throughout the day. That would make it as useful as a day pass.
$1 single-serve songs with minimal friction to purchase was an attractive proposition relative to file sharing.
I'd argue we never moved past the Napster era. Spotify was freemium at birth, it was Napster with a subscription option. Nobody is paying piecemeal for audio or video these days.
Over the past decade the Internet became mobile-centric rather than desktop-centric. A generation of users grew up connecting entertainment with phones and tablets, rater than computers. Mobile devices are opaque and locked down in ways computers never were, but they're also much easier to use.
So it's not a surprise that someone today might look at you pityingly if you show them how to get something from a torrent or p2p client. They'll pull up the Youtube/Spotify link in a couple of seconds, and for them, it's the exact same thing.
What killed blendle was the lack of newspapers willing to sign on, and the lack of integration for the few newspapers that actually did - if I was presented with a micropayment option instead of a $10/no paywall when I clicked a link to an article on Twitter, Facebook, or hacker news, it might work. But blendle payment was only an option if you found the article through the blendle website, and their website sucked.
but my point is i'm not going to buy a $10-15/mo subscription to some regional newspaper in the middle of nowhere just because i clicked a link on twitter or hacker news to the one article they publish this decade that might interest me. i would be willing to pay to read an article, but newspapers are leaving money on the table by only offering a monthly subscription option which is obviously unsuitable for social media traffic.
Few will have the patience for that when you're an adult. And especially when we're talking about pennies per article, for potentially a lot of articles.
That's one of the benefits of streaming services in the music industry. Nowadays it's much easier to discover artists which deviate from the mainstream because you don't have to spend any extra money to discover a new artist. I think this is healthy for the music scene and I suspect the same is true for journalism.
Also if you have a subscription you are probably going to read more articles than if you would have to purchase every article individually even if it's less expensive to do so. People reading less is hardly a desireable goal.
It's pretty decent imo depending on where you live and what you want to read. It includes some solid newspapers like the LA Times, SF Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald, Globe & Mail, Sacramento Bee, WSJ, etc. Plus some news-oriented magazines like the New Yorker and Atlantic. It's conspicuously missing a few of the top names though, who probably correctly think they can do better maintaining their own subscriber bases and don't want to be commodified in a bundle (NYT, WaPo, The Economist, Financial Times).
Even worse, the Mac app does not let you print or even select text. It's taking web content and making it as un-web like as it can. I can't even share the article to Pocket!
I subscribe to the NYT and Globe & Mail. I print articles I want to read to PDF (or save as a SingleHTML file) and have them auto-synced to my tablet. This gives me a permanent copy of the article that supports annotation.
I'm never going to go the bundling route.
If you get to a paywalled WSJ article on the web, you can often use the “share” icon to “Open in Apple News” and read it just fine.
And this is the exact problem with this sort of bundle - it centralizes something that is better handled in a decentralized way, and the platform owner then gains power that they can abuse. The GP comment mentioned Spotify, and they suffer from the same issue. They entered the podcast market, acquired Joe Rogan's show as an exclusive, and then immediately proceeded to censor vast swaths of content based on their employees' ideological biases (https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/04/06/joe-rogan-spotif...).
Edit: Found the name. https://contributor.google.com
Investigative journalism is expensive. So out the door, articles would need to be differentially priced to avoid adverse selection. That's a new friction the newspaper would need to incur to provide this pricing. Add to that the cost of cannibalizing subscriptions and the volatility of non-recurring revenue and it's a deal only newspapers who couldn't otherwise get subscriptions would take.
Having papers that are more reputable by having a sustainable business model that allows them to produce better quality content, to me would be worth it over fake news sites.
So, if few reader in its heyday paid direct for it, and Gannet hasn't really changed the structure or content of USA Today in the last 25 years, what makes them think that readers will pay directly for it now in the internet age?
Yes, though because it was provided by a hotel for free. I can't imagine paying for one.
A major USA Today revenue model has been passive consumption through hotel distribution. To the tune of $82 million/year. (Total revenues are estimated at $3.4 billion for the privately-held company.[1])
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/08/02/how-us...
(This Forbes article is in fact linked in the Nielsen piece anchoring this thread.)
Edit: Hotel revenue contribution downgraded from "a principle" to "a major" w/ information from Owler.com.
________________________________
Notes:
1. https://www.owler.com/company/usatoday
For the other half... now it's got me wondering what hotels pay USA Today on average per newspaper? I'd always assumed it was free or at least nearly free, just an ad delivery mechanism. But now you've got me curious.
I'd like to think I'd have noticed that, at least once. That's a pretty shitty tactic.
This part you’re wrong about, USA Today has always had its own reporters, a fair number of them, although it’s probably true they ran plenty of wire service stories as well, and may have run stories from other papers run by the parent company (Gannett).
It’s true about the hotels and as far as I know few people ever bought direct subscriptions.
Back in the day, it was common for people to grab their favorite local paper and a USA Today. USA Today was great at national coverage of sports which apparently drove newspaper sales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Today#History
When I was a kid I actually would read the newspaper every morning, though mostly I was just looking at box scores. I do distinctly remember getting USA Today when we went on vacation.
If you’ll forgive my ramble, one other thing I remember now was my parents always complaining about the quality of the newspaper. We moved around a lot, and they really missed things like the New York Times, which I suppose was too expensive to get so far from New York. When I was a kid, I couldn’t understand why one news paper would be better than another, I think I thought it was the quality of the writing. But we’re my parents really complaining about the political slant of Midwestern papers? Did people care about that in the 90s? The lack of investigative journalism? I’ll have to ask them next time I call.
I think USA Today is (or was, last I read it, ~5-10 years ago) underrated. They did some important investigative reporting and good journalism, and while they can lack depth in their short, digestible format (which is their intention, per distant memory), they also can be more succinct, which is a good thing. I thought the lack of depth was a real limitation, but I thought they also suffered from projecting themselves as a simple, easy (my words, maybe imperfect) source of information: People looking for the best information don't associate it with simple and easy.
The NY Times addresses serious topics in much greater breadth, depth, and sophistication, and their investigative reporting is unparalleled (and taken for granted - if you step back and look at the stories they've broken, and think of what the world would look like without those stories, it's astounding). Certainly it has its flaws, including IMHO sometimes long-windedness - rarely do I wish an article was longer!
You mentioned the NY Times but it has peers, IMHO, in the Financial Times and, to a degree, the Washington Post.
Soon craigslist popped up and destroyed the market for classified ads (which used to be the primary source of revenue for local papers). Free internet news didn’t help either.
Since then, more and more ownership rules and things like the equal time doctrine (if you let one politician on the air, you need to let their opponent on as well) were eliminated.
No other paper was like that.
None of them.
The Washington Post: the paper of the seat of the power. Similar to the times, it’s…sigh…thought leadership. Big political stories break in the Post, and people pay for that.
The Wall Street Journal: the paper of Wall Street. It’s business news. It’s valuable. People pay for it. People have been paying for it for a looooong time, too—they’ve had a paywall for quite a while, and a not particularly porous one.
USA Today: the paper of…uh…the door mat at the Hampton Inn I stayed in because that AirBnB ended up being terrible? I have no idea who would pay for USA Today. It isn’t the national voice on politics or business. They do have some solid reporters, but what differentiates them from either the Post or The Times? Why would I pay for USA Today above and beyond any of these other papers?
Yeah, USA Today and a paywall doesn't make sense, but USA Today doesn't make sense so who knows? I guess we'll find out soon enough.
WSJ is fine for business news if you don't look at the editorial page, which has been the case for decades.
USA Today was "TV that you can wrap fish in."
Surely the NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc realize that at $10 per month per paper, few people are going to maintain more than one or two subscriptions. Since the incremental cost of online distribution is nearly zero, this means that the news outlets are leaving money on the table.
Make everyone's first subscription cost $10, then provide access to additional papers for 50¢ each. Or use some other type of sliding scale—I'm sure there are numbers that would make sense.
The alternatives are either that a major tech company comes along and does it for them (as Apple is attempting), or that all the papers ultimately merge into 2-3 huge outlets. I don't like either of those outcomes.
Plenty of people, offices and venues do. What's more likely, and the direction we've been heading for years, is we see a population that consumes paid journalism and the broader market that has ad-supported filler.
I don’t know how people think they’ll survive with a tenth of the revenue. Maybe you think three times the number of people will subscribe so then a third of the revenue?
So then what? Publications look for alternative means of supplementing income. Which means ads and skewing content towards clickbaiting.
Maybe it’s fine not trying to be for everyone when not everyone values them.
But it's also possible I'm wrong—I certainly have no background on this industry. For example, someone on the TWiT podcast said the reason there's no effective "Netflix for Books" is because the industry is highly dependent on a very small number of "whales" who will buy five books per week.
What we need is a system of pay-per-view+quality news that uses a rating system to determine how much people pay for the article. Imagine a pay scale where users pay x/log(2+x/1000) cents to the service per month (where x is number of articles read, or some similar metric), and the authors/publishers of those articles split that money based on how highly the user rated each article. This would mean that someone reading 10 articles a month would pay 30 cents/mo, someone reading 10 articles a day would pay $9/mo, and someone reading 100 articles a day would pay $40/mo. At the same time, it would mean that users have an incentive to rate articles fairly, since they're charged regardless of their ratings, but better quality articles would get rated higher and get paid out more per view, incentivizing publishers to put out higher quality content and disincentivizing click bait.
Ad supported content leads to click bait and emotional manipulation. We are living in the news dystopia and only finding a way to get rid of ad supported content will save us.
This happened in the 20s too btw. Those "extra extra read all about it" boys selling newspapers by the headline caused a decrease in news quality too. Subscription news came along and saved us then. Unfortunately, there are too many different news sources to be supported by subscription services without massively fragmenting what people can read (just like video streaming services have massively fragmented what people can watch).
I'm also concerned that your ratings system would perpetuate the sort of think-piece journalism in which authors proclaim whatever their readers currently believe, as opposed to challenging their assumptions. We already see this sort of thing in what types of articles get shared on social media.
> your ratings system would perpetuate the sort of think-piece journalism in which authors proclaim whatever their readers currently believe
The idea is intended to solve the problem of low-quality news, not thought-bubbles. People will always gravitate towards their own biases, this won't solve that, nor will it make it worse. It could make it a bit better for people who are actually looking to escape their biases, because those people could rate articles more highly if they actually convince them to change their views, or at least teach them about an alternate viewpoint in a non-infuriating way.
But why would pay-as-you-go be bad for the class of entertainment? The vast majority of entertainment options out in the world are pay as you go (live shows, movie theaters, vacations, restraunts, etc etc).
> Even music, which was trending towards digital purchases for a while has largely moved to all you can eat subscriptions.
Music has been an interesting outlier here because people are increasingly listening to music playlists and not hand-picking their own music. Hand-picking music is time consuming and a pain sometimes, so why not let the algorithms decide what to listen to? By contrast, people still hand-pick news articles, TV shows, movies, and things like that - and they'll likely continue to do that because they're activities that generally require engagment - whereas music is generally listened to in the background while doing something else.
The movement towards the subscription model has primarily been about improving things for businesses, not for customers. The rhetoric is "customers don't want to think about paying", but we can clearly see countless counterexamples in the world. Businesses, however, like the subscription model because it makes it easier for them to predict their revenue and it puts up a (small) barrier in place for customers to stop paying them.
However, while the subscription model is great for single items (eg high-end software) where the subscription is basically just a way to pay-as-you-go automatically, the subscription model is actually a pretty bad payment model for networks of content when you think about what it incentivizes. The user pays a fixed price for unlimited content. This incentivizes the user to consume as much as they can. A user who use the service 100 times more than another user both pay the same price. This means it necessarily excludes users who don't consume a lot, and raises the price for people who consume a below average amount. There is a deadweight economic loss there.
In addition it provides no net incentive for the subscription provider to increase the options available in the system or the quality of those options. In fact, there is an incentive to release low-quality content as filler so that their high-consuming users don't run out of content (which they do anyway). Take a video streaming service for example. If they increase the number of options available to customers, they don't earn any more money but each item available in the system gets watched less, which means owners of the content would would to be part of that subscription network less and less as the content grows. Either that or they charge customers more as the library grows - which customers wouldn't pay for since most people wouldn't actually consume more just because the library's bigger.
What results is that video subscription services have necessarily fragmented and will stay fragmented for as long as people keep drooling over the subscription model. People are locked into one or two networks of content which are primarily all they watch. They don't have access to other content without paying significantly more or making a burdensome leap of ending service with one network and beginning with another (which loses them access to content they had there).
News is even worse, where individual newspapers have their own siloed subscription services. That's great if you read most of the content on there, but its terrible if you just want to read an article someone sends you ever once in a while. There's some more aggrigated news services that have come out recently, but these will also have the fragmentation issues that video streaming has because of the subscription model.
As for video services, lots of people argued against the $100/month bundle as augmented by the $5/each Blockbuster payment. I actually prefer the current fragmented services plus a la carte even if it's annoying sometimes. Certainly saves me money.
ADDED: >In addition it provides no net incentive for the subscription provider to increase the options available in the system or the quality of those options.
Not sure I understand that. While there's certainly inertia, if your subscription isn't providing me with value, I cancel it. (Some companies make it difficult to do so but that's a separate issue.)
I think a lot of people believe its saving them money, but in reality its actually costing more and at the same time lower quality than it would be with a correctly-priced pay-per-view model. You can't compare to blockbuster because that system was old and there have been many things that can bring the cost down these days.
> if your subscription isn't providing me with value, I cancel it
Yes, that's why streaming video services have some quality content, and its why they price them so cheaply - so its worth it despite the fact that most of the content is low quality and lacks a variety of quality content. If they increased the options available, they'd have to charge more money than its worth to cover the costs of that extra content. If they increased the general quality, same thing. There is a limit to how large these subscription content networks can get before it must fragment.
No, in the same way that Netflix is different from renting movies on Amazon Prime. It’s SVOD vs TVOD vs something like youtube without a subscription that is AVOD. There’s a reason that Spotify is hugely popular while it’s a lot less common to buy an album on iTunes. It’s the reason AYCE KBBQ and buffets are popular. Even if pay-per-use ends up cheaper, flat-rate subscriptions are easier for people to see value in, and they can consume without concern of overages.
Yes, but the reason is not the subscription model. People like variety. The subscription model actually prevents good variety in a network. Read my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27804511 . You bring up Spotify, but music is a fundamentally different product than news or videos.
> flat-rate subscriptions are easier for people to see value in
What you're saying is that people are getting duped into paying higher prices for lower quality content. While you might be right, this isn't a point in favor of the subscription model.
> they can consume without concern of overages
There is no reason a service can't help a user track their consumption and let the user configure a warning if they're hitting the configured limit. The subscription service is a very inflexible way of ensuring people stay within their budget.
The real problem is that pay-per-view content is massively overpriced. Of course people opt for subscription services when for the price of 3 pay-per-view movies, they can watch 30 movies on a subscription service. If pay-per-view content were priced commensurately with subscription services, it would change the game.
People have also had an entire century to become inured to utility pricing.
A better comparison might be data-limited cell phone plans. Even though spectrum and network capacity are legitimately scarce resources (especially in the early days), basically all of the carriers have been forced to offer some kind of quasi-unlimited data plan, where you might be throttled but you won't be charged overages, or you won't be charged on specific streaming services.
The only exception I know if is Goodreads, where people seem to put a great deal of effort into their ratings (which I find super interesting). You might argue this is a better analog because the audience would have more overlap with newspaper readers, but people aren't going to put as much thought into a short article versus a long novel.
Because youtube videos aren't rewarded based on votes. People generally want creators to be rewarded for their work when its good, and they'll almost certainly put more effort into rating if they know that's how those creators get rewarded.
Also, you seem to think that youtube's voting system has failed somehow. In what way do you think its failed? You do know that youtube doesn't recommend things to people based on upvotes, right? Views are what youtube cares about, not votes. Votes are mostly just for show on youtube.
Normal people being informed today costs 0 bucks.
In the US, there simply isn't enough quality news available for free, and many essential stories and reporting are behind paywalls (especially the NYT and Wash Post).
Yes, at the cost of being inundated with ads and being informed by low quality "journalism" that is really just entertainment in disguise. By paying 0 bucks we need to spend more time reading things to be well informed, or we'll just accept being less informed by news that's more entertainment than journalism.
> High quality public news is also still available
Sure, but increasingly you need to pay for it or you need to be good at finding it. Not everyone has the skills to sus out good journalism, and almost nobody can avoid their time being wasted by garbage articles and click bait. This is the price we're paying.
uBlock or AdGuard Home for everything on your network does pretty well at cutting out most ads.
Cable linear TV was / still is expensive and gates trash content behind unskippable awful advertising, so paying is not always the solution. We must demand better journalism, even though everything seems to be trending toward entertainment and sensationalism.
Sure, adblock is nice, but its kind of irrelevant to the discussion. The fact that you block ads doesn't change the fact that most news is paid for by ads (that people who don't have adblock get). In fact, adblock probably reduces the quality of news even further, because the people who don't have adblock are probably less smart on average than the people who do use adblock - and thus the articles who cater to that group more earn more money.
> paying is not always the solution
You're creating a straw man here. Did I say that "paying is the solution"? No I didn't, I said ad-funded news has lead to the trashy news dystopia we live in today. The reason is not because of ads per se - its because these pages get paid on a per click basis. If you click, they get paid, even if the article ends up sucking. This incentivizes massive amounts of low quality click bait. If there were such a thing as an advertisement mechanism where low-quality content wouldn't get paid, that would solve the problem without paying.
> We must demand better journalism
Sorry, but you don't just get better things because you demand it. We live in a world where the only way to actually make your own tiny individual impact on journalism quality is to purchase subscriptions to quality news sources and to avoid clicking on anything online. Ever. If you're still going to click on things online, you're not demanding better journalism in a way that will make an impact. And how many people do you expect to do that? Very few. I doubt you'll do it yourself, even tho you care about getting better journalism.
What we need are better tools that allow people to only give money (ad revenue or otherwise) to publishers of quality journalism.
So why share any revenue with the smaller papers?
There is precedent for the major papers working together in markets where it makes sense to do so, see the International Herald Tribune.
It’s not easy to differentiate the product enough to collect maximum money from the both groups.
But I do agree with your thinking. For me it would be almost enough if I could get access to just those articles posted on HN for $10/month (across many newspapers and with no risk of falling to some subscription trap).
But if you are the NYT or WSJ, you believe, reasonably, that one of those subscriptions will be for you.
I agree generally. Aren't micropayments supposed to solve this problem?
With that principle, I always figured that the endgame of the Gannet company would be to make their local papers USA Today with a small local supplement folded in.
Maybe the same applies online-- you'll buy usatoday.com for national news, and also subscribe to a local rag. Over time, the local papers may scale back the national/global/wire service stuff.
As the sibling notes, a lot of USA Today's were left outside hotel rooms at one point when that was common in an era where the WSJ was very oriented towards finance types and was deliberately stodgy. (There was also the International Herald Tribune internationally which was at least at one point, a joint effort of the Post and the Times.)
But, yeah, an American political junkie might get the Post and the Times today. I'm not sure why someone would pay for USA Today. It completely generic in digital form.
“Does anyone actually want to read any of these specific sites that badly?”
-> The Times reported a total of 7.8 million subscribers across both print and digital platforms, with 6.9 million coming for online news or its Cooking and Games apps. The company added 301,000 digital customers for the first three months of the year…”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/business/media/nyt-new-yo...
There’s a market for good paid content and there has been for 400+ years.
Substack is valued at close to $1B because people will pay for good writing.
Agreed. And furthermore, why haven't TV/film streaming services also not realised this. Is it because it isn't true? Do people really pay for Disney+, Netflix, and Hulu all at the same time?
Never used it, tho. I prefer reading HN comments instead of articles, because news nowadays is huge longrid with only ~10% of usable information in it. I'm not ready to pay $10 for such thing, IMO.
It seems like it would be impossible to start a news business off the ground today without a powerful investor, which means the publication would have some intentional bias.
I don't think there is anything to be done to save these larger newspaper organizations. I used to consume them but their signal/noise ratio is now so low I wouldn't read them even if they were free. The sacrifices in integrity and quality to satisfy low attention span, lowest common denominator readers signed their death warrant. No longer journalists, they transformed into ideologically reinforcing entertainment.
For example much of the political reporting and conversation is being moved to longer form chat online.
My question based off of that, are 29% of Americans funding paywalled media?
The more people will do that - the quicker this annoying business model die. Unless your content will help me to make money (courses, tutorials, specific investment analysis) I aint' spending a penny on you.
In a controversial note - I'd totally pay monthly subscription to some pirating service that extracts content from behind paywall, strip pages from ads and provide access. This will be valuable service.
Ideally I'd prefer to have a single legit service aggregating dozens of good content sites of my choice and pay monthly flat fee to access.
But because each of them are fighting with each other and each of them have their version of infestation with ads, paywalls, popups, content restrictions, accounts requirements - I don't envision any legit service to make peace with all that nonsense.
Pirate who will equalize all this into clean subscription based content is going to make a killing and I'll totally pay for it.
I am willing to invest into clear message that I don't like their current business model. I also want ads-based sponsorship of anything to die. I'm willing to put money where my mouth is. Let them sort it out.
I'd be willing to pay more for legit service to do all above - i just don't envision it happening any time soon.
They do have lots of "tabloid" content not worth paying for, however there are some interesting bits.
In my strange way of thinking it's just another form of civic duty.
That said, subscription fatigue is real. WaPo, Economist, Atlantic, NYT Food, a few specific interest magazines, and my local online newspaper starts to add up. I'd love to read more from some of the other major metros where I still have family, but I can't justify another $20-30 a month for the handful of articles I would actually read.