Hopefully this is the start of that stupid trend finally dying off. How many publications have cut off the nose to spite their face, and completely alienated their reader base with paywalls at this point?
DAUs === money. And the fact that management in the legacy media companies can't comprehend this is mindblowing.
The fact that random internet posters think they know more about the P&L of media companies than the executives running the organizations is endlessly entertaining.
You may be right but, then again, organizations do go out of business every day and those reasons are usually that they were persisting with a business model that most other sane people thought was doomed to fail.
Yes, it's strange that any business manages not to make money, because obviously the people running them are the best people making the best decisions, because in the best possible world, who else could they be?
> random internet posters
This is solipsism. Just because people are random to you doesn't mean they're random to themselves. You could literally be arguing with an executive of the company that was overruled, but you're seeing the world as full of NPCs.
So your armchair critique of the entire news industry overly simplifies a complicated problem.
>> DAUs === money.
DAUs may equal money but usually not enough.
It's not smart for any business to have only a single source of revenue (ads). The dependency on ad revenue as the primary source of income has been highly damaging for news orgs in the past. Even with steady traffic your ad revenue can fluctuate based on so many factors (health of external ad budgets in a given year or with big clients, recessions, changes in CPMs in programatic advertising, and host of others).
Subscriptions was the way to build a steady and reliable revenue stream while weathering the unpredictable ad side.
Users complain of crappy ads covering the content, and auto-playing video, and crap Taboola/Outbrain modules everywhere. Thats what usually happens when a media org depends on wholly ads.
Qz.com always struck me as a nicer-looking Business Insider but with equally shallow content. Their big pieces were always paywalled so I never knew whether the long form stuff was worth paying for or not.
yeah it should be illegal to ad / track users who have paid
given how crappy the ads ecosystem has become to browsers, if I'm paying for something, I want out of all of that
legislation should make a bright line here. I don't want to see an ad in a taxi, on an airplane, in the dentist's office, and certainly not if I've paid for nyt
maybe carve out limited 1st party tracking, maybe not
>Being able to unsubscribe without any friction is also a bit of an issue.
For a while I was known amongst coworkers and friends as "that guy who will cancel or reduce your Boston Globe subscription fee for 10 bucks." They make you call during business hours and go through a whole guilt routine where a human tells you statements implying you'd be a bad person for missing out on important news and not supporting local journalism, followed by questions prompting you to justify why you want to exhibit these antisocial traits by canceling your subscription. Then, if you didn't yield to that tactic, they beg to reduce your cost to a promotional rate of first half off, then 90% off, for 6 months. Then, finally, you can cancel and the agent says goodbye in such a way as like you just stepped on a puppy. I never found a way to get the call center to go off this script. My 'clients', empathic and intellectual Bostonians, simply could not bear to partake in this shame and/or degradement of the Globe.
You made the mistake of engaging in their dialog. I find that what works is to simply keep repeating the phrase "I wish to cancel my subscription". When they ask you why you are canceling, and you repeat your phrase, they typically just say they are filling something in.
This single-mindedness unwillingness to engage in their dialog might be interpreted as rude. But then again, their scripting is absolutely exploiting your unwillingness to be rude. Screw that.
That has not happened to me. I think an incentive for the agent might be, if it's clear you want out, they can save some time and get their calls-handled number up, by cutting out the pseudo-engagement malarkey.
My experience with the Globe seemed to indicate the agents were being graded on how many script points they hit, not on the calls-handled-per-minute. If you think about them as a defense from bleeding subscribers this makes sense. Spending 10 minutes to attempt to save a year of recurring subscription is a good deal. You don't want the agents to be efficient and handle many calls per hour.
I believe folks are operating in this general type of space, not sure if any are doing phone interface though. I think Truebill offers some kind of Unsubscribe+ for certain compatible services.
I am aware of Trim, [1,2] which has an interesting proposition. You give it your comcast type login and it pretends to be you in a support chat window. Then it repeatedly attempts to secure a reduced rate. If it succeeds, you pay Trim a portion of the long term cost savings.
After trialing the Economist and WSJ and both times having to go through all that bullshit to cancel, I'm never going to subscribe to any US publication ever again. I've never experienced anything like that with EU publishers.
The French newspaper Le Monde in France requires a printout of a cancellation form sent via physical mail with tracking to unsubscribe, even if the subscription is digital-only.
From their terms [0]: "Unless otherwise stipulated in the Special Conditions, the cancellation of a Subscription must be sent by registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt to the Customer Service department.
"A Customer who wishes to terminate their contract must print out (or copy on plain paper):
- For a digital subscription, the cancellation form is available here
- For a paper subscription or a mixed subscription (paper + digital), the form is available here
Cancellations received by Le Monde before the 15th of the month will take effect at the end of that month. Cancellations received after the 15th of the month will take effect at the end of the following month.:"
Back when the UK was in the EU, I also had to call long-distance to British newspapers to unsubscribe.
It's the same for many Canadian and US subscriptions. It's not cultural, it's common practice by newspapers. The best way to protect oneself consumer is to carefully read cancellation terms before subscribing to any newspaper or periodical and purchase subscriptions through Apple's App Store if you own an Apple device (as it lets you cancel without hassle) when you can.
Guess they finally realized the amount of revenue from a free site with ads far outweighs the diminishing viewers that pay considering the competition.
I visited QZ daily and stopped ever since the paywall. Ars Technica and The Verge have had the privilege of my eyeballs since then.
Ars Technica is on my shitlist because they chose to make their site content shift around as you scroll, to make way for ads or email lists or whatever. I don't know why devs and designers at these companies don't fix this.
>> I don't know why devs and designers at these companies don't fix this
Because they are not in charge.
The product/ad/business team could "fix" this, and then what would happen is they'd layoff some folks (usually editorial side) a few months later as the revenue drop hits home.
If you want my money, give me clear terms and make it easy to cancel. If I have to call you to cancel or guess how much I am paying every month, I will not sign up.
You need to be priced slightly less than Netflix or Amazon Prime.
They advertise $50.. for the first year. If you want my money, give me clear terms and make it easy to cancel. If I have to call you to cancel or guess how much I am paying every month, I will not sign up.
The article is literally them announcing that you don't have to pay anything.
No, it's extremely timely to discuss the wiseness of a pricing strategy that has recently been abandoned, and how it might have been successful with a change in paywall rather than its complete elimination.
> To celebrate today’s announcement, you can become a Quartz member today for just $50 for the first year. We hope you will consider joining our movement.
From the article.
If you are going to antagonistically correct me, please actually not be wrong. Correcting someone and being wrong is a special kind of annoying.
The subscription has nothing to do with reading the articles.
From the article.
"MEMBERSHIP INCLUDES:
Receive exclusive member-only newsletters
The Weekend Brief—offering analysis and insights on one big news item of the week, plus the best of Quartz. The Forecast—a look at emerging industries and trends around the corner.
Help make Quartz accessible to everyone
Your support allows us to provide a paywall-free experience to all readers and further our mission to make business better."
If you are going to antagonistically correct me, please actually not be wrong. Correcting someone and being wrong is a special kind of annoying.
If there are any QZ fans, can you recommend any great articles by them in the past year or two? It feels like a missed opportunity on this promo page here. I get what they're trying to do, and they soft-sell you into "joining their mission" but it assumes a level of familiarity with QZ. If their page gets shared (like here) because of the meta-story about dropping the paywall, it would behoove them to list a few of their top stories to try to attract new readers.
Journalism's single publication subscription business model is as absurd as ever.
I read hundreds of articles per week from dozens of journals from various backgrounds. I have three or four local newspapers I'm interested in, two or three in my mother tongue and dozens of international publications I like to read from. I tried subscribing to one of the local papers and it got boring pretty fast. I tried to subscribe to the Economist, but apart from two or three great articles per week I found them very dogmatic and I missed on all local events.
As long as there is not a serious Spotify like entrant journalism will keep dying.
Apple News is just selected highlights from papers like the WSJ (i.e. those that have their own pricy subscriptions) though, no? I've thought of giving it a try.
This is what I was going by: "Apple News editors select the most important, compelling articles and surface them in Top Stories, Spotlight, and other collections. These must-reads include everything from the latest headlines to in-depth coverage of the biggest stories of the year. An Apple News+ subscription unlocks even more premium articles and issues from the world’s best newspapers and magazines."
It makes it sound as if Apple News+ has more but not necessarily everything. In any case, I should probably give it a try.
I subscribe to Apple News+. I can't speak for the newspapers because I never looked at those, but the magazines are page-for-page reproductions of the print magazines, though some are enhanced with hyperlinks and usable tables of contents.
There are services that emerge every few years but they all ultimately fail or get repurposed. The latest was Scroll (scroll.com) that was acquired by Twitter.
It's almost certainly unrealistic to expect every publication to participate in a single all-you-can-eat digital subscription scheme--though music comes pretty close.
The traditional argument against this from Clay Shirky and probably others is [ADDED: mental] transaction costs. As soon as you're confronted with having to make a decision about whether the content behind a headline is worth paying for or not the mental calculus will often be "no."
The relative recent popularity of all-you-can-eat streaming of music and video vs. a la carte purchases would seem to support this view--although one could also argue that digital music and video purchases aren't really "micro."
Something like brave solves it, by automatically paying without you deciding or not, hiding the cost in your electrical bill, or in higher prices at cafes.
But you can have automatic payments without crypto too. Hiding payments from the UX is what's actually solving the problem
It's "solving the problem" in the sense that it's spending your money without getting your explicit approval. That does make sense in some cases--my electrical, oil, and water bill basically work that way--but they're also pretty predictable and I probably couldn't realistically reduce them all that much even if I wanted to.
ADDED: That said, it's not unrealistic to imagine a "hidden" micropayments scheme that deducts automatically and lets you know and/or just turns off if you hit some monthly threshold.
This might incentivise "below the fold" clickbait, or simply pretending that you have the answer to a query when you don't. It could also encourage splitting content and keep the user bouncing from article to article (when looking for a specific answer).
Yay. I loved Qz from the first day, but couldn't afford the subscription for how much I wanted and had time to read it. I'm really happy to have it back in my lineup, hope the advertising is tolerable. But they've always been classy, so crossing fingers it will go well for them.
64 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadI'm kidding, but that was the mentality a few years ago when everyone suddenly paywalled. "We can't sustain free!!"
DAUs === money. And the fact that management in the legacy media companies can't comprehend this is mindblowing.
> random internet posters
This is solipsism. Just because people are random to you doesn't mean they're random to themselves. You could literally be arguing with an executive of the company that was overruled, but you're seeing the world as full of NPCs.
>> DAUs === money.
DAUs may equal money but usually not enough.
It's not smart for any business to have only a single source of revenue (ads). The dependency on ad revenue as the primary source of income has been highly damaging for news orgs in the past. Even with steady traffic your ad revenue can fluctuate based on so many factors (health of external ad budgets in a given year or with big clients, recessions, changes in CPMs in programatic advertising, and host of others).
Subscriptions was the way to build a steady and reliable revenue stream while weathering the unpredictable ad side.
Users complain of crappy ads covering the content, and auto-playing video, and crap Taboola/Outbrain modules everywhere. Thats what usually happens when a media org depends on wholly ads.
It is not a simple as you think it is.
Being able to unsubscribe without any friction is also a bit of an issue.
given how crappy the ads ecosystem has become to browsers, if I'm paying for something, I want out of all of that
legislation should make a bright line here. I don't want to see an ad in a taxi, on an airplane, in the dentist's office, and certainly not if I've paid for nyt
maybe carve out limited 1st party tracking, maybe not
It should be illegal to ad / track users, period. Oh hello GDPR, I didn’t see you there.
For a while I was known amongst coworkers and friends as "that guy who will cancel or reduce your Boston Globe subscription fee for 10 bucks." They make you call during business hours and go through a whole guilt routine where a human tells you statements implying you'd be a bad person for missing out on important news and not supporting local journalism, followed by questions prompting you to justify why you want to exhibit these antisocial traits by canceling your subscription. Then, if you didn't yield to that tactic, they beg to reduce your cost to a promotional rate of first half off, then 90% off, for 6 months. Then, finally, you can cancel and the agent says goodbye in such a way as like you just stepped on a puppy. I never found a way to get the call center to go off this script. My 'clients', empathic and intellectual Bostonians, simply could not bear to partake in this shame and/or degradement of the Globe.
This single-mindedness unwillingness to engage in their dialog might be interpreted as rude. But then again, their scripting is absolutely exploiting your unwillingness to be rude. Screw that.
I am aware of Trim, [1,2] which has an interesting proposition. You give it your comcast type login and it pretends to be you in a support chat window. Then it repeatedly attempts to secure a reduced rate. If it succeeds, you pay Trim a portion of the long term cost savings.
[1]: https://www.asktrim.com/blog/trim-a-money-saving-chatbot-rai...
[2]: https://www.asktrim.com/
From their terms [0]: "Unless otherwise stipulated in the Special Conditions, the cancellation of a Subscription must be sent by registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt to the Customer Service department.
"A Customer who wishes to terminate their contract must print out (or copy on plain paper):
- For a digital subscription, the cancellation form is available here
- For a paper subscription or a mixed subscription (paper + digital), the form is available here
Cancellations received by Le Monde before the 15th of the month will take effect at the end of that month. Cancellations received after the 15th of the month will take effect at the end of the following month.:"
Back when the UK was in the EU, I also had to call long-distance to British newspapers to unsubscribe.
It's the same for many Canadian and US subscriptions. It's not cultural, it's common practice by newspapers. The best way to protect oneself consumer is to carefully read cancellation terms before subscribing to any newspaper or periodical and purchase subscriptions through Apple's App Store if you own an Apple device (as it lets you cancel without hassle) when you can.
[0] https://moncompte.lemonde.fr/cgv-en#ancre_engagement
Though I guess that isn’tEU anymore either
I visited QZ daily and stopped ever since the paywall. Ars Technica and The Verge have had the privilege of my eyeballs since then.
Because they are not in charge.
The product/ad/business team could "fix" this, and then what would happen is they'd layoff some folks (usually editorial side) a few months later as the revenue drop hits home.
If you want my money, give me clear terms and make it easy to cancel. If I have to call you to cancel or guess how much I am paying every month, I will not sign up.
You need to be priced slightly less than Netflix or Amazon Prime.
The article is literally them announcing that you don't have to pay anything.
Your moan is outdated.
If that's not timely, what do you suggest is?
From the article.
If you are going to antagonistically correct me, please actually not be wrong. Correcting someone and being wrong is a special kind of annoying.
From the article.
"MEMBERSHIP INCLUDES:
Receive exclusive member-only newsletters The Weekend Brief—offering analysis and insights on one big news item of the week, plus the best of Quartz. The Forecast—a look at emerging industries and trends around the corner.
Help make Quartz accessible to everyone Your support allows us to provide a paywall-free experience to all readers and further our mission to make business better."
If you are going to antagonistically correct me, please actually not be wrong. Correcting someone and being wrong is a special kind of annoying.
I can only write what I mean. I can't fix your mental model of what I write.
If there are any QZ fans, can you recommend any great articles by them in the past year or two? It feels like a missed opportunity on this promo page here. I get what they're trying to do, and they soft-sell you into "joining their mission" but it assumes a level of familiarity with QZ. If their page gets shared (like here) because of the meta-story about dropping the paywall, it would behoove them to list a few of their top stories to try to attract new readers.
I read hundreds of articles per week from dozens of journals from various backgrounds. I have three or four local newspapers I'm interested in, two or three in my mother tongue and dozens of international publications I like to read from. I tried subscribing to one of the local papers and it got boring pretty fast. I tried to subscribe to the Economist, but apart from two or three great articles per week I found them very dogmatic and I missed on all local events.
As long as there is not a serious Spotify like entrant journalism will keep dying.
It makes it sound as if Apple News+ has more but not necessarily everything. In any case, I should probably give it a try.
Apple News+ has two dozen local newspapers, and hundreds of magazines from around the world for $10/month.
Browsing through random magazines was how I found out I have an interest in bird watching.
Today I learned that Toronto and Winnipeg are in the US.
Pay $0.05 to read an article.
The relative recent popularity of all-you-can-eat streaming of music and video vs. a la carte purchases would seem to support this view--although one could also argue that digital music and video purchases aren't really "micro."
But you can have automatic payments without crypto too. Hiding payments from the UX is what's actually solving the problem
ADDED: That said, it's not unrealistic to imagine a "hidden" micropayments scheme that deducts automatically and lets you know and/or just turns off if you hit some monthly threshold.
- pay a variable amount to the website you visit, based on how many visits and time you spent on;
- pay a fixed amount to a website of your choice;
Both options can be enabled at the same time, and the minimum number of visit, or the minimum length of the same, is adjustable;
Flattr[0] should be similar with fiat currency.
[0] https://flattr.com/