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Comment by n0us | Hacker News Reader

The Washington Post and the New York Times both seem to have excellent engineering teams and both of their websites are in my opinion some of the best news sites that I've seen on the web. (Vox is also very nice in my opinion though they do not have ssl support apparently)

I would gladly pay a netflix-like subscription that gives me a "pass" to top news sites with no advertising. I just don't want to manage a dozen subscriptions to sites and it's difficult to choose between the different options that they offer like "tablet, web, paper" "web, paper" "tablet only" etc. Just take the difficulty away and give me access to the content in whatever format I want, with an addon fee for print delivery.

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I said this on HN yesterday, but I'll repeat again since it's VERY relevant.

I'd like the subscription, as you mention too!

What I'd like even more (for voluntary payment) is a subscription that divvies up my monthly 'budget' according to the % of the time I spent on different sites. Say I spend 50% of my browsing time on Nytimes, 30% on HN and 20% on New Yorker, and my monthly allocated budget is $20. Then NYT gets $10, HN gets $6, NYer $4, etc.

Or perhaps, a monthly budget where the money is deducted for subscription sites, per article/time whatever. Once my budget is finished, I see 'normal' web like everyone else does.

I don't really care about ads, but maybe people who don't want to see ads could pay like, 2x as much, etc.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of innovation in this field. Perhaps it's the difficulty of integrating everything in one place?

Edit after reading the comments: Google contributor just removes ads instead of getting you 'special pass' right? Do the site owners get paid for the 'eyeballs' from the subscribers?

Sounds nice in theory, but I'd be concerned about having my reading habits tracked by yet another Central Scrutinizer. I already block ads mainly to avoid creepy and invasive behavior by the ad networks, as well as the malware that seeps through said networks. I am not going to opt-in to mass surveillance.

It doesn't have to be.

Assume registration includes specifying a list of "preferred publishers" (like what aggregated news apps ask on sign up in order to curate your feed)

Add a client side tracker (i.e. browser plugin) with the ability to track the page views on each site.

One of three options:

1) no tracking - split the distribution evenly among your preferred sites

2) offline/batch tracking - at the end of the month, submit an aggregated percentage breakdown of your sites

3) online tracking - sent to the server in real time (i.e. Central scrutiniser)

And if you're really particular about tracking, it could just be an API, and you can write to it whatever data you want to share.

Why do you assume it must be an external, centralized service? why not a browser plugin that you plug in your paypal email into?

Google Contributor [1] is basically that.

[1] https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

But it really isn't. It blocks only ads served by Google and only blocks some of them.

> Do the site owners get paid for the 'eyeballs' from the subscribers?

Google contributor basically puts you in the same position advertisers are, you bid to advertise to yourself, and if you win, you don't see any ads :)

In addition:

1) Google Contributor requires you to whitelist Google ads

2) AFAIK - you will see at least 50% of the ads

I think Flattr comes very close to that. You set a monthly budget and then "flatter" the sites you like. The budget is divided among these sites.

Flattr is a Sweden-based microdonation provider founded by Peter Sunde and Linus Olsson and launched in March 2010.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr

Also, different countries in Europe solve this problem differently. Some have this system, such as Piano.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Media

Interesting idea, tough it incentivizes publishers to prioritize addictive content over valuable content.

That already happens now as advertising is mostly sold on impressions seen.

Those bundled subscriptions for journalism keep failing. There have been a lot of startups that have tried. Consider Kachingle:

http://kachingle.com/

The criticism that was made of Kachingle is actually relevant for this whole category of startup. You should read "The Limits Of Tip Jar Journalism":

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/kachin...

There are 3 main problems:

1.) there is an abundance of news sites in English

2.) there are not enough people who want to pay for news

3.) Google takes about 45% of all online global advertising

The situation is different for non-English publications. I know, for instance, there are limited number of fashion/news magazines aimed at women in Poland, and Polish women, all over the world, are willing to pay to support those magazines. So there are 5 or 6 fashion/news magazines in Polish that are doing well.

But in English? There are tens of thousands of such publications and there is not enough money for them all.

I think you underestimate how much you need to spend to counter the amount websites make on advertising.

I did a back-of-the-envelope-style calculation at one point (I can't recall my source data anymore now though), and basically you'd need to pay something like $120 a month for websites to end up with the same amount of cash as with ads.

120/month per user would be something along the lines of 1.3/visit (assuming ~3 articles on average every day of the month). That sounds very high?

I wonder how much such big organizations spend on selling advertising (I'm now conflating with the likes of NYT that has ads in its paper version etc). If one truly went for ad-free, one would of course let all the ad-selling staff go (or let them do something else).

I'm working on a secret project to do just this. Also working on an ad network focused on better ads.

The future will be better very soon.

> I would gladly pay a netflix-like subscription that gives me a "pass" to top news sites with no advertising.

This has been tried without much adoption (e.g. https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/).

Really the problem is that newspapers make very little online, even with high numbers of ads, compared to print.

It isn't cost effective to run an online-only newspaper (with all of the extraneous costs that go into producing "news", and not "blogs"). Thus, they have a strong incentive to crazy subscription models instead of streamlining everything.

Could HN be considered an online-only newspaper? It covers a lot of stuff.

From a reader's point of view it is. On the production side, HN differs greatly as newspapers have traditionally had direct relationships with their content contributors

HN is strictly an aggregator, which is about 3-4 orders of magnitude cheaper to operate.

Google Contributor has a few major problems:

- 5-50% fewer ads isn't good enough, it needs to remove all ads.

- It's too expensive. There is no way my ad impressions add up to $10 a month.

- How is the money divided? How big is Google's cut? Needs to be clarified, ideally made user-configurable.

> - 5-50% fewer ads isn't good enough, it needs to remove all ads.

And the space where those ads would have appeared, as well.

>- It's too expensive. There is no way my ad impressions add up to $10 a month.

Do you believe that Google's description of the way it works is inaccurate, then?

"Instead of bidding on behalf of an advertiser, Contributor bids on your behalf, with the budget you set up. The Google ad auction determines when a thank you message will appear in an ad space, and how much it will cost. In the ad auction, advertisers and Contributor bid for a given ad space in real time." [0]

[0] https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/6084026

$10 per month is really low.

I remember when Contributor was in an internal beta (back then I worked at Google). Initially there were no tiers. I recall being completely shocked at how high my 'budget' had to be to stop seeing just most ads, not even all of them. It was much, much higher than $10 per month.

When I looked at the per-site breakdown it was obvious why: I spent a lot of time on sites that advertisers were willing to pay a lot to be on, like (oddly enough) Slashdot. Presumably due to the affluent, IT-budget-controlling and very tightly defined audience. My eyeballs were literally worth a lot of money and to buy them back, would therefore cost a lot of money.

It was when I started to see those figures, and I wasn't even getting an ad free web, that I realised the whole dream of using micropayments to clear the web of advertising was a non starter. Hardly anyone is going to be willing to double or triple the price of their internet subscription just to get rid of some ads, some of the time. We really have no idea just how much the web economy relies on advertising to survive.

Presumably Contributor uses tiered budgets to avoid sticker-shock and people blowing through their budget in the first few days of the month. It makes sense but they can never get rid of all ads that way.

P.S. I don't use ad blockers.

- It's too expensive. There is no way my ad impressions add up to $10 a month.

They do though. Online advertising is a ~$60 billion a year (domestic US) business undergoing very rapid ~50%/year growth rates (estimates vary wildly).

Over around 120 million households, that's about $42 per month per household.

Over 20 million households with at least an upper-middle-class income, it's even higher.

What's interesting is that about half of the US have nearly zero disposable income and are living paycheck to paycheck, and their entertainment is presently being paid for by their wealthier neighbors at the cost of collateral damage in advertising annoyance; This is a deadweight loss if you try to quantify that damage.

Most people aren't willing to pay their equal share of the numbers, but most people also don't have the money to pay it now.

It would be hilarious if you took the 20% of the country with plenty of disposable income and made them the subscription base for destroying advertising: it results in ads shown only to the people without the money to justify them, or sites which go subscription-only.

Ad impressions add up to way more than that. Online content is, in aggregate, the most expensive content you consume yet you don't notice since it's free right now.

Why is Netflix, Spotify ok for $10 but not a constant stream of content from any source online? People spend 10x more on coffee every month in some areas.

One problem is that the traditional print model is heavily subsidized by advertising – for both the Washington Post and New York Times, it's actually cheaper to get a print subscription which comes with free all-device digital access than it is to buy any combination of digital for more than a single device.

(If the ecological cost of all of that unread paper bothers you, you can put in long-duration vacation stops or, in the case of the NYT, have your paper copy sent to a school instead)

I personally don't see print media going extinct (books certainly didn't) but I'd hypothesise that availability and convenience is more important than price for the average NYT reader.

I think this is complicated by perceived fairness: normal people do not view different formats as separate products and even people who aren't particularly price sensitive will bristle at something which they see as unfair.

Since there's no way to buy an ad-free copy of the NYT, all of their existing customers have been trained to think of the fair price as what a paper subscription costs with little thought about how much of that is subsidized by advertisers.

Even high-income people are sensitive to these effects – Doc Searls wrote about a similar problem where the New Yorker's intro pricing made him feel like he was being ripped off, even though I'm certain the cost isn't a noticeable financial issue for him:

https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2015/05/23/dear-magazines-...

I've posted about this before, but charging people to remove ads is a difficult business proposition. It disproportionately devalues the remaining ad impressions. Advertisers aren't likely to pay much to reach the people who are, almost by definition, either too cheap to buy a pass or not invested enough in the site to care. It also creates dangerous incentives: the site will make more short-term revenue in proportion to how annoying the ads are, and the core readers won't even see them to complain.

In practice, I think you'd be limited to selling network ads, which don't pay very much and rely on tracking users and building profiles to serve them targeted ads.

> Advertisers aren't likely to pay much to reach the people who are, almost by definition, either too cheap to buy a pass or not invested enough in the site to care

Are you speaking from experience and/or data, or based on logical reasoning? I'm honestly curious, so I hope this doesn't come across as a digital call-out of some kind.

To elaborate, I feel like a lot of people don't pay for news, or written content, because they expect (and can get it) for free. That doesn't mean they're not good potential widget customers.

I'm curious as to what kind of inferences advertisers make / have made about users based on their specific spending patterns. For example, while I'm sure that generally speaking someone who pays for service X may be more likely than average to pay for service Y, I would also expect that variance to grow or shrink a lot depending on the specific circumstances.

I haven't specifically tried that exact approach, but I have a fair bit of experience with ad-supported news sites.

> I feel like a lot of people don't pay for news ... That doesn't mean they're not good potential widget customers.

I'm having a hard time thinking of any advertiser who would be happy about excluding the sort of dedicated reader who is willing to pay for content online. I'm not saying the remaining ad impressions are "bad" just that they are objectively less valuable. That's why this scheme disproportionately devalues ad impressions: you remove the direct impressions from people who buy a pass and you also make the remaining impressions less valuable.

Look at how washingtonpost.com positions itself to advertisers: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/mediacenter/html/ad_was... and then imagine how much harder it would be to buy into that story if it excluded many wealthy and loyal readers.

A paywall subscription consolidator would indeed be a nice thing to have. Not sure the newspapers would give up their subscriber contact info to a 3rd party though, without some strong guarantees of privacy and continued access for internal purposes.

Check out Blendle[0] - Dutch company moving to the US soon[1] (launched in Netherlands and Germany). Can't vouch for it myself but was on HN yesterday.

[0]https://launch.blendle.com [1]http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/12/micropayment-platform-blend...

I work for a UK publisher with paywall sites. We hear (unverified) reports that micropayment revenue from Blendle is extremely lacklustre...

I have to disable JavaScript for NYT, every time I click or double click words in an article (I'm copying and pasting to reference things myself, thanks very much NYT!) they hijack my clicks and change the font size or switch articles.

Just to list some ways that advertising is better than subscriptions:

- Free, obviously

- No willpower/decision required

- Faster (due to no decision as above)

- More equal access (as wealth/income don't determine how much content you get)

- Anonymous (yes more than payments which come with your cc number, address, etc)

I do think online ad formats have gotten worse but the model itself works. It's the implementation that needs a severe restructuring today and is finally in progress due to the growing consumer power through adblocking.

I think the fundamental problem is that these companies would want to own the customer relationship, rather than simply be a branded content provider for some pay in someone else's solution.

I think news paywalls need to be bundled in not with other newspapers but other subscription services.

I'd kill for a Netflix/Spotify/choose-your-newspaper all in one bundle.

Do you like the fact that when you pay for cable you get a bunch of channels you never watch?

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