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Comment by isomorphic | Hacker News Reader

> So, in the coming weeks, we will restrict access to articles on WIRED.com if you are using an ad blocker.

Good luck with that, Wired.

The people-who-will-never-pay group will split into two: People who never visit your site again, and people who up the ante in the ad-blocking escalation.

While you may think that you don't care about the people-who-will-never-pay group, the latter subgroup will release their improved ad-blocker, allowing the people-who-might-have-paid group to continue blocking ads.

I don't see this ending well for any party involved.

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$52 is way too much for a medium that occasionally publishes something good. OK, that’s just my opinion and it’s highly subjective. But I used to love Wired back in the days when Internet was booming. Nowadays they’re just too irrelevant. All that aside, I’d love a pay-per-article scheme. Give me a summary of the article and if I like it I can pay for it. Sounds much more reasonable than asking me to pay for everything.

Right. I don't read $1 worth of Wired per week. That page I just read was worth maybe $0.001 (and that's being generous). Generally, I'd be happy to match forgone ad income. I wonder how many page views it takes for Wired to earn $1.

Edit: Make that $0.01 for the page.

> I wonder how many page views it takes for Wired to earn $1.

When I read the price, I immediately wondered "what are they doing to my computer with those ads that they're making $52 a year when I read maybe four stories a year?"

Companies trying to sell subscriptions have never understood how to set prices. One thing they're not taking into consideration is that you're a lot more likely to click on an article if it costs you nothing but time. For many readers, even $1 a year isn't a good value.

> Companies trying to sell subscriptions have never understood how to set prices.

It's a dead-wood mindset, I think. Sure, I like to read a Wired article now and again. But I don't regularly hit their site. I go there based on search results, links, and so on. There are too many sites at that level for me to bother following. Let alone subscribing.

I get that $52 isn't very much. Not for me, that is. But it is for many readers. And so it's not a good choice for a basic subscription. If they don't want to bother with per page pricing, they could at least offer multiple subscription levels.

According to undisclosed sources, a user gives around $1 per year to an editor of this kind, so yes, it's a massive difference!

I'd love to see a widespread adoption of micro payment schemes. It looks like BT could make that quite easy to do. I don't know the technical aspects of what a system like that would entail, but it could unlock gated articles, serve as a voluntary tip jar, or even a system where a preset amount of tokens/coins get distributed evenly across the participating sites a user visits.

I've been working on the idea for a similar system for years. The barrier to entry it mammoth.

I'd buy into your idea with one addition: A "Refund" button at the bottom of the article that I can click to get my money back if the content ended up being low quality. That's a "No questions asked, no arguments given" refund, and it is my sole judgement as to what constitutes crappy quality.

That might buy the publisher (a) some credibility, and (b) an incentive to publish decent quality articles and not clickbait headed by misleading summaries.

Might some people abuse it? Sure. Probably. But I think that a large majority would not. Most of us do get it that people need to get paid.

The refund option isn't fair for the publisher. When you visit a restaurant do you get a refund if you don't like the food? Or a theater? I don't need a refund, if I pay for a few articles and they prove to be crap I won't visit the medium again. Besides we're talking about cents here, it's not like you bought a Picasso only to realize after a couple of months that you don't really like it.

> When you visit a restaurant do you get a refund if you don't like the food? Or a theater?

Weeeell, some people do exactly that (and have done since the beginning of time, as popularized in folk songs). The iOS AppStore does that, and that's also "pennies". Amazon does that. It's no small part of their success.

It's a question of self-belief. A seller who is confident about the quality of his delivery will not mind guaranteeing refunds, because chances are that very few people will take him up on it. Considering your costs are pretty much the same whether you serve 10,000 or 1,000 webpages, it doesn't really matter if you get 9,995 or 995 refunds.

I think you have a good point, but I would liken it to: If I go to a restaurant, and they give me raw chicken, then no, I'm not going to give them my money.

I guess, it's a bad analogy, as food that makes you sick is easier to discern than "shoddy article with no journalistic integrity"

Maybe if it was implemented in a different way, like a running tally for a month for which you are billed. You read an article, then decide whether or not you are willing to pay for that article. At the end of the month you get a bill for the amount that you agreed to. Kind of like the 'pay what you will' but with a set asking fee per article.

Yep. Facebook makes about $1 per user per month.

I think they're betting the group of people who pay them $52/year will more than make up for it, at least in the short term.

They may very well be in for a rude surprise. You can bet they will roll this out with a big name writer's article (Neal Stephenson has written for wired before, that would be a good candidate) to maximize the conversion. If they start it out with a bunch of junk they'll effectively tell people 'save your money'.

I have found out that I try and access a Forbes article about once a week from my cellphone. I've also found that I don't care about any of the links enough to whitelist it. I haven't shared a Forbes link with anyone since then.

if I care I just open it in pr0n tab

Exactly. I for one will be one of the people who will stop visiting the page altogether since it doesn't provide that much of a content for me personally.

"Good luck with that, Wired."

I can only see this as an act of desperation. They can't possibly think people are going to sign up for $1/mo subscriptions ... they must know that will happen fewer than 1000 times ever.

The other half - restricting their content from the exact audience that they supposedly represent ...

I feel sorry for them - they must be completely backed in a corner with no good options.

Why would Wired care about people that use ad blockers and never visit their site again? They're really no value to Wired so why expend resources on them? I have no problem adding Wired.com to my whitelist because I enjoy their articles.

>I don't see this ending well for any party involved.

I would get used to this. Ad blockers are relatively easy to defeat and if that 20% figure starts getting higher we'll start to see more and more sites employ these countermeasures.

>Why would Wired care about people that use ad blockers and never visit their site again? They're really no value to Wired so why expend resources on them?

Blocking users that use ad blockers and will never visit their site may potentially block a significant chunk of their intended audience. That audience may then share interesting articles with others who are not running ad blockers. I would assume that the cost of serving a single article to a portion of users who will not view ads may be insignificant in comparison.

Blocking a significant chunk of their audience that doesn't pay for the content they produce, in any way, while expending their resources is of little concern to sites that make their money from advertising.

Your comment doesn't make any sense?

Don't view ads. Wired doesn't care about you. You contribute nothing back anyway.

So by making it a little harder, at least some of those people with morals will be pushed in the right direction to pay or white list ads for free content.

> some of those people with morals

As opposed to those without morals who won't white list the trackers or pay up?

As opposed to those moral upstanding citizens that run the advertising industry?

I don't think that the 'morals' bit needs to be in there, in fact it would be stronger without.

They are asking, please stop using our content without giving something back. We need something from you to continue. Here are two options. Payment, or ads that we'll try and keep ok.

The response is, we'll weaponize and win.

Or excuses about how I don't contribute anything but might bring in someone who does, so how dare you. You are going to fail.

These are not evidence based arguments. It's not to hard to block Ad Block users.

Other media companies have survived with paywalls AND ads.

And even if it doesn't work out, Wired can pull back and at least say they tried.

It's the self righteous behaviour about it that's immoral. The glee at that they might fail. This can be read both above and below the lines.

We don't want to bet on their content being good enough that it's worth so much money.

And honestly, if there really is a wall that isn't casually circumventable, then I just won't read it. I don't care enough to pay.

If they curated some constantly brilliant content, I'd jump on paying them. But as it is, I rarely end up there anyway.

> Payment, or ads that we'll try and keep ok. The response is, we'll weaponize and win.

You really got to realize this is not about showing ads, ie. some plain jpg/gifs--which a lot of people would accept--but loading tons of tracking scripts that slow you down and violate your privacy. So yeah, I'm gonna protect against that, I don't deem it as an acceptable choice.

I'm not sure about that. I'm right there with you, but I'm skeptical whether it's a majority opinion. Does anybody have numbers on that?

How's the weather up there on that tall horse, mister?

They could come up with a better payment option. They could accept micropayments of some sort. Even an anonymous deposit-based system. Then they could quote me an ad-auction based price, and give me the option of entering an account number and password.

>They are asking, please stop using our content without giving something back.

They are asking to violate your privacy by feeding your personal information to an ad network. If they were clear about the exchange they expected (personal info for articles), then people wouldn't be so harsh on them. It's pretending that their proposition is just seeing a little ad that's misleading to the point of being immoral.

>It's the self righteous behaviour about it that's immoral

I wouldn't call people being upset that wired has made this anti-privacy decision to force people into an all or nothing subscription self-righteous because it's not unfounded. This is a big middle finger to anyone who cares about privacy.

This isn't a moral argument. This is advertising. Less traffic overall will be bad in the long term. There are no two ways about that.

So true.

It is shortsighted to value your readers only for their capacity to view and click advertisements.

Readers also act as distribution nodes, sharing content that they find compelling with others who may or may not use ad blockers.

Building walls will result in fewer readers, and as you've noted, less traffic will be bad in the long term...

Odd how working for exposure is decried when business owners want designers or devs to do it, but grand when we want publishers to do it.

Exposure IS worth something and a business that pays a team of analysts and other professionals ought to be in a position to access this and decide accordingly. In this case in the long run something is better than nothing which is what wired will end up with.

As a publication they have little to offer to justify their high subscription cost and the portion of people interested in tech who don't use an ad blocker will eventually be the empty set.

Alternatively they could offer tasteful text and image ads served from their own domain and many people would be willing to allow them.

I'm enjoying the meta - ad machine that sometimes writes about ads writing about its own new ad plans.

So tech is having a shake-out at the moment - many assumptions being questioned, many business models being challenged, many unicorns revealed as dead horses.

Considering how little of genuine value these businesses contribute - including Wired - I'm not sure they're going to be heavily mourned if they disappear.

Is anyone really going to mind much if the Distraction Economy dies over the next few years?

people with morals

Nice.

You might take a moment to consider that some of us who block ads are more concerned about the morality (read: more or less utter lack thereof) of the a̶d̶v̶e̶r̶t̶i̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ trackers than we are the revenue some arbitrary site may or may not lose from missing our impressions before you start casting stones wildly about like that.

I'd probably be very willing to consider whitelisting sites who worked with advertisers that didn't run tracking programs most of the Three Letter Agencies in the West would kill to access — if they didn't already have behind-the-scenes arrangements with them. But that question is probably pretty moot at this point, isn't it?

I prefer the term "online surveillance industry"

So, clearly, you instead just directly pay the authors/etc when you can, right? Or does that all conveniently fall by the wayside in your crusade?

When they give me a way to, yes, I actually do. I pay for recurrent subscriptions, plural, to sites that offer and warrant it. At least one of them has been running for a decade or more.

Regardless, calling it a "crusade" is the same kind of argument-poisoning that the GP uses with his "people with morals" quip. If you can't have a discussion without resorting to that kind of rhetoric — term used very damned loosely — then, personally, I don't think you've got much of a point.

"crusade: lead or take part in an energetic and organized campaign concerning a social, political, or religious issue."

Apparently using correct words is now argument poisoning charged rhetoric.

Okay.

Sorry if you don't like when the definitions of words match what you are doing.

"If you can't have a discussion without resorting to that kind of rhetoric — term used very damned loosely — then, personally, I don't think you've got much of a point."

Let's look at who is using rhetoric here: "morality (read: more or less utter lack thereof) of the a̶d̶v̶e̶r̶t̶i̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ trackers than "

Yeah, i guess i couldn't agree more with you.

> So, clearly, you instead just directly pay the authors/etc when you can, right?

Yes, if the content is good enough to warrant paying for a subscription.

> Or does that all conveniently fall by the wayside in your crusade?

Nope, and there's no reason to muddy the waters with terms like crusade.

"Yes, if the content is good enough to warrant paying for a subscription. "

So if it's not, you just view it anyway?

"Nope, and there's no reason to muddy the waters with terms like crusade. "

It's pretty rich to make a moral argument the way the parent did and have a problem with a term like crusade, which is a precise and correct term to describe this.

> > "Yes, if the content is good enough to warrant paying for a subscription. " > So if it's not, you just view it anyway?

Yes, because I decide what authors and publications I choose to support based on what they publish. You might think I'm "taking free samples too far", but you can always flick through a magazine before buying it in a store -- what is the difference here? Paying for a publication when you have no idea what they produce is just being a bad consumer.

> > "Nope, and there's no reason to muddy the waters with terms like crusade. "

> It's pretty rich to make a moral argument the way the parent did and have a problem with a term like crusade, which is a precise and correct term to describe this.

Well, to be fair GP made a similar moral argument, so I guess they also have a crusade?

"Well, to be fair GP made a similar moral argument, so I guess they also have a crusade? " Sure. I don't discriminate.

Of course you think people who block ads are engaged in a "crusade": you work for an advertising company.

So pay for WIRED. What's the problem?

Paying for Wired does nothing to ensure you won't be tracked anyway.

"Wired doesn't care about you." isn't true at all. Just because a person who is blocking ads may not generate any revenue directly, they may share the article with someone who doesn't block ads.

Losing 20% of their audience may have really painful effects on their reader network.

Yup, which would in turn affect their advertising since advertisers generally sites with the most traffic.

I guess they have estimated the impact on revenue that would cause and realised it's minimal.

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