Hacker News Reader

Comment by simplehuman | Hacker News Reader

For a start we need to get rid of this ad driven model. But this is not going to happen because people are addicted to free. Its like a drug.

View on HN

Wikipedia, university pages, a lot of blogs and imageboards all work without advertising. It is not so much that people are “addicted to free”, it is that the showing of ads is so very easy and profitable. Site operators are to blame here.

Nope, just that quality content that's worthy of my $$ is mostly produced by bloggers that don't really ask for money. How many sites are there that are as good as LWN?

Ad network business is a big balloon soon to explode as the amount of actual customers you get is so little. Guess most advertisers know this but still publish ads because they're not too expensive to not do. When is the last time you willingly clicked an ad? I believe in the past ten years I only willingly clicked less than five ads.

Advertising isn't just about clicks/conversions. It's also about brand/product exposure.

If the exposure is an ad in a space provided by sth like the deck network, certainly. But otherwise it's not a positive exposure.

Do you really want a world without professional journalism? I know it's en vogue to hate the "mainstream" press, but a world without institutions that can be somewhat trusted will be open season for demagogues.

I don't really hate professional journalism, I hate news. I only read them because I have to. This aside, the actual, relevant problem is not what is en vogue to hate or not, but that the trustible institutions take the easy route and instead of producing nice subscription models and actual, valuable content with good, concise, precise wording and without clickbait posts; they just push sub-par stuff and ads to feed off of them. If there was a NYT or L'espresso for my country I'd subscribe.

I think a world in which all the trustworthy institutions hide all their content behind paywalls and so most people rely entirely on clickbait stuff from sources that don't have reputations to live up to is even worse...

So many "all"s used for a single sentence. They can have a free headline+summary feed, or a paid daily digest, or paid columns+digest and rest gratis. Monetising content is more honest, more predictable and better for the users' privacy and their bandwidth than ads, and I'm telling that I'd buy if they'd supply. At the end of the day, collecting, verifying, editing and publishing news is not free for the news agencies, it's not produced for free and need not be free at all.

So many "alls" (two!) because plenty of paid-for content already exists alongside the free media, and thus your principal complaint is that many news organizations have the temerity to cater to and profit from people that don't want to pay for news as well.

And if the objection is to people being misinformed by clickbait headlines and sensationalised takes on events in articles, I'm struggling to imagine anything that could be more inclined to worsen that situation than increasing the proportion of respectable news organisations that tell people they can pay a monthly fee to access the articles behind the headlines or bugger off and read Breitbart's take on it instead...

You can have free without ads if the consumers shoulder the distrubtion themselves. Decentralized p2p content distribution is the key. The more people consume want it the more will contribute resources.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com