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Comment by SSLy | Hacker News Reader

And that cost is subsidized by ads. Otherwise it'd cost $10.

I can only speak for the newspaper in my country. I never had a newspaper which had ads that

- track my reading habits - were blinking trying to catch my attention - started played videos I didn't want to see

If a news website wants to make money off advertising, just host simple images on your own sever. No need to load stuff from shady companies which try to grab as much information as possible.

Respectfully, if a Sunday paper has a cost of $10 apiece, you have a major cost/value ratio mismatch. No paper that reposts AP articles, 1-2 local interest articles, and a ton of user generated content is worth anything approaching $4, let alone $10.

And this is why SPIEGEL and Süddeutsche have few problems with funding their papers, and why papers just copy-pasting stuff without any actual journalistic effort do.

(And why the second category might die anyway, and ads just prolong their suffering)

So why can't they produce content worth 10$?

They do. Part of $X is paid by advertisers.

I think our content is worth $10, but of course we're a small paper, and very few people would pay $10 for it. If we paywalled our website, we'd just turn readers away and it would go counter to our mandate to inform the public.

I don't like ads, and I use an ad blocker (though with very permissive dynamic filtering rules), but we gotta pay the bills and pure subscription models rarely make sense.

Afaik, the only news agencies that work on subscriptions alone are the massive New York Times, which paywalls more than like 2 or 3 stories per user per week. Wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters make most of their money from member papers that pay into them to get access to content they otherwise couldn't afford to make. Some publications sell specifically to niches, Bloomberg has a public facing website but most of their content is only available for consumption via the infamous Bloomberg Terminal, a very expensive dedicated workstation they develop in house so people who trade, say corn futures, can access extremely realtime information and reporting on hyper specific corn stuff.

All this is to say that selling subscriptions to the general public only works if you're the New York Times, and even then they still sell ads in print.

EDIT: hey look the times does have ads. They're pretty unobtrusive but they're there.

I don't mean to disparage your content or get into an argument over the 'worth' of an infinitely reproducible good, or even the labour theory of value - but is your content really 'worth' $10 if such a small number of people would pay that much for it? Usually you'd have people offering more than the actual value and also people offering less than the actual value, but it seems that nobody is offering more than the purported worth of $10.

There isn't a way I can see around this problem short of abolishing the requirement to fund journalistic investigation and reporting and hosting.

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