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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

In fact, I think the author is underestimating the impact, right here: "Of course, making this change will have a dramatic impact on your revenue for single-visit traffic, because you basically have to design your ad model to work completely differently from how it works today."

No, it will basically make a newsmedia site unprofitable. I think it is the EU that has not fully thought this through. Most of the news industry is already sickly, financially, and they mostly have no model other than advertising (with a very few exceptions). The reason all this data got collected, was to try to make the advertising valuable enough that they could sell it. It may be that it never really worked, but it sure won't work without it. I think either the EU will backtrack on this once they see that Google and Facebook can easily force people to consent (because people consider those websites too valuable to do without), but most other advertising-supported media cannot; or they will see that the long-term impact of this is that it accelerates the current death spiral of newsmedia, as all ad spending goes to Google and Facebook and almost no one else.

I leave it as an open question as to whether this would be a good or bad thing.

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> No, it will basically make a newsmedia site unprofitable. I think it is the EU that has not fully thought this through. Most of the news industry is already sickly, financially, and they mostly have no model other than advertising (with a very few exceptions).

We have publicly funded broadcasters in most EU countries. The ad-supported news sites, on the other hand, are generally doing more harm than good.

News outlets existed before the web, so they're not going to be threatened by breaking the ad-supported website model. If anything, the traditional newspapers will be saved by this, because if free online news disappears, people will start buying newspaper subscriptions again.

> I think either the EU will backtrack on this once they see that Google and Facebook can easily force people to consent

They can't. The consent has to be for a specific purpose.

You don't see the potential problem if the only media that is able to exist is that which is state sponsored?

You may be happy with the state sponsored options now, but will that always be the case? Would you feel the same if you living in the Soviet Union or Germany circa 1940?

How is CNN, Fox News and the sinclair group, working out for you guys?

I trust state paid media in the EU, way more than any US news media.

The reason why most EU countries have state paid media, is so that its non commercial, non partisan, and cant be bought. There are different principles in place, so government has no say, in what is broadcast/not broadcast. This also means that all political parties get the same amount of exposure etc.

CNN isn't great journalism, but it isn't the only source of information.

The problems with Fox News and Sinclair aren't based on advertising, they are based on ownership. State sponsored media isn't going to be any better under an autocrat and will in fact be worse than the situation in the US because there may not be any other options.

I don't read news but I'm sure that GDPR would hurt the smaller, independent news websites or aggregators that people find reputable more than CNN, Fox News and sinclair group. The latter at least have TV advertising. Their website is just horizontal integration for them.

New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe?

Those are three publications that have sent shockwaves around the world with their privately-funded investigative journalism.

I used to like WP but especially since Trump they've almost become a single-issue publication following every fart of that guy, and a lot of it is way overblown and they leave out "details" and overstate the importance of others. I loved their investigative series such as the one about asset forfeiture, lots of investigation; the Trump reporting instead is more "instigation" than "investigation". And I can't open the comment section any more, it's like the Fox News comment section only the opposite.

What I dislike about all news sites is that they are inconsequential. They throw sooooo many different news items at you that it really does not matter. Today's outrage will be quite forgotten two days later, or two weeks if it was something really bad. They should instead follow a few selected topics long-term and investigate what happens, and point readers to ways to affect a change. That means not reporting on each and every little thing as extensively any more but instead focus on a few things over a very long time. Just being fed thousands of news stories is McNews - you get short term satisfaction and a feeling that you stuffed something into your brain, but it feels hollow quickly because it's not very nutritious.

And don't get me started on all the Russia hype, one would think those guys in their in large parts poor 3rd world country have capabilities far beyond what the orders of magnitude richer West does not (I speak some Russian and was there a few times, also in Ukraine). That all the media jumped so willingly on this wagon is quite amazing. Note that I don't doubt they (Russian) did most of what is claimed, but when, for example, sums of money spent for the campaign are mentioned it's so little that it's obvious it could not have had a significant impact, at least not on the scale fitting the amount and the tone of the reporting. What is also missing is that they take the opportunity to talk about the many ways the US and the West has influenced internal politics of other countries. For controversial topics they usually try to give such views some room, but Russia seems so incredibly overblown and one-sided to me - so impossible, and it all looks like that recent video about Sinclair where they all say the exact same things and one can see not much effort went into that reporting. I don't know, it all feels very weird - and very wrong, like when you put on very strong glasses and the world looks weird.

Absolutely, and they would benefit from the end of ad supported, low quality but free online news. All three are subscription funded.

40% of NYT's revenue comes from ads.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/new-york-times-c...

That article is literally about 60% of their revenue being from subscriptions.

> How is CNN, Fox News and the sinclair group, working out for you guys?

Not well, and I'd add MSNBC to that list, however much I may be a dirty pinko who agrees with their editorial stance. NPR and PRI do what they can, but I really wish we had something like the BBC here, with non-corporate funding and a remit to report current events.

You do have some very reputable newspapers though (NY Times, WSJ), which are subscription funded and hence losing out to the free ad funded stuff.

German public media is not state sponsored. It’s an independent entity which is paid for by public fees (not taxes, the money never goes through the governments coffers). There are some levers that could be used to exert some level of control, for example the height of the fee is set by a commission that is partly under government control and many ex-politicians get elected into high positions, but all in all, public media is fairly well removed from the governments control here. The constitutional court watches over this pretty well, too. The system has been set up in such a fashion exactly due to the experiences under the nazi rule.

I’m currently more concerned about private media having an agenda that promotes the right.

What is the difference between a tax and a mandatory fee? If government requires me to pay a fee, it’s a tax.

While there is a law (to be precise: one in each state) mandating to pay this fee it is levied by the broadcasters themselves and the money is at no point touching accounts controlled by the government.

(As a sidenote because it's confusing for people from both sides: In Germany we differentiate between taxes which end up in the general budget and can be used for everything and fees which are purpose-bound from the moment of collection, e.g. in this case the levied money must be used for broadcasting. This differentiation is not common elsewhere.)

in german law a tax is general purpose, government can use the money to pay for any of their "services". whereas a fee has a specific purpose and cannot be used for anything else.

It's the same in the US. For example, there's a fee for getting a passport, and it's not considered to be a tax.

That's not the same, though, because it is not mandatory to obtain a passport (at least not for everyone—you may need one if you want to travel abroad, but this is viewed by the government as a non-essential privilege and not a right). Broadly speaking, in the US, a "fee" is something you pay in order to receive some form of optional service, such as the issuing of a passport, and a "fine" is something you are ordered to pay as a penalty for breaking the law. Everything else—any payment required of a law-abiding citizen either for simply existing or as a condition for carrying out law-abiding actions (e.g. owning property, earning income)—is a tax.

Of course, sometimes fees and fines can be seen as "stealth taxes" when they intrude too far into everyday life, particularly when state monopolies are involved. For example, the cost of First Class postage with USPS is technically a fee for an optional service, but the USPS monopoly on First Class letter delivery makes it at least partly a tax, to the extent that another carrier might have provided the same service for a lower price in the absence of the monopoly.

I was going to say driver's license. But I guess that's optional too. There are garbage fees or charges. Sometimes you must pay them, even if you contract with a private hauler. But you need that to get an occupancy permit. Also water/sewer fees. Unless you have a well and septic system.

Right, the line does get rather blurry when a service provider has the power to compel people to purchase their "service" whether they want to or not. Local governments like to position such payments as "fees"—it makes for better PR—but if there are penalties for opting out (such as not being permitted to occupy your own property) then I would consider it a tax. In the cases you mentioned, for example, there really isn't any significant difference between those mandatory utility "fees" and property taxes.

There is a substantial difference between fees and taxes. Fees are tied to something specific. This has two implications: First, they cannot be used for something else. Second: The height of the fee must not exceed the cost of the service and thus is at least in principle something that can be checked. For example, some public health insurance providers in germany had excess money and they had to refund that to their customers. Taxes are under no such regime. It may seem like one is like the other, but it’s really an important distinction.

> Fees are tied to something specific. ... they cannot be used for something else. ... The height of the fee must not exceed the cost of the service....

In Germany that may be true, but I was speaking of the US, where the terms are used differently. There is no expectation here that "fees" can only be used to defray the cost of providing specific services.

> but if there are penalties for opting out (such as not being permitted to occupy your own property) then I would consider it a tax.

I agree.

But I'm guessing that it's the same in Germany. They call them "fees" but they're really taxes. Except that they can't be used for other purposes.

What protections are in place to prevent an internal takeover of the organization by a political party? Let's say the Roger Ailes of Germany finds his way to the top of German public media and uses that position to tilt coverage to be more favorable to his own party, what happens?

If all your eggs are in one basket what happens when something goes wrong with that basket?

We have 12 public broadcasters that are independent of each other each with their own board (and on top working under the laws of different states ensuring that no one political institution has power over all them, the federal government is strictly barred of interfering by the constitution). 10 of those cooperate closely, share some resources, and produce a common TV station in addition to their own radio and TV stations. One is a radio broadcaster using resources of the others. The last one is a TV broadcaster that works separately. It's pretty inefficient but ensures that there is no single entity controlling everything.

Why would you only have state sponsored media? You also have private media that you pay for (newspapers).

Newspapers are mostly paid for by advertising; having readers pay is mostly important because paid circulation is a signal of level of engagement that helps sell ads (though there are free papers that are entirely as supported, too.)

Perhaps in the past, or for local media, but the big newspapers (e.g NY Times) are primarily subscription funded now.

Anyhow, newspaper advertising isn't personally targeted by tracking readers, so it's a lot more palatable.

> Perhaps in the past, or for local media, but the big newspapers (e.g NY Times) are primarily subscription funded now.

That's a direct result of online advertising eating most of the advertising dollars, making the big papers less valuable advertising venues. Cutoff the things that make online advertising uniquely valuable, like the flow of personal data that enables far more focussed targeting, and that’ll shift back.

> Anyhow, newspaper advertising isn't personally targeted by tracking readers

No, instead it's targeted by every business decision of the paper ultimately being made against a backdrop of how it impacts the papers size and demographics of readership, which is how it sells itself as an advertising venue, which ends up with the major media all being crafted to narrowly appeal to the most valuable advertising audience.

Ad supported publications aren't immune from this though, if anything they are just as susceptible.

To get the most ad revenue they need to cater to the majority. See e.g. clickbait. For stable income, finding a group and catering to their opinions/narratives is also an option, and is also not independent news. See e.g. infowars. Finally, to get any ad revenue, they need ads. Unlikely many corporations will run ads on anything that is perceived even slightly controversial nowadays. See e.g. YouTube.

I don’t think ownership structure is the key factor. More important is robustness of institutions that protect freedom of expression and freedom of the press. The Nazi government had little patience for critical private media either.

At least a determined propagandist would need to corrupt every state media in the EU, much harder than just one.

None EU media would still exist.

Several UK media outlets use paywalls already, presumably they too would remain.

How about Hungary 2020? Poland 2022?

Strong emphasis that I'm not equating those to your examples. Rather, pointing out that even a subtle version of undesirable or extreme politics can lead to a similar concern.

Given the wild political swing going on in about half of Europe, it's a legitimate concern today, no need to look back 80 years. Not to mention persistently growing censorship and criminalization of speech in more liberal countries such as France.

Publically funded TV is prone to become a propaganda tube of the government. In some cases it already has (in Poland for example). Relying on it as the only news source would be silly (relying on a single news source in general is usually silly, but even more if the government directly handles the staffing).

You should never rely exclusively on domestic media. There's always too much conflict of interest. In state media this is obvious, but it's there for private media as well.

BBC is counterargument to what you wrote. It shows that publicly founded news outlets can work without being government propaganda tube.

His argument wasn't that all state-funded news media is a propaganda machine. His argument was that it easily can become one, and you won't have a better option, since all the other news media would be choked out of existence.

> since all the other news media would be choked out of existence.

There are other private TV outlets in those countries in EU and this legislation will not change it. Lets stop being paranoid and portraying legislation that should protect our privacy as something that will destroy democracy.

That's just going to fuel nationalism.

Let me tell you how it works in central/eastern europe - ad-supported sites are financially sick, but more and more 'info' is spread out by well funded russian propaganda sites (imo they carry the ads only to seem 'legit').

They will thrive even more :(.

Is there anything that can be done about this? The whole situation is surreal. Surely it must be possible to decrease these sites impact without having to resort to censorship. It's just 21st century propaganda.

Fun fact: oligarchs in Greece have been doing this to their own country for financial gain for decades. Most Greek newspapers are mouthpieces for the interests of the great families.

> News outlets existed before the web, so they're not going to be threatened by breaking the ad-supported website model. If anything, the traditional newspapers will be saved by this, because if free online news disappears, people will start buying newspaper subscriptions again.

We're also seeing very concerning trends in the readerships and profitability of print media (because of the Web, many think). So I don't think you can use the "News outlets existed before the web" line, without much more justification.

I do not think it is bad, I think that is evolution. Ads only content is total crap. We have to teach people to pay for content. Second part is we have to teach publishers not to be greedy. Just like iTunes with music, easy small payments, not subscribtions no one wants. Maybe they could make actually some use of crypto currencies but there would have to be strong player like apple to press for consensus. Otherwise each one would like to have its own payment system and charge others for using it.

> Maybe they could make actually some use of crypto currencies but there would have to be strong player like apple to press for consensus.

I doubt it. Cryptocurrencies seem to be terrible for micropayments.

That's my point. Get rid of the free “news" sites and people will start paying for print media (and digital subscriptions) again.

Print news media was dying for decades before online media came online, and was almost entirely paid for by ads (many local publications were and are free of charge, and many of the paid ones charged primarily to have paid circulation numbers and shape the socioeconomic demographics of their audience, both of which were and are mechanisms to boost advertising revenue.)

> Print news media was dying for decades before online media came online

Any sources for this? I don't think this was the case at all at least in my part of Europe.

It may not have been the case in Europe; the decline in circulation in the print media in the US was widely discussed as long trend in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and attributed to a number of factors, most notably (but not exclusively) the wave of mergers and associated cuts in local newsrooms and non-wire-service content in the preceding couple of decades.

>We're also seeing very concerning trends in the readerships and profitability of print media

Why is it "very concerning" (assuming no financial interests) that a legacy form of media is struggly to dominate in terms of profitability?

It's concerning in relation to the gp's post. Online media is having existential problems. The gp's response to this (in part) is that we have had print media for a while. My response is that it is unclear we'll have print media for much longer, so we should still be concerned about online media (otherwise we might end up with no media).

> We have publicly funded broadcasters in most EU countries.

That would be a terrible dependency for eastern europe, you wouldn't want putin-friendly government media teaching people what to vote next.

There is only one "eastern europe" country that is really Putin friendly and it's Hungary, the rest is anti Putin.

Many urban, educated folks in Serbia see Putin as a better ally than any European leader.

I think you could find a lot of pro Putin people in EU. Some of my family members are pro Putin while I live in probably the most anti-Putin country in EU. I could elaborate more about reasons for that but I don't want to digress too much from original discussion.

That's probably due to the rather unusual recent history of Serbia I assume

We have publicly funded broadcasters in most EU countries. The ad-supported news sites, on the other hand, are generally doing more harm than good.

Why am I not surprised that a European is saying that the government-backed "broadcaster" are all so good, and evil private American new sites are bad.

this pretty much sums up the real agenda behind GDPR.

It would be better to call the bluff of these EUrocrats and see what they'll really do. Other countries can retaliate.

> Why am I not surprised that a European is saying that the government-backed "broadcaster" are all so good, and evil private American new sites are bad.

You are not surprised because you have a gigantic filter in your head that turns everything into exactly what you already expect regardless of what it is. The second part of that sentence makes it quite clear what your mindset is.

Why am I not surprised that a European is saying that the government-backed "broadcaster" are all so good, and evil private American new sites are bad.

Nowhere in that comment I can find a reference to American (evil) news sites. There are more than enough private news sites based in Europe, so I wonder why you are so hell-bent on making this an EU vs US thing. Most EU residents will read news in their own language (which in most cases isn't English).

Why am I not surprised that an American is crying over potential harm to unethical business practices of some of its most darling corporations by an EU rule to protect its citiziens.

Every time the EU implements some law or regulation regarding control of personal data and privacy, someone (an American) has to dismiss all the problems those laws are intended to address entirely, and go on to post some defensive, nationalist spiel about it being an attack on US companies.

Perhaps the problem is that these companies make their money in an incredibly unethical way that an increasing number of people are very uncomfortable with?

Stop turning this into something it isn't. All you are doing is poisoning the debate.

Privacy first, profit second. I think that is a wise decision the EU makes (disclosure: I'm an EU citizen). 'The media' surviving on a distorted revenue model is not healthy and I will not believe it is necessary to break your customers privacy in order to make a profit.

I completely disagree with this. Firstly, the media currently are too lucrative for my taste and thats why we have everyone being a journalist and publisher. By cutting down on the easy money, only those worth surviving will probably stand. This will seriously cut down on more than just ads, ie fake news and unverified sources. An alternative I'd love to see is sponsored articles as the main source of income for these. Let the corporations have to pay bigger bucks to have their posts published. This will hopefully reduce the clutter, force the media outlets to provide quality content to keep a certain level of trust and quality to attract businesses as well as a good targeted audience.

Personally I'd live to have most media completely in the dark about visitors to solely speculate on the quality of their own content. Only metric they need is daily visitor count. Everything else can be shaped by type and quality of content. A great example is HN where we have a very targeted audience due to the content it serves. It obviously also has some sponsored articles but also the indirect benefits it has on new startups and so on. Just treat it as TV marketing and not a per person customized monetization strategy.

> Firstly, the media currently are too lucrative for my taste and thats why we have everyone being a journalist and publisher.

As someone who works in media: I'm sorry, what? Publishing is certainly not more lucrative than ever, and publishing online now is a far worse business than publishing a physical newspaper pre-cable TV. The proliferation of outlets is due to lower barriers to entry and less need for capex. Plus a little bit of VC optimism.

Depends how you look at it. You are an employee in the media space, I guess you're in an ok situation but also not swimming in cash. However I thought more in the line of media companies and solopreneurs.

Everybody seems to be joining the race to the bottom by delivering more questionable content for 2 more clicks per day instead of relevant articles and real journalism. Also not to step on anyones toes, this obviously doesn't apply to every individual, however a large majority seems to be doing it. This also makes it hard for the good guys to prevail I guess.

>This will seriously cut down on more than just ads, ie fake news and unverified sources.

Why do you think so? I don't see clickbait industry seriously affected. They churn out a ton of crappy content which costs almost nothing to produce (at least if compared with reputable journalistic work), monetize it with low quality ads for shitty CPM rates, but as long as part of their content goes viral, tons and tons of pageviews allow to balance everything.

GDPR changes nothing in this business.

There has to be some limit to how low they can go cost wise in delivering crap. Also as it becomes harder to get big bucks, people will shift to other lines of crap work.

GDPR in my mind influences this indirectly in the long run. It's not like it will kill fake news the week after.

Nothing about ads on the internet implies tracking.

The most simplest solution is that newspapers host the ad on their own server as a .png or .jpg that gets shown to all visitors. It's tracking free and GDPR compliant.

I don’t think the EU has thought it through. I work in a municipality in Denmark, one of the most digitized public sectors in the EU and we’re not anywhere close to being ready.

None of the hundreds of suppliers we use are truly ready, and how would they be? It took 45 years to build this tech, you can’t just replace the innards in a few years. Estonia is the only country that is close to ready, and that’s mostly because they’ve build their entire system with a focus on sharing and securing data. Nobody else has anything close to it.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in the courts. I mean, keeping privacy data safe should be an important concern, but do we really want to close hospitals and schools because we can’t afford to pay the fines when it fails?

> In fact, I think the author is underestimating the impact, right here: "Of course, making this change will have a dramatic impact on your revenue for single-visit traffic, because you basically have to design your ad model to work completely differently from how it works today."

To add to this, the quote paints complying with the legislation as a simple redesign. It would require much more than a redesign. The technical, administrative and legal costs of implementing the new system from scratch would be magnitudes higher than implementing the current system from scratch. And add on changing requirements as the legislation is in its infancy.

Or it could go the other way. If all media outlets decide to put up a paywall it forces people to actually pay for reading the news. Currently there are a few news outlets who plead for ad blockers to be turned off while still offering content for free. And since ad blockers allow you to add exceptions this doesn't create a level playing field between those outlets that advertise and those that are locked behind a paywall. GDPR might end up forcing the outlets reliant on advertising to also shift to paywalls effectively creating the level playing field that was lacking earlier.

Let's face it, despite social media being a great enabler for realtime news the quality of news is sub-par. The biggest bane of social media is the transfer of responsibility of filtering real news from a firehose of fake news, to the end user. Until that issue is solved people are going to probably pay for news. This is just my speculation of how things might go after GDPR.

Television and newsPAPERs were viable businesses before the advent of the internet. And on the internet, the need to spy your reader is also quite new.

What makes privacy-sensible internet newsmedia nonviable might very well be the much more profitable spying on the client. If regulation makes that competition illegal, and demand for news is unaffected by GDPR (and why wouldn't it be), then it becomes more difficult for advertising companies to find newsmedia that provide tht extra illegal profit-taking sugar, so they will go back to more traditional advertising plans. This, in turn, will make newsmedia's lives easier in regards to finding advertiser's that do not demand spying on their readers.

At the end, sellers still need to advertise, providing ads supply, and readers still demand free newsreading, providing ad demand. The market still exists.

Publishers are getting squeezed out of the web by various forces. There is this GDPR, then there is also the web giants Facebook and Google squeezing them with their algorithms and in-app browsers. However, I'd say the net effect is positive because I'm seeing the lowest quality aggregator type blogs getting squeezed out and the only ones that are standing strong are the well funded publishers, which means better content.

I thought about it before. Yeah it will make analytics driven journalism unprofitable. But why this is a bad thing anyway? The old subscription model works and the quality of the content is high.

  > No, it will basically make a newsmedia site unprofitable.

Good. We don't need that much "news" anyway. And I think my need would be more than covered by national TV which is sponsored by taxpayers money and BBC, which also has no advertising. There really won't be much of the value lost if we won't have sensationalized and invented news any more.

Another point to consider is that need for news or just for some brain filler: I am puzzled by appareant inability of many today to be alone and in silence. As if then some thought that they cannot be comfortable with start to be loud enough to be heard.

Good. We don't need that much "news" anyway.

The "we" is where you have a problem.

Ok, care to share why you personally need to be fed news 24/7. What's so important and fulfilling to know about the latest antics of some celebrity, or some crime blown out of the proportion so much that you will think a killer is waiting for you on each corner, etc. What value does it add apart from creating more anxiety? Not to mention that news tend to misreport things a lot. (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...)

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