No ads, no tracking, no cookies, not even Javascript. Just plain HTML+CSS and JPEG images. The whole front page is around 650 KByte, and by far most of this is in the image files. As a result the page looks very clean and loads very fast.
This is what all news web sites should look like, not just for EU readers (although I fear that this is just a temporary solution until they've figured out that whole GDPR thing...
I am willing to believe it to be someones idea of sarcasm, lets strip our website of all the "goodies", give viewers poorer experience and watch the cries!!1 Except its actually better, and I wouldnt be surprised if it vanishes really quickly once they realize it backfired by reminding users how fast and clean web once was.
Might be a little more lucrative than juice bag startups.
If they want to monetize, publishers should control their own generic ad inventory (like they used to in old pre internet days) and ask for opt-in if you want customization.
Easy on paper but hard in reality.
This site provides news and information of USA TODAY NETWORK. We hope you enjoy the site."
Colour me impressed. I sincerely hope it catches on.
The idea that "user tracking" is now happening on the internet and not in print isn't true. Yes, internet tracking can follow you specifically, but that's because the systems have gotten faster and more connected.
Back then it took the form of the subscriber database as you suggest, and was used to help target and sell ads in the paper. The print industry often "sold" the subscriber list in detail to prospective advertisers to demonstrate the potential reach.
Losing detailed subscriber data was one of the primary objections many papers expressed to Apple's app store distribution model which can effectively render readers anonymous, as this was apparently one of the most valuable things they had.
This means the revenue they can charge for that ad is 100x less, which means that any sites without massive, massive user bases will perish, and those that survive will do it on a pittance.
I think Patreon has the only good answer so far. There are multiple people on there that make top quality content and earn good money from it.
It's probably not an answer for every industry.
I mean: GDPR didn't forbid money. Not even advertising. Only using personal informations without explicit consent... Please, don't be too ridiculous and stop watching FoxNews :-D
Behavioural targeting is fine!*
Contextual targeting is fine!
*In many circumstances.
In the 90s, the N.Y. Times was $1 in my city and the local paper was $0.30. That covered paper, distribution and ink.
The ads paid for it, and I think the ads were more effective. IMO online ads are mostly fraud and bullshit.
The irony is that we'll get there, eventually: Apple and Google are slowly agreeing a payment system and then they will push it into the browser, and everyone will use it.
If we just do big-dollar monthly or daily subscription paywalls, we end up with a Balkanized web where I can't read the article you're reading unless I pay for it. That'll significantly change the way interactions happen on the worldwide web.
Sure, maybe that's exactly what would happen, but changing one variable in a toy model is not proof that it will.
There are successful news sites that do just fine without becoming relentless clickbait optimization mills - and in fact, those are exactly the sites I tend to read. Two examples, so we're talking about something specific: talkingpointsmemo.com and techdirt.com are both daily reads for me.
TPM is, for want of a better term, the more advertiser-friendly of the two, but it intentionally works fine with ad blockers. Techdirt is probably well-known to most folks here.
The other commonality is that both of them work hard to not be enslaved by the adtech surveillance machine - they both have non-ad revenue streams.
And I think that is the real trick missed by overly simple reasoning - even when it is correct (and it is, frequently), it obscures more than it helps. And somewhat more nebulously, I think it trains people into a way of thinking that blinds them to options. After all, if you "know" you can't reduce your surveillance metrics below industry-average intrusiveness, you won't look at possibilities involving doing so. Instead, you'd look at additional non-ad revenue as "more and better" and do both - thereby losing me as a potential customer.
Is that a good tradeoff? I don't know - and that's the point. These are much more complicated questions than econ 101 will guide you through.
It's also a dilemma of sorts. If you stop running ads, then there is one less outlet for them, which means rates for all the other outlets are likely to grow. If enough people do it, the few players left will make very good business. Would you rather move out, risking your livelihood on experimental business models, or stay in with the devil you know, ensuring nobody is going to do better than you?
What you mean is running 3rd party ads via ad networks.
It's perfectly feasible to show an image that links to some advertiser's site for a negotiated fee. This is the equivalent of a paper magazine with advertisements. Not renting out injection points to executing whatever foreign code on their visitor's devices.
My ad blocker won't even block it (well not by default, and only as long as you play nice, it's not like online advertising has any goodwill left over, or ever acted to deserve it).
Still it's hard to deny that the (presumably temporary) EU site is a much nicer experience. It's certainly faster.
They have plenty of metrics on the ads still, just not on the users. It's not going to be an issue to see how often an ad is shown, they just don't know if it's relevant to the reader. The good thing is that no they have a way of measuring the effectiveness of targetted ads, because the entire EU is available as a control group.
For a newspaper, like USA Today, I honestly doubt that targetted ads convert much better than random ones. EDIT: Random or based on the content of the article.
Just because it's been useful doesn't give it some unqualified right to exist.
Either pay or sell yourself.
A gamble they might lose if people just stop sharing and click Washpo articles, but a possible route if others follow suit.
Meanwhile, NPR goes more hardcore than even USA Today: https://text.npr.org
I wonder, does that mean EU users are just a nuisance costing traffic, or that all graphics are tracking visitors?
To wit (washpo):
"You consent to the use of cookies and tracking by us and third parties to provide you with personalized ads"
Where is the "No I don't. Just give me regular/random ads" button?
and,
"Premium EU subscription" "No on-site advertising or third-party ad tracking"
There's nothing specifically EU about that, in fact, it sounds like a good service to offer to all your readers. But still, there's a big difference between on-site advertising and third-party ad tracking, and that difference is at the heart of the GDPR. A half decent journalist could have figured that out. Maybe that's their real problem.
But most importantly, and frighteningly, instead of these two stunts being knee-jerk backlash reactions, maybe they're serious and most data-peddlers aren't shady figures in smoke-filled backrooms, but simply the fourth estate en large.
Also, I wonder how much of Washington Post and NPR's revenue comes from Europeans. It might not even make sense for them to spend resources to be more precise in their compliance.
What is your preferred third option for content that costs money to make?
A pity I'm not from the US so most of the news aren't that interesting to me, I hope some European news outlet follows suit (although it won't happen).
This just shows us how big and influential the media giants are becoming.
Some of the links appear broken. For example, all the "More" links here haven't been hyperlinked: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/05/25/rac...
http://lite.cnn.io http://lite.cnn.io/es
If anyone knows of more let us know.
If the business was so predicated on user tracking and selling that data or using it to target ads, I think GDPR (in spirit) is saying “that’s not a business” and requiring a greater form of transparency and informed consent before a website can inflict that on a (possibly unwitting) user.
I’m not trying to say this point of view is right or wrong, just that I think there is a spirit here in the intention of GDPR to say “that’s not something we’ll allow to be called a business model.” (Obviously it doesn’t fully go that far, but it’s the idea.)
It’s not that different in spirit than regulating usury or payday loan businesses. If your business model profitably works only because it preys on people, the spirit of the regulation is to say, “that’s not a business model,” and regulate or disallow it. Usury laws in the case of excessive short-term interest rates; GDPR in the case of excessive user tracking and data privacy concerns.
So when you ask, “how can be a business sustainable in this way?” it sort of has the wrong premise.
Instead, if the business could not be profitable without this then it wasn’t actually ever a business— rather it was some other data exploitation entity, and the lack of an alternate way to be profitable in compliance with GDPR is a signal that the entity was unable to determine a way to exist without causing the kinds of harm that GDPR aims to prevent.
Again, I’m just trying to represent what I think the spirit is behind the GDPR choices— not saying they were right or wrong.
If that USA Today site sticks around and adds advertising, it will presumably be low quality inventory like the internet used to be flooded with - casinos, punch the monkey etc.
You can have sensible context-sensitive advertising without problem with GDPR. You just can't target a specific reader using its behaviour
The shitty early-web ads were already a result of shady 3rd-party ad networks selling private data.
Does a paper magazine need to run unsavoury ads? Because they don't have pay-per-click. They don't even record impressions, they have to negotiate the deal beforehand with the advertiser.
I don't want data about me to be someone's asset. I want an Internet shop to delete data about me as soon as possible after I made a purchase. That's why I want GDPR in my coutry too.
By not building their entire business around ads and tracking.
I don’t think it’s as simple as finding the same news elsewhere for free though, or accepting this level of data collection, or subscribing to every site with micro transactions.
I would pay to use HN if the articles I clicked through to (or upvoted, or engaged with in the comments) got a piece of the pie. I’d pay a fair amount because I get a lot of value out of the aggregation and community HN offers. There’s no obvious allegiance to a particular perspective on life so one day I can enjoy a spiritual read and another I can learn about baking bread. I’m not only challenged, my curiosity is being piqued. It may be that HN works this way because there is no direct profit motive in HN itself except to point budding startups to Y Combinator.
I’m unlikely to pay an individual publication (say, The Guardian) because such publications have a specific editorial viewpoint, and more often than not it’s going to be the point of view that supports my own. My money is wasted on an echo chamber that makes me mad about the state of the world.
Neither am I likely to pay a publication that I persistently disagree with because our values are incompatible. I might read them if they have something profound to say but I’m not going to commit to them for that.
So maybe there’s something in a co-operative effort where the community collectively funds the content it engages with. But rather than it being an individual thing like with Patreon or individual subscriptions, it’s a pool you contribute to in order to participate further in the community.
On the other hand, there's quite a lot of evidence of successful businesses operating on a subscription model because they provide a good value proposition. Which leads me to conclude that your claim is simply false.
Also relevant: https://membershippuzzle.org/about/
Please stop attacking services and sites that hundreds of millions or billions of people find useful because of your own over the top histrionics.
Those users need to be protected.
The parent makes an excellent point: it’s easy to argue the other models (micro transactions, subscriptions, paywalls) failed because they were in competition with an industry that has safely operated with little to no regulation for a decade or two.
The ad industry in this situation has an insane advantage because it can make money from end-users without them even being aware that they are involved in a transaction. They don’t have to see a banner ad in order for dozens or hundreds of other businesses to learn about them.
There is no explicit contract between the website and the user in the way that there is when you agree to pay the business money in exchange for the value it offers.
So GDPR levels the playing field by removing that advantage. If an advertiser or another business runs above board they don’t have a problem. More to the point, if they can convince a user to opt in, then they have a serious value proposition to the user too.
Advertising itself is an easy and almost fallacious target. People know about adverts so they use Adblock. People have no idea what a business will do with all of the data that reaches their servers without any JS required.
I think that elides pretty important aspects from the equation. In reality, it's more like: "It's easier for Bill-brand horses to compete with John-brand horses; if you ban the steroids, amphetamines, and cruel practices John uses to get his results."
i.e "It's easier for employers to produce cheaper products by exploiting their employees if your protection of labour is on the level it was 1850"
Now sure those prices were subsidized by ads. But they can still use utargeted ads, in addition, cost of the “medium” and distribution is much lower.
You sound like the other people complaining "you know how much money I have to spend on lawyers to ignore this law??".
There are millions of businesses around the world that don't give a fig about European customers or the E.U. Hurts to hear it, but it's true.
They manage to survive an thrive without any interaction with anyone in the E.E.A.
It's a very European thing to think of the E.U. as the indispensable center of the world.
Huh? Culturally, that has absolutely not been my experience - quite the contrary.
In the case of the GDPR, it's simply a matter of "if you can't respect our citizen's basic rights, then we don't want to be doing business with you".
That has nothing to do with considering the EU to be the 'center of the world', and everything with setting the conditions for trading with it. You can either take or leave those.
Obviously if ads are less targeted then they may be less effective so advertisers will make less on ads that cost more. This will hurt their bottom line, which in turn will make the products we buy more expensive. But that's exactly the end goal. I want to pay for things (information, products) with more money rather than with slightly less money and all my integrity.
I remember the tedium of non-targeted advertising---it's what ultimately pushed me away from most traditional print and broadcast media and online. Targeted advertising occasionally brings me information I actually want; non-targeted advertising feels like such a waste of everybody's time.
I hope someone takes on the experiment of opt-in GDPR compliant ads.
I'm sure you considered all the poor people across the world that are subsidized by the ad driven model we use today. What we truly need on the internet is data gated behind pay walls to protect important information such as which facebook groups you clicked like on.
A lot of them are poor, because we don't want to pay a decent amount for the products that we consume and instead rely on people working in sweatshops in third-world countries.
You don't solve poverty by giving them 'free' products that require them to give you all their private data. You solve poverty by giving people a decent wage, so that they make these decisions themselves.
Adtech might move to correlating all these things + the website visited to target particular demographics.
ie: figure out why they are doing what they're doing and direct them to ads that capture that intent.
I think this much vaguer stuff will be fine.
To show ads you don't have to report about all of your site visits to Facebook and Google.
My god. They sucked so hard! AdSense was a revolution.
Are we viewing the same page? Not only do I see JavaScript in the EU page, but I also see this in the code:
"trackingServer":"gannett.hb.omtrdc.net"},"market":"gpapermobileapp","trackingServer":"repdata.usatoday.com","trackingServerSecure":"srepdata.usatoday.com"},"ads"
found an invalid character in header value
for me
In the long term I would be happier if we'd all be treated with equally high privacy standards and pay for the content we consume. For that to happen we only need one thing, Americans and their legislators need to start valuing their privacy too.
Edit: There many other ads as well not just from taboola.