Hacker News Reader

Comment by drb91 | Hacker News Reader

This is an easy argument to make when there's conveniently no way for consumers to decide how they want to pay. Realistically, humans are just lazy about finding decent ways of monetizing their time. I can't say I'll shed any tears if a business relying on ads goes out of business from my ad blocker: they always could have asked me for my cash.

View on HN

Consumers will pay for the services that consistently deliver value, but most of media out there delivers value occasionally. And that’s assuming some exclusives, where a competing publication is not a click away.

When even the mighty NYT and WSJ have issues monetizing their Web presence, what hope is there for smaller fish?

Do I read an occasional article from The Guardian or Venture Beat? Yeah, happens every now and then. Am I willing to pay for it? Unlikely.

Where media struggles is in spending hundreds of dollars per page of content that has an effective lifespan of about 1 to 5 days before it goes off to the virtual landfill (formerly a real landfill), never to be seen again.

Maybe they need to ditch the daily blog-feed style of journalism and direct their resources toward building a more cohesive/holistic archive of events that provides some lasting interest and value, so they won't need to desperately squeeze revenue from each article as aggressively as possible before the aggregators drop it.

I think they try to. But it might be that it is actually much cheaper to write small daily articles that junior people can write than to write extensive high quality stuff. That puts you under constant pressure.

Which is precisely why they have a problem with monetizing. I can't really sympathise with that. Why should I care if the business model of flooding people with crap, occasionally containing some gems, is in trouble? Drop the crap, drop the frequency, send only gems when you have them.

Well that goes against attention economy we have today. Slow news are not news. I think what you want are magazines. It is precisely why they are not dead. In fact they had dip but now they are growing again.

Economist Espresso is an excellent example of this in action.

IMO this has already been proven to work as long as it's easy to pay. Just think of all the successful phone apps where the paid version is there to remove ads.

> This is an easy argument to make

For the record, I'm not making any value judgement or "argument" here. I'm pointing out that GP's complaining about issues that aren't really technical, but fundamental business practices.

i would like to see stats on that. in my experience people are very hesitant to pay even if they recognize they derive value from your service. it's just not the "thing that everyone does"

I think a bunch of smart people have spent a bunch of time on it and what we have currently simply makes the most money. Of course that may change once the majority block ads.

Consumers have basically already decided. How many people use incognito windows to get around the NYT paywall, for example?

Still waiting for the Spotify of news sites. I guess it's harder than it is for music?

It's interesting to see how no one even seems to try. In Europe there's Blendle [1], but that's only an aggregator and you still have to pay for each article you read (with hilarious differences in pricing). I've always wondered if they'd be more successful with a flat fee for complete access to all articles for all their papers and zines. But I guess the publishing houses don't consider this viable as it would hurt their subscriptions (who's gonna subscribe to just one paper when there's access to ten more for roughly the same price?).

[1] https://blendle.com

At least for my part Blendle has been a huge win for publishers. I've probably spent more money on Blendle articles in just a year or so (even asking for my money back a number of times) than I have on regular subscriptions.

Considering the fact that I'm generally not too interested in mainstream news, and somewhat frugal, I imagine there's quite a number of people who spend even more.

Spotify to the music industry is like putting some ice on a broken neck. The music industry at least has concerts and merchandise to drive revenues up.

The problem is that news is very expensive to produce; particularly investigative journalism that might or might not pay off. Local news at the town or suburb level has a similar issue, where the market is quite small to begin with. Strip away the expensive parts and you're left with cheapo aggregator papers. But what happens when there's nothing left to aggregate?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com