Coca-Cola buys Costa Coffee for £3.9bn
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"Time Magazine Sold to Marc Benioff for $190M"
It is a shame that the difference here is so big. Many people would rather pay $3 for a cup of coffee multiple times a day, than pay a fraction of that for valuable content.
Edit to clarify:
I understand that consumer products are different than content and that news is not a direct competitor to coffee products. What I mean is that news companies are struggling to get enough out of the advertisement model whereas nobody expects to get coffee for free/less in exchange for advertisements on their cups.
This¹ website says a Fuji apple, my favourite, my dogs also love them too, contains 16.6g of carbs of which 12.7g are simple sugars, whereas Coca Cola contains 10.6g of sugar per 100ml.
Amazing!
Rather than quote nutrition difference between the two I'll just give a subjective opinion: when I eat an apple I just generally feel ok, nothing different really. Coca Cola makes me feel ill, it upsets my digestive system and makes my nerves feel a bit jangle.
I don't think I'm alone.
Some services actually give away coffee without requiring advert revenue of any kind.
Moreover, coffee vendors such as costa coffee or starbucks aren't mere coffee vendors.
Edit: I'm really interested to know what exactly did I said in my post that could possibly justify the downvotes.
Fantastic stuff, but totally agree with your point about the music. I would love to be able to post up there and work, but I unfortunately need almost complete silence to focus.
- ed
Or, rather, the latter promotes uptake of more of the former.
But I know plenty of people that are not willing to pay anything for "news", and their argument is always that there is enough free content on the web. The quality of news is something that is very difficult to assess, unless you are a domain expert.
If I could buy a paper here in the UK that gave me a good mix of local and broad global coverage, focused on the facts rather than pushing its own agenda and stopped telling me how to think, speak and behave, I'd buy it, but that paper doesn't seem to exist.
The reasons for this are plenty of course, but having to rely on advertisements for survival makes it hard to focus on facts. Instead you have to focus on sensationalist news in order to garner more views/clicks/readers in order to sell more advertisements.
Well they don't directly usually say think this and given that there is 1000x stuff happening over what you can write up on a couple of pages it has to be filtered according to some view point. I'm not sure there's a way to do it with no bias.
I have some sympathy for UK newspaper attitudes that "we have a point of view and we're proud of it". The fact that they are all terrible rags written by the worst kind of hacks is a separate problem.
As for sibling argument that the FT have no agenda, well, the clue is in the name. It's written for upper management. The fact that such people don't need or want their news as heavily filtered as their underlings is more an expression of the requirements of capital that anything else. Upper management can't afford ideological flights of fancy when they need to keep the system running.
Something of a defeatist position I would say: just because perfect neutrality is not possible, doesn't mean we cannot strive towards it, and even come close.
It's not so much that I'd rather pay $3 for a coffee than valuable content but that the content is available free and nice coffee isn't so much. I used a long time ago pay cash each day for a paper copy of The Guardian and similar but there's so much free info now it doesn't really make sense anymore. It's a bit like air to breath. It's worth a lot but why pay if its free everywhere?
After all Facebook bought Whatsapp for $19bn.