Any time a site asks me to disable tracking protection, it has the curious effect of reinforcing my desire to leave it enabled - that site has made it clear that they are intentionally and unapologetically violating my privacy for a quick buck.
They remind you that having a good grocery store in your neighborhood is important, and don't you want to support that?
Facial Recognition systems are out in the wild, busy profiling [0]
I'm saying if a store used ther CCTV systems to track the behaviour of individual customers, and was building a database of that information, and pestered their customers whose apparel foiled their facial recognition, then that would be pretty much exactly what WP are doing here. What the tools used might have originally been designed for doesn't make any difference IMO.
Yes, exactly. It'll make me reevaluate which neighbourhood shops to patronize.
That is a thing somewhere? Genuinely curious because I can't imagine that ever happening around where I live...
Win-win!
We need a way to pay a few cents to read an article, ad and tracker free.
There is a tricky point though. “allocate the revenue to sites based on which content I read” implies mandatory, centralized tracking. I’m not at all sure I want that.
And the private news sites hate it, too! It’s an unfair advantage!
I don’t think it will make a difference if a private company collects the cash, but who knows?
The problem here is that STIM is a private company handing taxes and payout. It is commonly argued that they are paying the wrong artists and has no real track on what is popular. The industry can easily game the system by making their own music popular (formerly pushing it out to all radio stations, not sure what they do now).
Micro transactions might just end up with a botfarm in china clicking articles to generate income for the newspapers. Or even more clickbaity headlines to click. A lot of problems to solve and no solution in sight yet?
Articles cost between $0.10 and $1.15 (most between $0.20 and $0.50). You can request a refund if you don't like an article, which makes the transaction almost frictionless.
The one thing I miss is the ability to share articles without requiring the recipient to sign up for Blendle. Especially since the article can usually be read for free by going directly to the publisher's website. Five or so articles per month to share for free would sound about right.
However, the newspaper style "every article from today" or even "monthly access" still focuses around the thought of "you've picked one, or a very narrow set of news sources and do most/all of your reading there." We're all news grazers now.
We need federation. Let me pay one flat $20 per month bill, and I can read freely from a really broad range of sites-- say "every newspaper from a large wire network" or "95% of the 1000 most popular magazines". It needs to be organized to rein in the publishers, to discourage the "we're the big draw, let's take our content and start a new service" syndrome that has ravaged video streaming.
Seems like the price range is $10-25/mo for many periodicals, so a bundled plan of $20/month might be a bit low.
But I can imagine a $50/mo plan for including two national newspapers, a local newspaper, and a news weekly (e.g., economist) being pretty popular.
But on a network-of-services level, you also have a "value plateau" effect on both the supply and demand side though.
Each news source you add to a network typically provides a little less value than the one before. By the time you've got 100 newspapers in the network, number 101 is probably only contributing a few articles a year that weren't handled first or better by other papers, so nobody's going to pay much more to get it in their subscriptions.
And for readers, the number of interesting articles and the amount of time we have to read doesn't grow nearly as fast as the sheer number of available articles, so each additional provider doesn't produce that much more consumption.
So to be seen as a good value, we need a pricing model that tracks those "plateaus".
So for most general national news, there really isn't as much content as many would think, and adding each one still brings significant value.
The 100s of newspapers you refer to derive most of their content from the big ones, and maybe add their own analysis and slant.
A subscription model that provides access to 2 or 3 of the big ones, plus 1 or 2 local ones, and 1 or 2 special interest ones seems to make a lot of sense.
I really don't want to read a anything about American politics. I am not interested in the vast majority of "news" in newspapers.
I am willing to outbid advertisers to read an article - if there was a convenient way to do micro-payments.
There is a much stronger interest to build a lasting relationship over time with their readership, so the reader becomes familiar with the paper's voice, credibility, and focus. This leads to more revenue: readers will pay more for content they respect). It also leads to better news: a stable revenue source allows papers to plan and better invest in their reporting.
Blendle[1] is exactly that. They are in semi-private beta, but if you follow a link from their twitter[2] you can sign up right away.
Their model is put a few dollars in your account and pay $0.10-$1.00 per article. You can also get an instant refund after you've read, which is supposed to solve clickbait type articles.
They have a lot of major publishers including WaPo, NYT, WSJ, Economist, etc.
Not affiliated, just a satisfied user.
What other tracking could there possibly be once they're tracking everything I view on every site that monetizes its content?
But I think there's more to it than that:
It's customary in trade to not have hidden costs or unintended consequences of using your product, anything otherwise is dishonest. And insisting a product is "free" while having hidden schemes to extract value from customers is scam-y.
Then to say ad-hoc that its a "fair compromise"... but if it was a "good deal" why not be upfront about it, why try to hide it? "You should've read the EULA." Well, a bet a bunch of people being targeted/tracked by Google & Facebook are children, many too young to consent, some maybe even too young to even read...
Regardless, if you attempt to extort me with a choice between privacy or an uninformed populace, I'll happily share my view on where exactly you can stick that and spin. There are decent media outlets doing good work out there who can report and respect their readers at the same time [1].
I frankly don't care if the papers who can't figure out how to function without selling out their customers fail. Let their corpses be a cautionary tale.
[1] One outlet I subscribe to, Talkingpointsmemo.com, is in the process of offering ad-free options. I blocked them previously, and they've made no effort to break the site in the presence of blockers.
Also, what do you think of Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent'?
I think Chomsky is fairly correct, but a bit blinkered.
Your turn: How to you think Manufacturing Consent applies to message boards like this? Does that tell you anything about human behaviour, whether or not mediated by institutional imperative?
1. I do/don't think the content is worth the subscription.
2. I do/don't think advertising should be used to support the business.
3. I have issues with the privacy implications of advertising.
4. I don't want to pay but I also don't want to deal with ads.
Though maybe you're expressing a fifth? "I don't see why they need to spend this much money to make this content."
I cannot afford to support dozens of publications which still might not include all the content I want to read because article foo is from yet a different publication.
Guessing ahead of time seems both broken and expensive compared to grazing one a continuous stream of interesting data supported by ads consumed by people too stupid to install adblocking.
In theory modest advertising could probably easily pay for the people that actually produce the content, In theory micropayments might work too.
In reality they insist on wasting most of the money they earn and deploying intrusive ads and bullying to try to make me subscribe so they can keep wasting money.
My choices are to either give them a big middle finger or surrender my computer to their nonsense and prop up their poorly thought out business model.
As adblockers become increasingly prevalent and decreasing numbers pay for subscriptions this will obviously be increasingly difficult for content creators but solving their problems isn't my problem.
Since I only control my computer I will just keep doing whats best for me.
(not that there's a whole lot of that left... but its still better than getting news from facebook and youtube vloggers)
The journalism that we aspire to today requires a lot of personnel and material resources. Independent vloggers and Facebook/blog randos simply do not have the resources to report like NYT
As it is, all I have is paywalled niche news sites each thinking they can charge similar fees for very limited access to just they tiny corner of the market. I'm not going to pay per article. I haven't bought a news paper in years. I get all my news through ad sponsored crappy websites. Because they are so offensively bad, I have adblocking, tracking prevention, and other extensions trying to limit my exposure. Works great for me
So, that's money not spent by me or millions of other users that news papers are neglecting to make.