Not something you wrote, but HNs relationship to journalism is weird. On the one hand there‘s an infinite stream of complains about clickbait and how advertising ruined the media. On the other no one is willing to pay for a more sustainable model.
For the rest, I think it's something like the Netflix problem. Netflix is great if that's all you ever want to use. However, if what you want is scattered across Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, and other video services? Then you might be less sanguine about the situation. The costs add up, at $15 per month per service.
Journalism, for all it's absolutely critical importance to freedom, democracy, and our shared hobby, is far more dispersed than that. How many different subscriptions would I need to have to read every article that graces the HN front page every day? At least a dozen, but perhaps more. That's going to add up too. WSJ wants $40/mo, Atlantic $80/yr, Economist is $180/yr, and that's just three.
How much do you think each HN reader should be paying monthly for jornalism?
And the answer should be, as with everything else: the amount everybody is willing to pay.
I understand your criticism, but what we‘re seeing is the fall out of the disruption of the news industry. The old model (advertising) isn‘t working anymore, so companies are falling back on the subscription model. (Or memberships) And yes they are expensive. But what‘s the alternative?
Right now I'm led to think the answer might be consolidation. Or some other form of subscription intermediation. A dozen outlets is far more than I want to manage, especially when the price really has little correlation to how often I actually read an article from an outlet.
That buying a subscription doesn't make ads go away is also not helping. I do not want to pay to support something so I can be the subject of behavioral targeting, thanks.
With all that said, I do want to address one underlying point. "What's the alternative?", you ask. That's not my problem. That's your problem as a media professional. As a media consumer, I'm perfectly happy to watch the vast majority of media outlets dry up and blow away because they never figured out how to respect the people they purport to serve. I'll stick with the ones that provide me with value I find reasonable and treat me with a measure of respect.
I refuse to accept that democracy can only survive at the price of listicles and privacy-invading ads.
Again. That‘s their choice and that‘s totally fine in my book. But journalism is a business and no business survives on people not willing to pay.
I completely agree that behavioral targeting can die a premature death and I‘d love to go back to models based on local, contextual or brand-driven advertising.
> With all that said, I do want to address one underlying point. "What's the alternative?", you ask. That's not my problem. That's your problem as a media professional. As a media consumer, I'm perfectly happy to watch the vast majority of media outlets dry up and blow away because they never figured out how to respect the people they purport to serve. I'll stick with the ones that provide me with value I find reasonable and treat me with a measure of respect.
I think we‘re on the same page here. And again that‘s totally fine for you to make this decision. Media companies need to find a sustainable model. At the moment it looks like subscriptions and paywalls are the way to got. Maybe that‘ll change again, but I wouldn't count on it, tbh.
You're completely right - business needs revenue.
What I'm pointing to here is that the way subscriptions are structured and priced doesn't match the way media is consumed. It's like if beer was only available in kegs or in free samples, because nobody had hit on any other approach. It's a sign that the assumptions about user behavior no longer hold.
I mean, I understand that newspapers with print editions often rely on those regular subscribers to the dead-tree ones. But it seems weird to base your business model around assuming that the internet is not different.
Journalism is expensive. Really expensive, if you want quality. More so, if you want some great investigative reporting.
So, yes subscriptions are mostly structured around the needs of the media company, not the needs of the consumer. No one is assuming, the "internet" is different. The economics of journalism just don‘t care.
If payment options are not convenient to the customers, fewer customers will agree to pay. Maybe too few for the whole thing to be sustainable.
Journalism is there not just to serve the consumers. It serves as a critical check and balance tool of democracy. We need healthy and functional journalism.
Paying for the content is about as transparent as it can be to ensure the media is sustainable yet can maintain its integrity.
Media works in a pyramid just like many other industries. There are handful of top level publications and a sea of unknown, low readership ones. Journalists often start with those low level publications. If they can't make a living working there no matter how good they are, how can they get to the top level ones that you're willing to support?
> I'll stick with the ones that provide me with value I find reasonable and treat me with a measure of respect.
Which ones are you currently stick with? Is Conde Nast one of them? Ars Technica -- which has a very good science section, has an annual membership of $35, with no ads. Do you consider them worth paying for?
You're absolutely and completely right! Journalism accomplishes this critical function by serving the consumers. I refuse to believe that these essential checks can only be accomplished with privacy-invading ads, paywalls, and subscription models from the 70s.
With that said, you're describing a structure that only works when there's a functioning business model. When everyone's model falls apart, the whole pyramid starts gets structurally unsound. At this point the question at hand is not how to people keep advancing up the pyramid, but rather a more fundamental one of how the industry needs to function.
> Which ones are you currently stick with? Is Conde Nast one of them? Ars Technica -- which has a very good science section, has an annual membership of $35, with no ads. Do you consider them worth paying for?
Ars Technica is, in fact, the Condé Nast publication I mentioned subscribing to. I also like that they offer RSS feeds.
I also have a lifetime subscription to Nautilus and a yearly one to The Economist (the audio edition is perfect for my commute).
1) a standard oauth2 login system. One identity I can use to sign into all my streaming platforms.
1b) mint/manilla like management tools from the account provider for keeping track of subscriptions, bills, and what you are actually paying for.
2.5) something that can deduplicate when you are paying for the same content twice. It's very easy to end up paying 2 or 3 times for access to the same streams, whether they be viacom or fox or nbc. Once I pay for the rights to a library, I should be exempt from paying a second service again. Its very hard to see overlap, when youve signed up for access to the same libraries through multiple providers.
3) a rss/pubsub like standard for feeding video to a video player. Sure if I want to navigate to the Netflix app to see the netflix experience for browsing video, I can, but I should also be able to click videos and see all the videos I pay for across all services, in any library browser I choose.
Roku and Apple TV, and to some extent Amazon, have all somewhat recreated this experience for the user through sheer force, but it requires streaming platforms to be compatible with Roku and Apple and Amazons way of doing things. It's not an industry standard for 1) tracking licensing access 2) providing authenticated access to raw video. Anyone should be able to write a video player interface that can automatically interface with compatible video providers. Just like web browsers and websites.
And to the same extent, until paying, tracking, and access to journalism follows some kind of open standard, its just too hard to pay for access to tons of articles from a ton of providers. Ill gladly pay a la cart or through usage (not when I open a tab, but after i finish at least half an article?) And I know these kind of startups exist, but they are still proprietary, they arent a technology built right into the browser and and into each news platform. I should be able to prove I pay for a news site, and get the content, without the site caring what browser/librarymanager I am using.
In essence, the frontend newsreader/videoplayer should be completely decoupled from the backend content provider infrastructure, and both ends should be infinitely interchangable and compatible.
I didnt need a separate WB, Disney, Sony hardware device to watch movies, my Sony played them all.
For DVD, there were almost two standards (yet again), but computer manufacturers Apple, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Microsoft basically forced the video industry to stop messing around and use the same format.
But otherwise? Phonograph cylinders vs disks (records), VHS vs Betamax, Blu-ray vs HD-DVD, etc. XBox vs Playstation vs Switch vs PC exclusives. The list goes on, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
What Im less ok with is this completely proprietary vudu, ultraviolet, moviesanywhere, fandango, itunes, googleplay, amazon digital locker tangled web mess. I should have ONE master account at ANY platform that tracks my ownership of digital keys, and it should grant me access to play it back on any platform that chooses to serve me the video file. If I decide to move from google to itunes I should be able to export or transfer my key library. If I have a google account, paid for Bumblebee in Play Movies, Apple should choose to honor my request for playback on my Apple TV, and cover the bandwidth. It would be in the best interest of making their product Just Work. And if Apple only wants to offer files for keys I have stored in their service, it should seamlessly fall back to grabbing the file from google without the user having to do a damn thing. It should just silently work. As a movie watcher I dont need or shouldnt need to care if the file is streaming from Apple or Google. (but if i were apple I would want full control of the video quality on an apple tv.)
None of this "you can load it into moviesanywhere and see it in vudu, but then you cant see it in intues or ultraviolet." Permanently locking the keys to proprietary temporal services seems explicity designed to have these services ebb and flow into new services and magicaly lose my keys from time to time, or make them nearly inaccessable if they can only flow into one specific other site.
Do they want my business? I am willing to pay, if it means not balancing full price access to nyt, wsj, foreign policy, bloomberg, wired, ars, etc etc etc. I cant just sign up for every single one of those, and they cant expect me to. Im not going to devote myself to just reading one or two of them. So either they can cater to people who are willing to spread money around, little bits to each of them, or they can ignore that market and lose potential business. Ive paid for those products in the past, but now I'll just go read something else.