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Comment by nemacol | Hacker News Reader

I signed up for NYT and canceled the next day.

After becoming a paying customer they do not remove the ads from apps, pop ups on the website, etc etc. I was annoyed so I decided to cancel. The cancellation process was also quite annoying. Couldn't just do it through a form, I had to chat or call. I was on hold in the chat room for 35 minutes before someone got on and asked me what I wanted. At that point I was quite annoyed.

The person in chat was perfectly friendly and handled the rest of the cancellation process swiftly.

I am happy to pay for content but I'll be damned if I am going to pay and still be subjected to popups and ads between every paragraph.

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The problem is that newspapers still make the majority of their income from advertising. This is why ads still appear after you're subscribed and logged in to their websites.

Shifting to a subscription-only revenue model is not an easy proposition, and requires a huge adjustment that most newspapers are not yet ready to make.

Source: I used to work for a major regional newspaper.

This is what I had always heard, that the price of the paper just covered the printing and shipping. It seems like all these papers already have advertiser contacts and should have been able to easily transition into an online advertiser only model.

and as far as paying for ads, I find it absurd that anyone pays for cable tv anymore.

I'm not a cable subscriber but I don't think it's a bad deal for the average American, especially families. DVRs have allowed cable subscribers to skip ads with a bit of planning and a slight delay in viewing for over a decade. This allows for unlimited viewing of the newest content on demand without advertisement. Basic cable seems to start at about $40/month which is about 2x more than having a Netflix and Hulu subscription while offering more movies, the latest season of every show, cable news, and sports.

I still pay for cable TV because

1) its my cheapest option to have local channels

2) of the DVR options (so I don't deal with those ads), it still has the best experience (tried Hulu, DirecTVNow, YouTubeTV) - YouTubeTV was the closest, but they inject ads you cannot skip in on demand programs and replace your "recordings" with on demand programs as soon as the network makes them available.

1) its my cheapest option to have local channels

cheaper than an antenna? Do you live somewhere with too much interference?

Condé Nast seems to have figured out a workable majority-subscription revenue model.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/conde-nast-to-put-all-titles-be...

> “The New Yorker, which introduced a metered paywall in late 2014, generated about $115 million in paid-subscription revenue in 2018, up 69% from 2015, people familiar with the matter said. That revenue includes consumers who subscribed to the digital and print editions, although subscribers today no longer have the option of subscribing solely to the print magazine. The New Yorker’s regular renewal price for a print and digital bundle is moving to $149 a year from $119. The magazine will publish 47 issues this year.”

Granted, there’s a big difference between publishing 47 issues of long form writing a year, and 365 issues of a much longer daily-reported newspaper.

EDIT: not to mention that the Times and other big newspapers probably see themselves as informing the public discourse. It probably wouldn’t fly to put general newspapers behind a paywall, though the FT has greatly increased profitability with this strategy.

What's it like to try to unsubscribe from the new yorker? Do they still track you digitally and show ads with a sub?

It's similar to the newspaper. You still see the advertisements in the newspaper even though you paid for it. I guess it would be more expensive without ads.

I believe https://app.nytimes.com is ad free for subscribers (tablet-friendly version of the day's paper).

Full disclosure: as my handle implies, I'm one of the co-founders of presscast.io. Obviously, I have a horse in this race.

I want to point out that advertising doesn't have to be intrusive. While this isn't appropriate for an independent journalistic institution like the NYT, the vast majority of for-profit publishers actually can continue with an ad-driven model without degrading their site's experience. One solution is to accept paid contributions to articles by advertisers with actual expertise in the subject matter. For e.g. marketing or tech periodicals, this works quite well.

> One solution is to accept paid contributions to articles by advertisers with actual expertise in the subject matter. For e.g. marketing or tech periodicals, this works quite well.

Advertorials are an even worse solution than ads.

Agree. What I'm proposing here is something closer to "paid expert contributions", to an otherwise non-advertorial piece.

Obviously this needs to be properly disclosed, but the result is very different from an advertorial, i.e.: _actual_ expert commentary on a well-researched piece.

> Obviously this needs to be properly disclosed, but the result is very different from an advertorial, i.e.: _actual_ expert commentary on a well-researched piece.

No. If an advertiser is paying to publish it, it's an advertorial, full stop. Why would they pay to produce and publish an actual quality article that doesn't push an agenda in some non-journalistic way? It's literally the job of advertisers to push an agenda.

I have a NYT digital sub and I never see any ads or anything. I think uBlock Origin is required, when using any website, even for websites you pay for.

I had the same setup (uBlock Origin) and I just cancelled my subscription over ads. Not because I saw any, but because every NYT web page had a static (did not scroll) gray banner telling me to disable my ad blocker.

And then when I couldn't take it anymore and went to cancel, their retention department had the gall to suggest the message was not from them and maybe was from my browser.

Fuck you, New York Times. Paying subscribers should not see ads or be hassled to be tracked by the ad industrial complex. Raise your prices if you have to.

As a counterpoint, I use NYT + uBlock Origin and never see a banner about disabling the ad-blocker.

In general though, I agree that paying customers should not be subjected to ads. But as someone who worked in the news industry (quite some time ago now) I don't think newspapers have learned that lesson yet or can afford to do that.

This cancellation via phone seems to be a common practice with all subscription newspapers.

I just subscribed and added an ad-blocker.

If I wanted to cancel, I'm not going to be able to call though, as I live in Australia. I thought there were laws in some states of the U.S. that meant you have to be able to unsubscribe through a form though?

I'm confused, why can you not call a US number from Australia? Is it prohibitively expensive?

In the UK it would certainly be _annoyingly_ expensive, given I'm calling because I want to stop spending money on whatever. I'd expect a connection fee + ~£1/min + rate they charge an American caller, and you know you're going to be kept on hold for ages.

It's bad enough calling to complain/cancel a local company - I've paid several pounds a time; I certainly avoid it if at all possible, and would more so with an overseas company.

Yes, it would. There is also the time zone difference.

might also be the time difference. You'd have to wake up pretty early to catch 5pm.

I think I've heard that Direct Debit isn't really used in America? Certainly subscriptions I have based there are only recurring card payments.

If I was going to have to go through that to cancel my subscription to a British newspaper, I'd just cancel the DD - a few taps in my bank's app.

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