I simply don't understand how anyone could be frustrated with a publication making it harder to get content for free. It's what we must accept if we don't want the government to provide the news.
You were always the product. Newspapers, magazines, year books, church bulletins have ads directed at you or a group you are part of. Certain people buy a publication for the ads.
Free isn't the problem. Taking free away means less people read their paper, less talk about it, less get invited on cnn, less word of mouth. The need to move to clickbait titles increases.
Remember these media sites do not create the news but present it in a digestable format and provide commentary.
Also, if the user is not to be the product, then the company must demonstrate the value of the product that we should be paying for. If the perceived value is not there, why would anyone want to pay?
that's the annoying part.
In fact there was a recently promoted site called https://1mb.site/ which allowed a small free website. If you hotlink your images from your own https://imgur.com account, you can have a relatively easy site.
Yes, there is. If you make it easier to monetize, people who would otherwise have shared their creations freely put them behind paywalls or force their visitors to subject themselves to advertisement.
Also, something technical can be extremely easy for the average HN reader and practically impossible for most people.
My entire argument isn't that it can be monetized easily (https://www.facebook.com/help/publisher/321041698514182 it can) but that there are dozens of EASY ways to publish things and do so freely.
It's literally dead simple.
If you make monetization hard, people will freely share their works. If you make it easy, they will monetize them. Monetizing is easier than it used to be, stopping people from sharing freely. That shouldn't be hard to understand.
Positive revenue for the first time since 1998.
While admirable and noble, I find that this strategy is fraught with its own risks. Your company/product becomes fragile to financial headwinds in absence of a steady revenue.
Or we could provide robust public funding, like the BBC
> It's what we must accept if we don't want the government to provide the news.
Public funding of media does not make it "government news". In fact, it's subject to far more scrutiny than private media. You would rather Jeff Bezos and friends control the news rather than a transparent & highly regulated independent publicly funded organization?