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Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that's an entirely fair comparison to make for a couple reasons: A) nobody pays to read the news anymore, and B) Facebook controls its ad network.

If WaPo or any other news publication decided to turn off ads out of moral obligation to prove a point, they'd be digging their own graves. You're essentially arguing that they should commit economic suicide if they truly care about ad tracking. Our culture isn't willing to spend as much on news content as we do Netflix, and that's just a sad reality.

Facebook, Youtube, etc. OTOH have built very profitable advertising systems that form the foundation of their entire business. They fully control these ad networks and all their data. And in this case, it sounds like YouTube may have violated COPPA, which is a totally different level of moral failure than choosing to put up ads.

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If WaPo or any other news publication decided to turn off ads out of moral obligation to prove a point, they'd be digging their own graves

Why, at this rate, Jeff Bezos might have to shut the Post down in... 6.3 million years.

>nobody pays to read the news anymore

I pay for several, quite a few people do.

Umm you do realize Youtube is free to the end user? That makes the two exactly comparable in business model.

Again, YouTube controls its own ad network. It has full control over what advertising JS is being served to users. It’s also a technology-first company, where advanced web application development is a core competency.

News publications aren’t like this at all. They’re embedding Adsense or some other third party ad widgets, probably at the direction of management. They’re serving whatever that black box ad API returns, which could be a lot of things. I haven’t really looked that hard, but are you aware of an ad network that pays comparably to Google that pledges not to track people? It’s kinda hard to imagine that such a thing exists, given the ad industry’s pervasive encroachment on privacy.

Also, most publications I’ve interacted with don’t have technical stakeholders at the executive level, and web developers are a back-of-the-house role. They’re not nearly as technically capable as a YouTube

A lot of people pay for the Wall Street Journal. If the news sites would stop giving it away for free maybe people would be forced to start paying. You may think this would just drive people to fake news sources but people actually want something accurate. Fake news only works if it mixes with trustworthy content.

I think Wall Street Journal/FT are different though, people pay for those because it's a valuable curation of financial/economic news and presents political news through a financial/economics lens and not entirely through the traditional left/right political spectrum lens.

Call me cynical, but what makes you think people subscribing to more politically-oriented publications are doing it because they want truly something accurate and not because that publication confirms their biases?

Probably because there’s low cost alternatives if all you care about is confirming your biases.

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