Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30
whatsnewinpublishing.com
whatsnewinpublishing.com
I'm not going to fork over $10/month to each of the other potential news sites for every article they publish. I have no idea why the Podunk Press and the Suburban Picayune Times even consider that as an option for out-of-area readers.
It'd be interesting to have a federated subscription model -- I'd pay an additional $X/month for all of the rest of the newspapers, and they could share that. They'll get nothing from me otherwise. Probably there is a business here (the tech to actually do it seems pretty straightforward, at first glance).
I want to be able to have a non trivial level of discretion as to which writers/groups to starve and which to support. For example, being able to pick a handful of sites or articles where my subscription/views/view-time don't count towards their bottom line. Or we could set aside 30-40% of subscription cost to distribute based on the the proportion of some active user action for like Medium's claps or some other rating.
At present the economist/ft are the only publications that haven't let me down in a big way and I'm weary of supporting anything else.
edit: apparently you have to use apple devices? oh heck no, what were they thinking?
That's what they're thinking.
This subscription would do minimal metrics of tracking and allow people to adjust their feed. And also go back to traditional headlines (with all the fun puns and occasional hyperbole, but much less click-bait because that turns subscribers off.
Journalism for profit is fundamentally broken.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/democracynow
I wonder how they make money.
Checked wikipedia:
Democracy Now Productions, the independent nonprofit
organization which produces Democracy Now!, is funded
entirely through contributions from listeners, viewers,
and foundations such as the Ford Foundation,[failed
verification] Lannan Foundation, J.M. Kaplan Fund,[4]
[5][6][unreliable source?] and does not accept
advertisers, corporate underwriting or government
funding.[7]
Clinton defended his administration's policies and charged
Goodman with being "hostile and combative".[51]https://getpolarized.io/2019/07/26/Minimizing-Defection-Migh...
I think it's an issue of tragedy of the commons. No one wants to pay for news because of defection.
Outside of a few exceptional pieces the typical content on print "news" sites is utter garbage. The pressure to have a bunch of different columns publishing multiple stories a day seems like it really drives the quality down. All the super cool long-form investigative journalism gets totally buried by "stories" or "updates" that are basically just a headline and a sentence or two of actual content.
Podcasts where the format is they have to pick a single story to tell for the whole week gets this right. A daily book where on a typical day you can shread the whole thing without looking and not feel like you missed anything is only being kept alive by feaux prestige.
Pretty sure sites like buzzfeed and other tabloid news would more popular than the sites which you mentioned.
And BuzzFeed is a no different than NYT it WaPo at the macro scale. They just have a different idea about what the filler content should look like. Print news is really behind and have been fruitlessly playing catch-up due to a prestigious culture that holds reporting the most boring least relevant news as the highest ideal. The paper should be pushing a handful of super in-depth issues and putting the 'reporting' straight in the archive for news nerds.
NYT's Wirecutter is the most interesting innovation from an old guard news org I've seen in a while and is a good candidate to be some of that filler -- relevant, useful, and sometimes genuinely interesting.
An even better service would be to have something like Netflix, but for news. I could pay $X/month and have access to a variety of news sources. Ideally, those news sources would be paid according to their popularity and accuracy, and I would have a simple bill every month to pay instead of several.
I had a subscription to The Economist for a little while, but I found that I still read other news sources and only read a handful of Economist articles. I want quality journalism, but having subscriptions to every source I trust is cost prohibitive and no single source has everything I want. I want a curated set of high quality articles for a constant price.
You sort of described Apple News+
Taler should allow anonymous payments, which means a possibility of one fix to the present model: you can read the news without the news reading you.
I guess I'm a "credulous moron".
(I do subscribe to a few magazines though, just not newspapers.)
The problem is how much of their model is built on giving away their product for free, they want all the benefits of being open and free to access (in googles index, shared on sites like HN) but they also want to be closed to non-subscribers, the two are mutually exclusive and they need to pick one.
Either way I consider this a solved problem with the BBC and/or PBS model, news is an important public service and shouldn't be left up to commercial behemoths.
The product of good journalism is investigation, reporting, and insight. What news organizations sell is a writeup. This is a mismatch. I'm interested in paying for the ideas, not the prose.
When, say, the Wall Street Journal reported on the Stormy Daniels hush money last year, everyone else re-reported it soon after. If you had a Journal subscription you got the news slightly sooner; otherwise, wait a tiny bit and every news organization from VICE to Breitbart has their own story about it too. Paying for the original source makes you feel good about supporting journalism, but that's it.
It's rather like the companies who produce a high-quality open-source product with a medium-quality cloud-hosted offering and then blame open source when Amazon also offers their high-quality product in the cloud. If the interesting and valuable part of your work is freely copiable and you're only charging for a delivery channel that anyone can provide, I feel bad for you but I'm entirely unsurprised your business model isn't working out.
Perhaps one answer, as with some open source code, is to see journalism as a social good in itself, worth supporting as an activity even if we don't have a way to turn its output into a profitable product. Perhaps another is, like other open source, to find people who have a commercial need for good journalism and have them subsidize it in the process in some way.
Markets and information play poorly. Always have, always will.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Also known as the Lake Wobegon Fallacy. All the children aren't above average.
"This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. [...] I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable."
--- George Orwell, 1942
A sea change began with Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, seen as birthing modern, generally impartial, journalism. Not absolutely, but relative to earlier periods, quite.
Ironically, widespread national advertising assisted in much of. this, at least for stories not adversely concerning national advertisers. But local squelching of critical news was limited, and occasional nationally critical stories could appear. Watergate was arguably the high-water mark. Corporate ownership massively diluted effectiveness, especially after 1980, though exceptions remain.
Bookending Orwell and Lippmann, I'd suggest I.F. Stone (who calls the 1970s as a high-water mark) and Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909).
I.F. Stone, interview: https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g
textsCommercialism and journalism https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
Further reading:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
> Without fail, the websites detected the intrusion attempt
The startup could then try implementing micro transactions or minimal ads and do a revenue share with the original publishers.
The problem would be surviving without being sued long enough to gain the traction and acceptance that Spotify has.
The real problem, of course, is that there are a billion different news organizations with independent paywalls and gateways. It's a hassle to sign up for them all and completely unreasonable to expect that we should subscribe to all of them. Because they don't have a federated micro transaction model in place, the solution is to come up with one for them and get them to adopt it. It's better for both us and them, they just don't know it yet.
Could it work?
A middle man controlling the subscriber-ship would not necessarily be better for papers. The middle man entity would have enormous bargaining leverage, like Apple does with the App Store.
That's a great point and speaks to a true danger with this model.
I imagine content publishers could distribute their content across multiple distributors if they existed, though I imagine the market would only support a handful of competitors.
> Spotify worked a compulsory license provision of copyright law that applies specifically and only to music streaming. (Originally intended for radio.)
Could you speak more to this point? I'm incredibly interested. How was this provision created, and did they start their business with a law team? How were they able to get this accepted? What about other, earlier entrants in this space? Grooveshark obviously failed (they walked a slightly shadier path), but had they tried to get on proper legal footing they might have made it.
Could a news aggregator start out as a Grooveshark, then pivot into a Spotify without getting sued into oblivion?
I think they're thinking of DMCA radio licensing. This is what Pandora, not Spotify uses/used, and why you can't play specific tracks on Pandora.
Proof? A radio can play any music it wants to and an artist/record label can’t stop them as long as they have a license. An artist can stop Spotify from including them in their music library.
Also I hear they are changing their business model to monthly payments. If this is true I guess I'm out unless they suddely - like Spotify - will give me access to everything I'm interested in.
To the publishers, you should _really_ use some kind of federated login. Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. but don't forget those who are willing to have a unique account.
I doubt anywhere near 26% block ads because of tracking. I doubt even 1% if users even understand what tracking means.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/most-americans...
People on HN keep using this in a number of contexts as an excuse to not even try.
I'm tired of it. Maybe we are to late. But if try to avoid failure then at least we have a small chance.
But, do you really want your users to have the added friction and probably just move on to another site, and do you really want the responsibility of providing your own authorization? I work for a B2B SASS company and we highly encourage users to use their company’s AD account that we federate with.
Google will only include your content in their search results if the user can see your content. The "metered paywall" trick is a loophole to get around that.
If you put all your content behind a paywall, you're siloing yourself off from the entire rest of the internet, at least as far as discoverability goes.
Do keep in mind that this isn't so much a loophole, but an agreement that Google made with publishers so that they could stay ranked on Google. In the wake of this they might reach a different agreement.
If Google had a setting for "I am a subscriber to x,y,z -- please include them in my results" I would be so happy. I want to tell Google that I'm a Red Hat subscriber and want their KB articles first.
That's not true for the WSJ.
https://9to5google.com/2019/02/15/google-chrome-detect-incog...
Hopefully publishers will understand at some point that "Only show a couple articles free" is not a 100% technologically viable option. It will always be a cat-and-mouse game if that's the behavior you're going for.
I would much rather pay a fair amount (more or less $15-$30 per year, which is what I pay on my landline), and then subscribe to a number of them.
This for me looks like a more sustainable model, but I guess that's not what their finance departments think.
I think that their main problem was that at the same time, the subscription was low (so didn't bring much revenue) and at the same time people hated it because now they had to pay for something that was free before. So I guess once we get used to pay for journalism, then something like netflix for media might work.
Newspapers never made their money from subscriptions or from selling papers on the street. What kept newspapers in business was classified ads, which was disrupted as a revenue stream when Craigslist came around.
Having said that as a user I should be able to be anonymous at will too...
But anecdotally, news orgs will never get my money while their subscription terms continue to be asinine. I will gladly give a newspaper $25 - $50 a year for access. I will not play these $X/week for odd week increment games.
Agreed. The only official way to cancel a NYT subscription is to call them. Infuriating.
I usually “unsubscribe” from these kind of services by changing my credit card to an empty prepaid one and let the payment bounce.
Yeah, luckily I subscribed through paypal, so I could block them through that.
I learned my lesson from LA Fitness. Check the cancellation process before signing up for anything that requires a contract.
I suppose that should be common sense, but I never thought about it until I had to mail a freaking letter to their HQ requesting cancellation.
The regional newspaper in my state is $25/6 months, which includes the physical Sunday paper and DRM-free downloadable PDFs of the newspaper every day that you can view on any device.
About a year ago I looked around at papers in other states, and the pricing and benefits were similar. It's only the super-premium papers that charge much more, but even the New York Times maxes out at $40/month for physical Sunday + digital. I'm OK paying a premium for the New York Times because I understand it's expensive to pay reporters and editors and photographers to travel to and live in cities around the world.
I think if the people who whine about "I'd pay $xx if the newspaper only did $yy" actually put their money where their mouths are, journalism (especially local) would be in a better place.
Your regional newspaper does sound super reasonable though, and I hope more newspapers follow that general model.
Seems reasonable to me. Important journalism isn't free. If you want free trash, Buzzfeed is your friend.
that doesn't even get me their cooking section.
Lucky you! From that same link someone else posted above you can subscribe to the cooking section for $40 for a whole year ($3/month). And then you don't have to have the newspaper that you're not going to read anyway!
But go ahead and move the goalposts again. We'll wait.
Or do you want him to pay $200 for the general contents + $40 a year for recipes? Is it the same kind of deal for getting business breaking news or yoga tutorials? That seems crazy to me.
> But go ahead and move the goalposts again. We'll wait.
Stop that. The original goalpost clearly says $25-50.
Isn't it? It seems that most journalism these days consists of taking things from a news agency feed and polluting them with garbage opinions. Might as well read the source.
Why would they offer facts for free and charge for the opinions they are trying to use their reputation on facts to promote?
And if there are other likely ones the sites will be able to fall back to?
Basically, attempting to use FileSystem API but getting an Error === Incognito
I suppose that might pose an issue with shared IPs at offices, for example. Also might cause a minor issue with people in the same household trying to read articles on the same site. But seems like a vast improvement over nothing at all, no?
As long as sites have "backdoors" around the paywall for SEO purposes, these types of extensions will work.
> why is knowing whether an unidentifiable reader is accessing a website via Incognito mode a privacy issue?
Because it makes Incognito less useful, and Incognito is a tool for people to control their privacy.
Anyway, Incognito isn't only used for anonymous browsing. For example, a user might use an Incognito window to register on a shopping site, providing all their personal details, just because they don't want Facebook to see their activity on this third party site (and they don't want to bother signing out of Facebook in their main browser context). So it's reasonable to consider "is using Incognito mode" to be private information.
And doesn't the clone army of iphones all essentially use Safari where the cookies still work?
The simple truth is that the people who will circumvent paywalls are usually the kind of people who would never subscribe anyhow.
If you are a publisher relying on detecting private mode to compel people to subscribe then you have a content problem - or a lack of marketing talent.
I say this as someone who has worked in 15+ years in publishing (web/digital) and also with publishers and digital subscriptions (NYTimes and The New Yorker).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_addresses_are_not...
I guess that this situation is a result of trying to find the right balance in pricing.
That said, if I was guaranteed ad-free content, I would subscribe to more publications than use incognito mode to get around soft paywalls.
If there was a way to pay once for all sites i frequent to support them and at the same time block the tracking, I'd be interested.
Anyone can make unlimited accounts on a site, so users will need scarce tokens to begin with!
Intrusion attempt? Excuse me?
It's bad for publishers but not catastrophic.
The tone of this article was very alarmist. The author says opening incognito is an "intrusion attempt". That's not what this means.
So they look at this information from the publisher side.
You start to read the article, it seems interesting ? You click (and then have to login, pay , or whatever).
Of course it might result of some sort of redacting bait, but why not try that ?
There's a french tech website [0] that does that, some article are free to read (mostly brief content), but those where journalist have spent time on it, you can only see the begining, and if you are a paying customer, you see the whole content.
You can pay from 0.99€ for a 48h test, so you can see if the content is worthy for you.
(not affiliated at all, I just think they do this the good way)
Kind of disingenuous to talk of the open web in this context as what the publishers are trying to do it rather the opposite to putting the content on the open web (to the extent the term isn't already taken for meaning building on public technologies).
The journalists and publishers need to get paid for their work of course, and running a proprietary, closed, pay-for-access service at the periphery of the open web can be justifiable. But I find the rhetoric here has a tinge of hypocrisy.
The only reason I bypass paywalls is so I don't have to be annoyed by them, go back to the page I came from, and choose the next option. If the aggregators I use stopped linking paywalled content entirely (or gave me a checkbox option), I wouldn't even bother.
edit: there are outlets I donate to, and they don't even have paywalls. This may sound weird, but I donate to orgs so they produce content that other people can read. People who want me to read their takes should really be paying me.
Looks like false controversy to me. All publishers have to do is demand a login and that’s it. Articles that are now behind a paywall will continue to do so.
There’s no difference that I can understand outside of a slight adjustment in paywall protection. Seriously can anyone explain what he’s going on about?
Now we'll see what their response is, probably something moronic as 5 views per IP.
Better to just require an account straight up. Then there is no point for anyone to link to them and we will get rid of the whole "will I be able to read this link mess".
Purely anecdotally, I never remember seeing the "Incognito walls" before a year or so ago; paywalls are clearly able to function even if they can't stop the use of private modes.
Many/most paywalls can be bypassed by blocking or wiping cookies. I wonder if news sites are going to come for cookie blocking next.
Soft paywalls are essentially a loophole in that (at least superficially) pro-consumer rule, and incognito blockers are apparently taking that loophole one step too far. This move will fix the issue by changing the browser instead of page ranks.
Here is an unfounded conspiracy theory: People noticed that regularly clearing cookies works better than incognito mode, so they were switching to that because of incognito blockers, and that presents an existential threat to Google’s cash cow.
I don’t believe the previous paragraph, but I really want an extension that nukes all browser state if my computer / device is idle for more than 4 hours. The only exceptions would be bookmarks and password management.
I understand this is publisher-centric newspaper, but it's not like it was that hard to bypass it.
If I remember right, Chrome had "open guest window" functionality forever, which bypasses the detectors as wll -- and it only took 4 clicks (select all, copy, open guest window, paste-and-go)
Sure 4 click -> 1 click reduction is a big change, but it is hardly "death of metered firewall"
Monopolist news orgs are losing readership/revenue because they're terrible and refuse to change, not because of Chrome. Meanwhile other, better forms of journalism are thriving.
It would be interesting to discover the stagnating effects of closing your doors to all but those willing to pay. Perhaps naively, I assume the majority of paying customers were dedicated readers before the paywalls went up. How are new users brought into the funnel of such an exclusive system?
Such as?
See https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edwy-plenel/blog/140319/eleven-ye...
"Work for free for two years and maybe you will have a semi sustainable income" sucks.
Crowdfunding also encourages extreme opinions and bubbles over neutral reporting.
Yes, and that is a rather important advantage in case of news & opinion reporting.
The old system consisted [1] of small number of large, vertically integrated media outlets. Each of the outlets was pretty close to a single point of failure in our democratic processes: each had undue ability to influence popular ideas and opinions, and well understood focal points of partisanship and propaganda [2].
The new model, with distributed funding and distributed production of news content is a much healthier, much more resilient ecosystem, with no single points of failure. From my limited observation it is also less prone to creating two singular focal points of polarization ("left" vs "right"); instead people end up in loose, overlapping circles according to their varying interests, socio-political situation and the likes.
--
[1] started off as small outlets, but the more successful ones quickly accreted into large entities, and the internet era weeded out a lot of the smaller entities.
[2] to the point "FOX" and "CNN" has became pejoratives among politically active people.
>Some people can support themselves with patreon but the number is limited
isn't that true for all industries?
>Crowdfunding also encourages extreme opinions and bubbles over neutral reporting.
lol wat. you got a source for that?
The number of sustainable journalists is much more limited using crowdfunding than other monetization models.
How many patrons are giving to high quality neutral journalism? How many are giving to people that they personally like and agree with? Look at somebody like Jordan Peterson for an example of how on can leverage culture wars (instead of quality analysis) into cash.
https://www.statista.com/chart/3755/digital-subscribers-of-t...
I also have a hard time understanding why it should be free. If you don't want to pay for it, you don't have to pay for it. You also aren't entitled to their for free no more than the writers at the New York Times are entitled to your work for free.
I don't get news from the NYT and am quite happy continuing to do that regardless of their monetary strategy (and by the way, Google is extremely profitable with free + ads).
Google isn't free.
https://hackernoon.com/how-does-google-earn-money-as-simple-...
Ideals: They don't seem to keep me fed.
But I'm not going to ever paywall my writing anyway.
Publishers can everybody to be logged in in order to read their content. Then none of this applies.
This is part of the articles point. Forcing people to login is going to hurt conversion.
Publishers have every ability to use some DRMed iOS app and bypass the web completely. Instead they want their cake (free SE & sharing traffic) and eat it too (paid or demographically tracked and ad targeted visitors.)
Modifying browsers is preferable to that. It will (hopefully) solve the the problem at the source, and make a HN-level solution redundant.
I imagine other news aggregators face the same problem.
Using incognito mode in the browser to make it a bit harder to be tracked (without even blocking ads!) is "an intrusion attempt"? Excuse me? That's absurd language.
Going to www.nytimes.com is roughly the equivalent to driving in front of someones house. It's certainly not my fault if they leave their blinds open while they are naked. Now maybe they thought I was someone else due to the car I drove, but that sure as shit isn't my problem.
Equifax is an entirely different issue. If you leave the door open to your house, that sure as hell doesn't give me the right to go into it. I can look at it, I can even tell everyone "Hey, that door is wide open." But I can't go in do shit without permission to be there.
Of course, if you're just using incognito mode normally and happened to visit the same page, then it is not an intrusion attempt but just incognito browsing.
The whole point is that news websites can't distinguish between the two.
Frankly, considering this an intrusion attempt reveals a crazy, completely warped mindset: "We will track you, we want to know exactly who you are and what you read and how long, and if you attempt to evade this surveillance, you are an intruder!"
I use unique emails when signing up for websites - is that intrusion, too?
We have the technology to subsidize media creation appropriately, in the manner of performance royalties organizations. However, since there's no equivalent of radio station middlemen, it's not a problem that can be solved by an unregulated market.
Hard paywalls will just make even less people to read sites like nyt, wp, wsj and their revenue will probably go even down.
subscribe to read? no way. my modus operandi is that if I get to a link and it asks for a login or to subscribe, I just close the tab. there's a few websites that I don't even click anymore because of that.. and the list just keeps growing to me.
hmm this is exactly what the update will prevent...
The browser is an agent of the user, don't expect it to reliably hold information that determines what content they have rights to on your server.
Is windows fixing security flaws anti competition? Sounds like anti virus companies should sue.
The publishers are happily sending their entire articles to people whether they pay or not. Then they add in some Javascript code to cover up the article if they don't pay up. Google has done nothing more than prevent this code from running, which is what the users want. The users own the computers, and they have every right to choose what code to run on it.
Nothing is forcing the publishers to send the entire article to non-paying users. They only do it because it's convenient for them. If they don't like Google's actions, they're free to come up with a different technical method of hiding their articles from non-paying users. Most other subscription-based sites don't do these things: they force you to login to access premium content, so the only way to get that data is to either have a valid login, or to hack the site somehow (which is obviously illegal).