We Never Paid for Journalism
idiallo.com
idiallo.com
I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind.
There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up.
So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?
Well, one explanation that people often point to is that there are now many more places to advertise. Back then, newspapers were one of the best places to advertise if you wanted to reach a lot of eyeballs. Now you can advertise on Google and other search sites, you can advertise on any number of blogs and other sites through AdSense and other ad delivery networks, you can advertise on social media, you can place classified ads on Craigslist, etc. So newspapers now have to compete against all these other properties in a way they didn't have to do in previous generations.
But there's another consideration that is just as important and doesn't really get talked about as often. With the dawn of digital advertising, where every view, click and conversion is neatly accounted for, advertisers have come to realize that newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue, even when it was the only game in town. They just didn't have the metrics to prove it.
What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search.
So the real battle isn't even a battle for advertiser's attention. It's a battle to remain viable even though the advertisers would be better off advertising elsewhere.
As any SMB owner who dabbles in advertising will tell you, you can, in fact, get a pretty good guess as to what the ROI on print advertising is. Look at business when you run ads versus business when you don't.
For stuff like brand uplift, yes, its difficult to measure the value of print advertising. It's also difficult to measure the value of brand uplift on the web.
> What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search.
Which should be a surprise to nobody, given that search implies intent to... Look for something. Often a product.
Of course! Scientific advertising was published in the 1920s! It's just that Madison Avenue could make a hell of a lot more money by being shy about it. So, nobody was talking.
Until the internet made it too obvious…
I run Thinking About Things [1], an email newsletter with one interesting link every day. Popular ideas and clickbait content always gets more views and clickthroughs, and I see the temptation that newspapers face to include only that content.
No fly-by-night scam operation will be able to afford a full page ad in a reputable magazine, and I hope newspapers also do due diligence on the advertisements they run, as their reputation (and possibly even legal liability, especially in certain fields like medicine, etc) is at stake.
This means I can be confident an ad in a magazine won't be an outright scam and I can somewhat trust it (sure, it's still trying to sell me something that I wouldn't have otherwise bought, but if it's relevant and I'm confident it's not a scam or low quality crap, then why not?).
The same does not apply to digital advertising where there's plenty of shit, no human actually reviews the ads and given the ads are very targeted there's little chance anyone else sees the ad (in a magazine, everyone sees it, so an expert in the field can speak up, unlike for a targeted ad where only the people in the targeting criteria - who often lack the knowledge to make an informed decision - see the ad).
The other advantage of the lack of tracking is that I get exposed to ads outside of my daily workflow. I work in IT, and if I were to browse without ad blockers (cancer blockers as I call them) I would just see IT or business-related ads all over the place. I don't want to see those - I already know what products I need for IT and have the knowledge & experience to do my own research. On the other hand, a print ad which knows nothing about me might show me an ad for cat food - I want that; I know nothing about the subject and am willing to trust the magazine's reputation behind it.
IIRC there was a similar phenomena with the dot-com boom: companies that spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising did so because they weren't selling anything useful, while the actual survivors spent zero on advertising and grew virally from word of mouth. Google and Facebook make money by selling ads, not by buying them: Google's first ad didn't run until 2010.
Of course there are projects that seek to archive online newspapers too (archive.org is awesome!), but online newspapers are able to thwart archiving either through technical means or policy (robots.txt.) Furthermore even when they aren't maliciously attacking archival efforts, online publications can swap out headlines or even the full content of articles, sometimes before the original has been archived. That sort of undisclosed on-the-fly revision simply isn't possible with print newspapers.
Also, the print newspaper industry isn't as clean as you think.
http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
You shouldn't be trusting any ad, wherever it is. Actually, the most reputable the platform, the more skeptical you should be since you are more trusting of the platform to begin with. The easier you are to be duped.
An advertisement that happens to reach someone who has a problem that your product solves isn't a scam. It is a way to get that person to know about your solution.
It's like a city was proposing to limit car movement through the center to improve air quality, and you countered with "but some cars are electric and don't pollute!". Yeah, right. Wake me up when most of them are.
--
[0] - See this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21348886.
I don't think the parent poster meant absolutely all ads, just the vast majority of them. But in so far as they meant all ads, it's still a good point you shouldn't trust them - not even the product catalogs you yourself paid for. There's very little legal and social protection from the merchant lying to you, and all the business incentives to do so.
did the creator of the X pay a third party to present X? is X an essential part of its context? is the recipient of X seeking X itself or something else?
I disagree with your assessment. For one, if you base reliability on monetary costs, then it's trivial for a fly-by-night scam to work around it. You just have to get more money. A loan could work. Or VC investment - such companies have plenty of money to burn on advertising, and it in no way reflects the quality of their work.
Two, reputation. I don't think reputation matters much to anyone anymore. Think of all the corporate scandals that are featured essentially weekly on HN. Or, closer to the topic, think of all the bullshit newspaper publish that gets thoroughly debunked in discussion threads around HN or topical subreddits. And yet both those corporations and those papers are still happily chugging along, no worse for the wear. If reputation of news publications mattered at all, nobody would post anything from Bloomberg here ever since the Supermicro fiasco.
How does this compare with television advertising? I see them as similar. Is traditional television advertisement per-viewer revenue dwindling compared to the past? I know the subscriber count is reducing and they have alternative income streams via subscriber fees. Is it that the ROI on television advertising remains higher compared to print simply because there are still a significant number of eyeballs?
Is it due to ad supported subscriptions being worth more to Hulu or is it just a subscription count growth strategy?
> We may share information collected from or about you with third parties as explained further below, including business partners, social networking services, service providers, advertisers, and other companies that are not affiliated with Hulu.
Basically anyone.
But it's probably not that big of a deal if advertisers and "other companies not affiliated with Hulu" can see that you watch Always Sunny with alarming frequency, right? Well that's not the only data they're collecting. Hulu's tracking is just as invasive as Google and Facebook:
> This information may relate to your use of the Hulu Services, websites you visited, advertisements you viewed, and your other activities online. Advertising that is based on information collected from or about you across websites, applications and other platforms over time is known as interest-based or online behavioral advertising.
It's not tracking though, Hulu uses the far less sinister name of "Behaviorial Advertising" in their policy. And the policy repeatedly justifies their practices by pointing to the "Self Regulatory Principals for Online Behavioral Advertising"[2] which are not particularly principled principals. Unsurprising when you consider they were created by the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
Hulu might share information about everything you do online but at least your personal data will be cloaked in the anonymity of "aggregate" data, right? Nope.
> We may share the information collected from or about you in encrypted, aggregated, or de-identified forms
That's a tres commas club sentence. Meaning they'll share your information in the aggregate OR de-identified OR they'll encrypt it. So they might send all of your information and browsing habits to the highest bidder but at least they'll do you the solid of encrypting it first.
And notice they use the term "de-identified" instead of the standard "personally identifiable." That's no mistake. According to the policy, "de-identified" means:
> that the information does not identify you personally
As in, it doesn't have your full name or phone number. Contrast that with the typical definition of PI[3]:
> any information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual's identity
It's no wonder they aren't operating in Europe.
TL/DR: Hulu's privacy practices are significantly more abhorrent than FAANG's.
[1] https://secure.hulu.com/privacy
[2-PDF] https://www.aboutads.info/resource/download/seven-principles...
The newspapers had been steadily dying since the 1970s, but Craigslist certainly didn't help them any.
Newspaper profits were also pretty good up through the early 2000's. I've never been convinced that craigslist was immediately responsible for the loss of classifieds revenue (which used to represent %50 of many newspaper's income), so much as the internet made it really cheap to build classifieds ads distribution platforms, craigslist being only one of them.
Back in the 1980s (in the Datalight/Zortech days), the only game in town was advertising in computer magazines. We knew it worked because the day the monthly mag appeared on the shelf, we'd get a big spike in sales, that would then taper off through the month. It was fairly easy to correlate which computer mags mattered, how ad placement in the mag affected results, and how the size of the ad worked out.
For example, we learned to never bother advertising in August. Programmers apparently all went on vacation in August :-) but September would be a huge month for us.
I tried print advertising in the aughts, but there was literally zero return on investment.
I think that means we're doing it wrong, but nobody wants to admit it.
For example, I buy hot rod magazines for ads for cool stuff for my car. I'm not interested in furniture ads in those magazines, and furniture makers don't advertise in car mags. When I want to buy furniture, then I'll buy a home decor magazine and look at furniture ads. I don't want to see a fuel injection pump in a home decor magazine.
Hemmings Motor News is another example of effective advertising. It's nothing but car ads - and people pay for a subscription.
An online example is newegg.com. All it is is computer electronics. It's my go-to location when I'm looking for stuff for my computer. Seeing ads on newegg is exactly why I'm going there.
Of course, if I actually was able to buttonhole some guru at Google who understood the business and my situation, they would just look at me like I was an idiot and say "we warned you that if you turned off the various personalization features the ads wouldn't be relevant".
But if I left every option turned on, the ads wouldn't be better, just creepier.
People like reading ads about products they're interested in. I know I do. This idea that ads are all toxic because their purpose is to sell just isn't right.
I think most people back in the day came away from these magazines wanting more things they didn't even know existed prior to opening it up.
That just seems like common sense to me. The advantage of newspapers should be that they have more readers, not that their readers are any "clickier".
The increased income of Google (which is nearly all ads) matches the decreased income of the newspapers, so it doesn't seem like the ad spending actually decreased, it just moved away from the papers.
"Google, Craigslist and others are (mostly) in the new high-intent advertising market. It's an entirely different type of market based on an entirely different type of moment. The reason newspapers are losing here is because you aren't even in this market to begin with."
Not even in the market? Surely anyone who reads about the newspaper business has heard about the role of classifieds, and how they propped up newspapers until Craigslist came along?
AFAICT, search is a really amazing ad product. Users are declaring their interest in a subject, _right now_.
> They just didn't have the metrics to prove it.
You're not wrong, but I wouldn't discount the power of inertia. There's a story Steven Levitt tells on his Freakonomics podcast about a retailer who wanted to measure the impact of print ads. He suggested not running print ads for a duration in order to measure impact, and was met with incredulity: "Are you crazy? We can't just do that. We'll get fired like Jordan was. Dude was so unorganized that he forgot to order ads for the northeastern market for his entire summer internship."
After analyzing the data from that mishap, there was no measurable impact, and yet they refused to run the trial for longer. 'We can't not just buy ads' was the argument, even though the data suggested you totally could. I guess if your department buys ads, until you have an alternative, arguing for a budget cut is arguing your department should all be laid off.
- A recent comment regarding a travel agency reflected that execs would check the stats on the most popular travel agency every week, and wanted to be at the top. They would therefore run ad campaigns at the end of the week in order to drive themselves to the top, even if the ads were a net loss in revenue. This suggests that a lot of advertising is aimed at people who are already invested in the company: execs and shareholders, who see the ads and think it is reflective of how well the company is doing (which, in a way, it is: it signals they have extra money to waste on advertising)
- I recently saw a clip from a Jobs interview, where he contrasted non-monopolies, which are run by product people, with monopolies (like Xerox and IBM), which are run by "sales and marketing" people. Presumably some ads are effective. Controlling the ads that are effective gives marketing power over the company, in the monopoly case. Having attained this power, they then use it to route the company's spare revenue to buy still more ads. This has the interesting implication (perhaps obvious) that a monopoly is bad for shareholders (as well as consumers), who are being robbed of the revenue now being spent on ads.
I decided not to answer that question in the comments above in the name of brevity, but since you asked. My own thoughts:
- Punctuated evolution. The firms that follow the data are the ones more likely to survive recessions. One hopes that orgs where convention is only upset in a crisis are the ones more likely to fold.
- Re Jobs: he is widely regarded as a 'sales and marketing' genius, and was succeeded by a former IBMer focused on supply chain logistics, which is where monopolies actually focus. Why hire more salesman when your customer has to come to you to buy regardless?
I believe many magazines (though not newspapers) had a “Reply Mail” thing. I bet they derived metrics from those.
Because they lost their monopoly!
In most markets, there was one newspaper and that newspaper could charge advertisers as much as they wanted to.
When your monopoly rents go away, you go out of business.
It isn't in a shambles; it's just shifted to a more efficient mode of delivery. Who is going to bother with ads printed on paper that readers have to shuffle through when they can get them delivered direct to the readers' eyeballs online?
Now they know, and they also know the amount of waste is much higher.
This plus the destruction of classified ads has hit the newspaper industry hard.
Now pile on top all the "news" sites that don't really spend any money on editors, research, or reporting (all those sites that post articles about other articles or even worse tweets) that directly compete with newspapers on advertising money and you have a very bleak environment.
There are ads in newspapers where I just can’t think of any other reason. Like an ad for EADS (don’t remember if it was EADS or an equivalent). I ain’t going to buy an Airbus airliner in my next sunday shopping! And I doubt airlines make decisions based on ads.
No one is gathering that information though.
Digital publishing broke the monopoly and eroded the profits. In my opinion, newspapers that already had to deal with real competition before the internet have been much more successful: NYC and London papers.
Now there are basically two kinds of news content: factual information that is cheap and not profitable because it is a commodity, and propaganda that is supported by the beneficiary.
http://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american-...
https://books.google.com/books?id=3De8nd_B_C8C&printsec=fron...
The first episode deals exclusively with Bernays, and the following three episodes follow a political narrative of impact.
I believe Curtis’s “Hypernormalisation” would be more salient to the narrative here, which discusses the funding of misinformation as an alternative to traditional authoritarian power structures like censorship: https://youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU
Many publishers are typical corporations, with a large number of shareholders, none of which get to even talk to the journalists.
Even among those owned by individual billionaires, the evidence is lacking. The Washington Post, for example, has broken quite a few (often negative) stories about Amazon. The Seattle Times recently broke much of the 737-MAX scandal, even though they are faily dependent on Boeing. The New York Times doesn't even write much about Mexico, let alone topics related to Carlos Slim's financial interests.
The motivation to own these reputable papers seems to be far easier to explain as a status thing. Kinda like NFL teams, but for the more intellectual billionaires.
Alexander Hamilton didn't create the New York Post to make money. Henry Jarvis Raymond (politician) and George Jones (banker) didn't create the NYTimes to make money. Stilson Hutchins (politician) didn't create the WashingtonPost to make money. These newspapers were created to further their founders' political interests.
And in case you were wondering, Bezos didn't buy WashingtonPost to make money either.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
To my intuition 50c per day doesn’t signal a useful amount of disposable income even in 2006 dollars.
$0.50 a day is real money, even today.
Wow, I had no idea that city papers had such robust delivery networks back then.
I can almost imagine an alternate timeline where papers might have survived by leveraging that network to deliver books or other items from a catalog before Amazon.
I suppose their scale was in part only possible due to their consistently sized product and how much abuse a newspaper can take, but still wonder if any papers took a stab at delivering other print products before the internet era.
Newspaper delivery was closer to 'real-time' - it was printed this morning, and arrived for consumption during morning coffee. Many children took paper routes for some cash and delivered on their bikes. You slow down paper delivery when you start sending along multiple shipments, weighing more, for various customers.
Really not sure what to make of that. Other than maybe our outrage triggers have been honed to a razor's edge
I find it handy to evaluate the source of the outrage by this metric:
If they, personally, would not lay down their own lives in defense of whomever they are “protecting”, especially if they disagree with what that person is doing — they are somebody’s shills, and should be harshly disagreed with.
Newspaper delivery, on the other hand, was a short before-school/after-school job (back when evening papers were a thing) that didn't particularly interfere with schoolwork, and had already been displaced by adults in cars in the 90s after our society ceded street space as automobile death zones instead of treating it as public space that children could be expected to ride bikes along safely[1].
[0] https://mashable.com/2016/07/20/bike-messengers/ [1] there was plenty of resistance, but ultimately American society evolved into a technological dystopia where we permitted a new technology to be introduced to public spaces in spite of massive safety issues, ultimately overwhelming traditional uses https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/10/street-safety-am...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/charg...
It was perfectly normal in the 19th century along with street children, an unusual artifact in the 20th and blatantly out of place in the 21st.
Thinking about it though, I do think there's another big difference in that the stealing newspapers and reselling them isn't very profitable to potential criminals. Also, missing a paper delivery due to delivery error isn't the end of the world either.
So it seems like for Newspapers to really make any use of this network, they'd have to stick to delivering stuff that didn't majorly change their format or value, preferably that they could print on-demand themselves.
I guess the Sunday coupon print-outs could be considered an example of branching out a bit then?
The system works better for packages than post, since you send and pick up the parcel at their newsstands (there's always one nearby) at your leisure, avoiding the annoying "delivery failed, pick up at the post office" notices you'd get from the postman attempting delivery while you are at work.
It was also helped by the fact that the national postal service here is notoriously slow and not exactly reliable.
It was pretty sweet getting them at night, leaving the test in the morning and having results in 24 hours from the doctor ordering the tests.
There was a tweetstorm by some journalism prof I can't recall that was basically saying newspapers killed themselves, by consolidation, mergers and over-reliance on classified ads and news-by-wire. By the time Yahoo! news came along started publishing AP news wire feeds, and Craigslist allowed free listings, they had already cost optimized away local news they'd need to compete against new entrants. Perhaps someone will find that twitter thread for me.
https://mobile.twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1088503510184...
A few choice quotes:
> For those who aren’t quite sure why these media layoffs keep happening, or think “it’s the internet!” or “people don’t pay to subscribe,” there’s a lot more going on.
> Classified ads were a damn boondoggle. $500 in a mid-metro to place a car ad. The more expensive your item, the more you got charged. No wonder people rebelled the minute they were offered the ability to do it for free. Newmark didn’t kill classifieds; news publisher greed did.
> Profit margins for companies like Gannett and Knight Ridder were commonly around 30-40%.
> So chains started gobbling up papers all over the country in the ‘80s and ‘90s. They took on debt to do this because with 40% margins, there wasn’t much downside in that model.
I eschewed ad blockers until around 2016, when the (relatively mainstream) sites I was frequenting started getting hit with a lot of malicious ads. I'm happy to support content I enjoy, but not at the expense of my own security.
I understand the economic model of free access with advertising, but I'm not going to put my computer and data at risk for it. Allowing ads to include executable code was idiotic.
Now the profit from ads largely goes to engineers to build products for the web, (and shareholders of tech companies).
Both journalism and web stuff provide public good, but we need to figure out how to replace the revenue that financed journalism. The public was getting it for "free" before, and when it moved online we continued to want to get it for free, but the advertising model did not survive the transition.
No ads, no clickbait, no partisan nonsense, no dark patterns, no hit pieces, no mixing of news and opinion.
Just uncompromisingly focused fact-based journalism (of course there will always be some bias and mistakes, but there's a lot you can do to mitigate these things).
I wonder if there are enough people that would pay $X/mo for this to make it viable. I'd happily pay at least $20/mo.
They're doing kinda/sorta OK with digital subscriptions but basically journalism is expensive to produce.
* https://www.economist.com/ - good coverage of various subjects worldwide.
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/ - good coverage of US politics
* https://www.bendbulletin.com/ - because I live here and they're the only ones that always have someone at things like city council meetings, county commissioner meetings and the like.
Also the rise of online business review websites (Yelp, Google Reviews, Trip Advisor, ect) are now more useful and specifically targeted to an audience looking for local eats. (And also killed the Yellowpages.)
In all seriousness it seems like an attempt to fill a minimum word count without much research or math like say percentages of revenue by ads vs consumer sales over time.
The Sunday Times ran $0.30 in 1969, which is $2.10 in 2019 dollars:
https://goodmorninggloucester.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/wo...
Price of the Sunday edition was raised to $0.20 in 1952, or $1.92 in 2019 dollars. 1974's $1 Sunday paper would be $5.21 today:
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/08/29/archives/times-to-increas...
The $0.01 daily paper cost of 1898 would (based on 1913 dollars) today be about $0.26. The US dollar actually depreciated generally through about 1900, though at a fairly gradual rate.
On September 13, 1987, the Sunday Times reached its maximum extent: 12 pounds (5.4 kg), 1,612 pages.
https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/history-of-the-new-york-...
I want to pay for news. But I don't have the budget to pay $20/mo each to six great newspapers all equally worthy of my attention, and nor do most other people.
Ten or twenty cents a day is lower than the fifty cents for a paper copy- but the marginal overhead is also zero.
Is it possible to keep a newspaper in business by purchasing subscriptions. Think about that the next time someone suggests subscribing to some popular newspaper to counter the effects of declining journalism.
Here is what I plan to get done in 2020: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#DIGITAL-MEDIA-AND-CONT...