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Comment by msvan | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that revenue from paying subscribers is not enough. For most newspapers, ads are needed to run a profitable digital business. Ads cannot be removed for paying subscribers, since paying subscribers are precisely who advertisers want to target. And if you want to display ads on the internet, you have to track people just like your competitors Google and Facebook do.

> If news companies believe their core purpose is the dissemination of valuable information, it would make a lot of sense for them to provide a text-only static version of their website.

I think most serious news companies think they have an important democratic mission. But at the end of the day, the economics have to make sense in order for quality journalism to exist in the first place.

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> I think most serious news companies think they have an important democratic mission. But at the end of the day, the economics have to make sense in order for quality journalism to exist in the first place.

I guess the real question that we have to answer as a society is: what's more important: democracy or an unfettered free market economy.

If the answer is democracy, the economics of our society can be changed to make it work for journalism. Maybe those changes will mean some Chicago-school economist's equation won't yield the highest value for some term, but that's perfectly fine. Despite some popular misconceptions, modern economic theories do not communicate the true, revealed nature of human society. The economy needs to serve society, not the other way around.

I think that the necessary conditions for mass market ad supported quality journalism have largely disappeared. Except for perhaps a handful of nationally prominent newspapers, 20th century dailies didn't turn a profit on "quality journalism" (investigative reporting or in-depth analysis). It was too expensive to produce relative to the revenue it yielded even before the Web. But geographic and technological barriers to competition meant that newspapers could command high margins on low-production-cost material (police reports, sports scores, weather forecasts, classified advertising...) and end up with enough money to make employees and owners happy, even after bundling in some prestige reporting that won Pullitzers.

It's kind of like how Bell Laboratories did some unprofitable and groundbreaking basic research back in the heyday of the AT&T monopoly. The lack of competition in AT&T's main line of business inflated prices but also let executives choose to fund a few unprofitable ideas that they considered worthy.

Now competition is fiercer and prices are lower. We're also not getting the positive side effects from monopolies that people had conceptualized as natural features of "the telephone business" or "the newspaper business."

you do not have to track people in order to display ads on the internet, you just incorporate the ad on the webpage, and whoever visits the page sees the ad

That sounds an awful lot like how ads in newspapers used to work... you put the ads in the paper, and whoever reads the paper sees the ads.

So why do we let people tell us it can’t be done on the internet?

Computers cut the ads out of the page with no effort.

I don’t understand the relevance of that argument in this context.

Computers can cut ads that do tracking out of the page with the same effort they can cut out anything else from the page.

The difference is that ads without tracking remove the incentive for the user to block them. This is why people don’t cut ads out of the newspapers before reading. If the ads in newspapers were cameras, analogous to the tracking used in online advertising, you’d see people expend that effort. Just as you see people blocking ads online.

Plenty of people block ads because the ads themselves are annoying. People don’t cut ads out of paper newspapers because it’s more annoying to do that than it is to just ignore the ads.

So why do we let people tell us it can’t be done on the internet?

Precisely.

There is an entire multi-billion dollar industry built upon instilling fear in advertisers that their ads might not be fully "optimized," whatever that means these days. Google is at the head of this list.

Amazingly, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Pepsi, Boeing, and every other large non-tech company managed to become enormous companies by advertising in significantly less targeted ways through newspapers, television, radio, billboards, magazines, etc...

The notion that ads not targeted by Google or Facebook are wasted money is a lie invented by the targeting industry to keep itself in business.

Because now there are cost-effective alternatives that didn’t exist back then.

It's been tried. What that usually means is you manage the ads yourself, or it's some really small ad network which doesn't have that many advertisers on it competing to give money to the website. Advertisers are as lazy as anyone else, they don't want to have to deal with numerous agencies to deploy ads, they want one, maybe two, and would certainly like it a lot if they had some metrics to show their boss.

Yeah, at a really low CPM. Not trying to justify the awful practice of user tracking, but why would I pay you $3.00 per thousand impressions if you’re going to be showing my ad to demographics that will rarely buy my product?

Companies want to optimize their marketing dollars, so they’re going to pay pennies if you don’t track users.

> The problem is that revenue from paying subscribers is not enough.

Nope, it's enough. News is just not what you think, it's far from simple business. The biggest value news outlets provide to people who own them is the value of influence and controlling the narrative. So they are deliberately chasing after the eyeballs to spread their influence and no business model that narrows the audience much is even considered.

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