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Comment by inductive_magic | Hacker News Reader

What really grinds my gears: they do the same thing when you're a paying subscriber.

I'm with the nyt for two years now, and I can vividly remember seeing the first ad that was displayed despite me being logged in. How is that okay?! And btw: I wanted to cancel my subscription afterwards, but apparently you can't do that via web from the EU (or not for my subscription type?) - so I need to cancel on the phone, during american business hours. I appreciate the times for their journalism, but their business practice with respect to selling their customers data is beyond inacceptable. I'm already paying you money, get your act together please...

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It annoys me too, but I'm playing devil's advocate to reason it out.

When you buy a print copy, it also has adverts. The price you're paying is subsidised by the adverts, it doesn't completely cover the costs.

Perhaps there are two possible ends of the spectrum. On one side, you have to pay for all news that you access and there is no advertising. The news will be expensive, so only the wealthy will have access. The government can subsidise it, but that runs the risk of politicising it.

At the other, there is only advertising-supported news. The content you see is decided by whoever bids the highest.

A blended subscriptions plus advertising model tries to find a middle ground. I guess the argument is that advertising would be OK, if it didn't track your every movement and share that information with thousands of scummy companies. Is that even possible now? Would advertisers pay if they didn't get that information?

>I guess the argument is that advertising would be OK, if it didn't track your every movement and share that information with thousands of scummy companies.

Honestly: no. I'd rather pay more than selling my attention, because that's what ads are doing. My time is more valuable than whatever margin they're making by showing me ads, and I'm very confident that I'm not alone with this position.

>Is that even possible now? Would advertisers pay if they didn't get that information?

This is a really good question, and adding to it: how hard-wired are these mechanisms into modern websites such as the nyt's? I'm pretty sure that there is no simple on-off switch, but how much work would it be to implement one?

A sliding-scale subscription model would be nice, where I could say "I'll pay $100 per month and have no adverts at all" or "I'll only $5 per month, and I'm happy to have a lot of adverts".

But the advertisers probably want access to the kind of people who are prepared to part with a lot of money to avoid advertising. You see this in the FT and Economist where it's more expensive to advertise to subscribers, because the advertisers know those people have higher disposable income. If all they can have access to is lower-paid people, I guess there’s a risk a lot of the advertisers will not bother.

Maybe there's just an inherent problem here. News can be good quality, independent from government, free from advertising, and available to all. But it can't be all of those things at the same time at a national level.

>"I'll pay $100 per month and have no adverts at all" or "I'll only $5 per month, and I'm happy to have a lot of adverts".

there is another problem with that model. As long as ads revenue is a significant portion of publisher's income there is a risk of advertisers influencing the content. At $100/month you won't see the ads, but the news themselves could still be influenced by advertisers in some way. I'm afraid that this would need all or nothing approach to be effective.

I am afraid there is a high probability in that $100 wont work. And the question is a little more complex.

This is not about I am willing to paid $100 to get rid of ads as the OP stated, it is how many are willing to paid $100. Or more precisely, we need X ( Say 10 ) monthly million revenue form customers to sustain the business. Are there enough customers to share the $10 million expense. We could price it at $50, are there 200K customers wiling to subscribe, and if not, how many more paying the $5 + Ads will make it sustainable. Given the Ads money with the $5 subscription will be lower since the subscribers of $5 are likely not worth anywhere as much as the $50.

Like you said most of the high paying subscribers are already concentrated in FT , Economist or WSJ. And precisely the reason why Apple news didn't include any of those three. They still dont get it. It might work for casual, gaming, sports magazine. Not Quality Daily news.

> This is a really good question, and adding to it: how hard-wired are these mechanisms into modern websites such as the nyt's? I'm pretty sure that there is no simple on-off switch, but how much work would it be to implement one?

After Ars Technica's most recent revamp/relaunch of their pay-for subscription, it took them a few additional weeks to clean it up to remove all third party domain calls for paying user.

> I'm very confident that I'm not alone with this position.

You are not alone. There are plenty of services I pay to eschew ads. The moment they start inserting advertising, they'll lose me as a customer. I don't have cable, don't listen to FM or AM radio, and I don't have satellite radio, all because they have ads.

> The news will be expensive, so only the wealthy will have access.

I think this is correct, although HN readers may have some bias to disagree. I think the HN crowd is generally fairly well off financially (but not rich) and cares more about privacy than other groups.

> When you buy a print copy, it also has adverts. The price you're paying is subsidised by the adverts, it doesn't completely cover the costs.

For print and online the advertising covers the cost and the subscription is just a bonus on it, same thing you said but from the end users perspective. Why pay a bonus for nothing?

There's a better way: just don't read news.

> I guess the argument is that advertising would be OK, if it didn't track your every movement and share that information with thousands of scummy companies. Is that even possible now? Would advertisers pay if they didn't get that information?

They would, if they had no choice. Thay have to be forced, both technically and legally, to advertise without using that kind of fidelity. Simple as that.

Many of us don't care about the ads. It's the tracking.

They could offer a no-tracking tier. When you consider how little revenue most ads generate per user, the price increase wouldn't be very much.

Print ads don't call home with your identity when you see them, they don't tell a dozen different companies who you are. The magazine may have some general statistics on it's customers (maybe differentiated by region?), but they certainly don't give the advertiser enough information to uniquely identify every person who sees an ad, along with individual demographic information and information on what ads the reader has seen elsewhere. The print customer database is (probably, hopefully) not linked into other third party databases that list what your hobbies are, what shelves you look in at the store, and what other publications you subscribe to.

If online news only had static first-party ads that were the same for every customer (or possibly every customer in X region), uninformed by Amazon/Google/other browsing, I'd be more than happy to turn off my ad blocker.

If the newspapers produced a daily epub, I'd be happy to pay for it. Even then, epubs can contain references to third party images and other resources (not sure about PDF, I despise PDF for lack of text reflow). My personal ideal for online subscriptions would be an OPDS catalog that I could subscribe to; this supports login-based access, and I could use fbreader or any other app to read.

I did the exact same thing. I was so pissed off about having to see ads on a website I was paying for.

They do the same thing to the US: They force you to call them.

I tried to cancel my credit card to get rid of the charge: soon after, they started charging me again.

In the end I had to call my credit card company and block all transactions from them, forever.

Super scummy, super annoying. Fuck the NYT.

Financial Times do the same thing. About €60 a month for a subscription and they still insist on putting ads in the app.

I estimate that the ads only generate a miniscule amount of revenue, yet it really detracts from the user experience.

The ads for paying users are probably worth a lot more than for non paying users.

For the FT specifically, I get the impression that a pretty large portion of subscriptions are corporate/paid for by employers so I'm not sure how true that really is.

The companies paying for a FT subscription for their employees are going to have well compensated employees, hence valuable eyeballs for advertisers.

This. Also, some of those eyes are going to belong to people who make purchasing decisions on the behalf of their employer. Those people are exceptionally valuable to advertisers.

That's why I like the Guardian, if you're a digital sub app is ad free.

Is it also data-collection free?

I pay for NY Times (as well as several other papers, like the WSJ).

NY Times runs giant banner "subscribe" ads even if you're a paid, logged-in member. I still need ad blocking on!

I wouldn't mind ads equivalent to what you see in the real paper -- a Macy's ad at the end of an article, etc. But they should be in the page, and not popping up on top, on the bottom, or over the article.

> And btw: I wanted to cancel my subscription afterwards, but apparently you can't do that via web from the EU (or not for my subscription type?) - so I need to cancel on the phone, during american business hours.

There's existing NL law (maybe based on EU regulation?) that makes this impossible. Basically: the way you cancel should be as easy as you subscribe. Meaning, if you could subscribe online, you must be able to cancel the subscription online. If subscribing was utterly difficult, then cancelling can be utterly difficult.

If there's EU regulation behind it, usually you can force any foreign company to abide by this. Unfortunately it was difficult to figure out if this NL law was based on any EU regulation (e.g. Consumer Rights Directive from https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/consumers/consumer-c...).

Same thing with Wall Street Journal. Can't cancel via web, gotta waste 15 minutes on the phone. Never subscribing again.

I had the same experience with the Globe and Mail in Canada. You get ads regardless of whether or not you're a paying subscriber, and while you can sign up online, you can't cancel. It was a total pain in the ass to do that over the phone, and it's a glaringly-obvious (and misguided) retention tactic.

I'll never subscribe to them again. What a short-sighted way to optimize for revenue at any cost.

had same problem trying to cancel my subscription, I've canceled payments through paypal

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