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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

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?

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>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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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