Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy | Hacker News Reader

Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy

reuters.com

98 pointsuptown123 comments

Although it's regrettable that Reuters' content will be harder to access, it's a positive trend for the news ecosystem to generate increasing revenue through a subscription-based business model rather than selling ads.

The more money that comes from subscriptions, the more that news coverage will reflect the interests of subscribers rather than advertisers.

In my very personal opinion, based on the New York Times this isn't necessarily a good thing. Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit crazy in their coverage. (and Fox is just as bad, but its not an online publication for the sake of my point)

>Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit crazy in their coverage

Equating one of the premier news organizations in the world with Fox is quite interesting.

NYTimes has been breaking news stories since the Civil War. They are the only organization that routinely breaks news against 'both sides' of the aisle. e.g. Clinton Email server and Trump business ties to name a couple

The fact of the matter is that people can not differentiate the opinion pieces from their hard hitting news pieces. Which is a symptom of the low quality "social media news" that currently exists.

> The fact of the matter is that people can not differentiate the opinion pieces from their hard hitting news pieces.

They intentionally blur that line. Almost all of their news pieces the last several years have been full of opinion.

No. There is a distinct Opinion Section with it's own editorial oversight.

https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion

Just like every other high quality news source.

That doesn't refute what I said at all. Yes, they have an opinion section. They also inject a lot of opinion into articles that are nominally straight news.

This just isn’t true at all.

They are distinct and completely governed by different editors.

Yeah, Fox never had one of their Pulitzer prize winning journalists writing literal propaganda handed to them by the Soviet Union to cover up the Holodomor.

Lol, Fox has never won a Pulitzer and for good reason. They run propaganda in prime time every single night. Roger Ailes was a bona fide conspiracy nut: https://www.axios.com/john-boehner-book-ted-cruz-fox-news-a1...

NY Times has been in operation for 170 years and has made a few mistakes. There is just no comparison. They are best news source in the country bar none.

>They run propaganda in prime time every single night.

All major news outlets run propaganda - not just in prime time, but all of the time. That is their job. The NY Times does have the privilege of being one of the primary establishment press outfits, resulting in their main aim being setting the tone for propaganda outfits around the nation and throughout much of the western world.

If you want to know which way the wind is blowing inside the FBI or CIA, the NY Times is where you go.

To compare them to Fox is pointless, as Fox does little to no print journalism. NY Times excels in [often overly-]lengthy, well-written articles, whereas I don't think Fox has ever done much more than briefs and blurbs.

> They are the only organization that routinely breaks news against 'both sides' of the aisle.

Both sides indeed. They report on news of national importance, such as a playground scuffle:

A Black Virginia Girl Says White Classmates Cut Her Dreadlocks at a Playground - https://web.archive.org/web/20190927202007/https://www.nytim...

Once it turns out the story was a hoax, they do their journalistic duty and remove any reference to race from the title:

Update: Virginia Girl Recants Story of Assault, and Family Apologizes - https://web.archive.org/web/20191001003852/https://www.nytim...

I wonder if they would have reported on it at all if victim and perpetrator were reversed, or featured race so prominently. But if they were reversed, the story would not be important to the national conversation, would it?

the same with npr, a crumbling sheen of objectivity thinly veiling increasingly blatant partisanship.

there is value in curation, as demonstrated by subscriptions (or 'donations'), but these outlets have lost sight of that value in the quest to ever-more-desperately shape public opinion while retaining relevance. they've slid down the slippery slope from objective(-ish) curation to the coercive variety and have no one but themselves--principally their wealthy owners/directors/executives but also the rank & file--to blame.

i'd love to pay for objective(-ish) curation, and ideally slower, more considered reporting but that latter bit may be more than is practically possible right now. the paradox of choice makes it really hard to curate your own news feed as substack invites you to do. just like a portfolio of stocks, you won't get great returns on a (likely) highly correlated group of individual newsletters. and without a plethora of them (like 60+), you'd likely fail to garner enough breadth to even have a chance of avoiding false correlation, much like how the nyt and npr (and fox) fail via partisanship bias.

The problem articulated by Antonio Garcia-Martinez:

> The customer always gets what they want: In the case of an ads-driven business model where the advertiser is the true customer, that’s balanced political news alongside frivolous lifestyle stories as a canvas for ads. In the case of subscribers, it’s being flattered by having their own worldviews echoed back at themselves in more articulate form. Nobody actually pays for news, unless your livelihood depends on it, which is why outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg will still flourish, but nothing vaguely resembling news will otherwise remain in a subscription-driven world.

Source: https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/twilight-of-the-media-elite...

that's a decent and succinct summary of the situation, and perhaps why the hybrid funding model of subscriptions, ads, and classifieds balanced out to objective-ish news for the few decades before the internet flattened out the business model entirely.

the news industry is roughly $100B in the US (depending on how you define it). as a thought experiment, maybe we could give each of our 330M residents $300/year (~10% of the military budget) to spend on any news source, and only news sources, and preclude other forms of revenue for the industry. that'd make journalism directly accountable to the entirety of the population rather than just to moneyed interests.

On the topic of objective curation, I've been appreciating The New Paper [1] enough that I started paying when they went subscription-only.

Top five or so stories of the day with a few lines of detail so you can understand what happened and why it's important, focusing on the actual events, not the narratives around them.

[1] https://thenewpaper.co/

The optimistic view is that there is a market for unbiased reporting and someone will step in to service that demand.

But who know.

After rewatching the film, Network from the 1970s last night I felt a weird sense of shame for supporting almost any modern news. The film conceptualized the modern issue with news and money in an unbelievably perfect manner for today.

If subs-only model improves reporting and rids the pubs of propagandizing, I’m all for it. The price we pay now for free news is too high -click bait, us vs them, persistent shallow dives into inane subjects is taking its toll.

> If subs-only model improves reporting and rids the pubs of propagandizing, I’m all for it.

Yeah, if.

I'd argue it would increase bias, since now they need to cater to their audience even harder.

Do you think the average man is going to rely on a news provider like Reuters after this change?

My father reads a lot of third party news but actually fact checks on Reuters. A lot of friends and colleagues skip third party news and read directly from Reuters, because it is free. With this change, I doubt a great many of them will continue with Reuters as a source, and would rather stop at a third-party localized news outlet.

Reuters provides facts, and very little opinion. People believe that facts ought to be free, and only worthy opinions are worth paying for.

I don’t know.

People used to pay for newspaper subs before. In real terms, this price is relatively cheap. Gathering facts requires time, money and able reporters.

I know people got spoiled for a while with free news. It’s time to go back to reality and pay for good news reporters.

Except that's not going to happen. Nearly every relative, friend and acquaintance of mine was a paying subscriber of the news before, but all have since moved to free digital, even though all of them can easily afford to pay for the rounding error. Expecting that whole set of people to go back to paying for news after more than a decade though, is going to be hard. People don't feel that news should be a paid commodity, simply because it's a commodity now. If they Google a topic and arrive at a pay walled site, they'll simply move onto another site that gives it for free. And this is in a world where 50%+ of the audience gets their news third party from social media, and not even news websites in the first place.

> Reuters provides facts, and very little opinion.

It's perfectly possible to provide facts in a highly opinionated way. The world we live in is a messy smear of mostly-contradictory evidence [1], so media can influence perceptions enormously by being selective in its reporting of that evidence.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CAy7jujW4AAHhuu?format=png&name=...

Reuters has maintained a very neutral facts-based reporting style compared to other similar wire sources such as Bloomberg and AP.

I'm not sure I agree. Ad-funded publishers will still get the scoop. While the lucky subscribers might get access to better news, the masses will be left with the dreadful reporting of the open websites.

The more neutral sites that go behind paywalls, the more people will turn to sensationalist sites which remain free. This divides the knowledge of the people, sorting the well off and the not into different news buckets.

Advertising-based is awful in itself, but I don't view this is a positive improvement.

It's not either-or. Plenty of companies make money through subscriptions, and later on add the adtech garbage back in.

Yes, but other outlets with subscriptions still have ads as well. It seems to be a strange holdover from print news where you also had to pay for a newspaper ... with ads.

There was of course a physical paper that had to be printed and delivered so a base cost at the very least kept printing and delivery down to reasonable numbers. The ads could pay the reporters wages, etc.

I'm not sure what the new rationale is for double-paying for the content.

It would seem to my naive brain that the more eyeballs on your ads, the more money you make from the advertisers. Needless to say a paywall (even a free subscription wall) blocks those eyeballs.

Most of HN crowd I'm sure can spend a few extra bucks per month to get quality news.

What about not so lucky people, though?

> What about not so lucky people, though?

If it’s a civic issue, the government could offer them subsidies. Economics are an existential issue for news organisations. It’s unreasonable to foreclose them viable business models on the basis of equal access.

Let's be honest, most of the HN crowd probably has a paywall blocker extension. That, or they just turn their cookies off and the website can't keep track of how many articles they have left. Not so lucky people can probably do the same.

In my mind, a subscription model for these websites is essentially a donation model.

Most of the free alternatives, that is, the ones accessible to the precariate majority, will be propaganda.

This is not a good development.

Here's the thing with the proliferation of paywalls in news sites: it just makes disinformation and the spreading of fake news all that much easier if you can't fact-check easily. I understand people need to get paid, but I don't know if this is quite the right way to go.

They should charge for today's news, but give free access to older news (olds?) to facilitate research.

It also presents a problem for the news companies, as it makes it even harder to inform viewers of things that the viewers don’t want to know / believe.

Subscriber-based access excludes the overwhelming majority of possible readers.

Amongst the most successful subscriber paywalls is that of the New York Times, boasting about 5 million paid subscribers.

Given about 130 million US households, this means that 96.67% of the country's households lack access to this source.

And before any comments on the merits or failings of the source in question, again this is among the most successful and widely used subscription paywalls extant, and it excludes over 95% of potential readers.

The exclusion cost is absolutely immense.

Interestingly, and I don't see this argument often, this situation can also turn into a rich get richer. If market information, political information, educational information are all hidden behind paywalls, the haves can afford information, and the have nots are kept ignorant. How can one perform their civic duty without accurate information? How can one invest in equities without up to date information?

I see this as making a strong case for more put into entities like PBS, CPB, BBC etc and for Libraries paying for access for their citizens.

"audiences prepared to pay $34.99 per month for a deeper level of coverage"

Holy crap...who is this audience? NYT is $4/month, WAPO is $4-6/month, etc.

Edit: Ah, okay, intro pricing that shifts to ~$17/month after a year. Still, though, that's half of this proposed pricing.

Your overall point still stands but the $4 you cite is a sign-up promotion - after that expires, it's $17/month for a digital subscription.

NYT is $4/4 weeks (not per month) during its trial period. That plan jumps to ~$18/mo after that ($17 per 4 weeks => ~$18/mo). WaPo is similar.

The audience appears to be people who subscribe to Bloomberg, which is in the same price bracket.

I'm surprised they would be competitors. My (perhaps incorrect) assumption is that Bloomberg would have much more in-depth business coverage.

And that Reuters would have more breadth, but significantly less depth, and competing more generally with AP than Bloomberg.

NYT is $4/4 weeks as long as you continue to call and pretend to cancel at the end of your trial periods. It's a pain in the ass, but it work every time.

Although the comparison to NYT/WaPo makes some superficial sense, there is a big difference between a newspaper and a news agency like Reuters or AP.

I don’t know much about the journalism business, but I expect Reuters is catering towards a smaller, premium audience that reads a lot of straight news but doesn’t care so much about criticism, commentary, and so on. In particular: reporters and academics, for whom this will be a business expense.

Yeah, somebody really needs to solve the micropayments problem for real. I have no problem paying for content, but there is no way in hell I'm paying $35 a month for a Reuters subscription just to read one or two articles a month. And same for NYT, WSJ, yadda, yadda, yadda. I mean... if we all paid for monthly subscriptions for every news site we read a couple of articles a month from, we'd be paying $600 / month just for news. I think that merits a "C'mon, man" response.

If nothing else maybe these sites could have plans that are tiered somehow, instead of going from "5 free a month (but you have to register and give us your info)" straight to "35.00 a month for unlimited." Give us "$3.00 a month for 10 articles, or $8.00 a month for 20 articles" tiered plan options or something.

Why not just offer a preview (headline and first paragraph) and pay a small fee per article; maybe something like a quarter? They could also include an unlimited tier for avid readers. A decade ago this model would probably be a non-starter because it would require the inconvenience of maintaining an account everywhere and going through an awkward checkout flow for every transaction. SSO payment providers make this a lot easier now. Anecdotally, Apple Pay is a joy to use, for example.

That is the micropayments problem. You have to make it easy enough, like taking a quarter out of your pocket, for people to actually do it. And low enough fee where it's worth it. I believe most micro transaction providers still charge at least a flat 10c fee, which is a hefty portion of any micropayment.

So why not pass that along to the consumer? If we were talking about a quarter an article before, now it's thirty five cents. I'd still pay it. My point was that the technology seems good enough now. I'll admit I could be way off on the price for it to be economically feasible, but I'm still very curious what that is. Based on what I read, see and hear, many of us have "subscription fatigue".

Micropayments are the way to go. But as the intermediate solution, I would be in favor of (non-expiring) credit-based microtransactions. E.g. you buy $20 of NYT credit. After that, it is $.25 for a single article <3y old, $1 for any number of today's articles, $3 for any number of articles from the past 7 days, $10 for full access for the following 30 days.

I'm not very fond of the tiered plans as you describe them. They are like the child of the unholy union between fast-food and gym marketing tricks: Would you like us to oversize your subscription from 15 to 40 articles for only $3? Wouldn't it be a huge inconvenience to pay us every month? Why don't you set up a recurring fee instead? But of course you will be reading 40 articles per month for the foreseeable future!

It's all gain for the sellers. But from the customer's perspective, one still has to give their credit card number, and may still end up paying for content they won't use.

That's a fair point. And I definitely favor a real micropayments option in the long-run. But I could settle for a tiered plan in some cases as an interim step, especially if the only other option is the "unlimited plan" which just doesn't (in most cases) make sense for my usage patterns.

Micropayments have a 50 year history of consistently and precisely perfectly failing to work.

The grail you seek is not the holy sort.

FT is even worse; $50-$100 per month for individual subscribers, depending on which package you have and whether you catch a promotion.

I agree with the other poster who suggested Reuters is targeting pros with this pricing.

"Reuters.com will remain free for a preview period, but will require users to register after five stories. It is not immediately clear when it will begin charging."

Reuters reporting about Reuters in the third person is amusing. "We asked ourselves when we would begin charging but we didn't know."

Clever way of demonstrating the separation between reporting and finances, I think.

Snark toward the suits, taken to an art form. I love it.

I used to work at Reuters (last century) - in technology, but had occasional contact with the news side. They would treat it as a badge of honour to be the first to publish stories about Reuters - however embarrassing. There was no possibility of interference by management.

I don't know if that's the case now or how many other publishers would live by those rules.

I think Techcrunch is similar w.r.t. Verizon but, given Reuters didn't acquire Reuters, this seems more unusual.

Still the case! (Journalist at Reuters)

A tangent, but I love that the wikipedia article on Humans is in 3rd Person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human Reads like some alien civilization documenting us.

> ... and with humans solely on the Moon, two at a time for brief intervals between 1969 and 1972.

Their slapdown about our presence on the moon is brutal!

A fun one: "They're made out of meat" [1]

[1] https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

"Conservation status: Least Concern."

Not at all unusual for [formerly?] serious news organizations. Most of the navel gazing at the NYT is in the third person, for example.

The answer to 'when' is likely going to be: after we collect data about user views, sign in rates, return rates, etc.

Someone highup wants a money grab but they also want to know roughly how much money there is to grab and how much will be lost to see if the strategy is worth pursuing first. I cherish these innovative businesses and all their high-risk taking that leads them there.

Makes you seem more important https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4FxhUA0SKM

Does anyone pay for these kind of sites? I just can’t imagine doing it. I already have streaming subscriptions I just cannot imagine paying for news. I know that is a problem for the internet and journalism in general but what person will buy a Reuters sub? I can maybe see a NY Times sub or WSJ for some people but it has to be the best of the best. And still I personally wouldn’t do it. I don’t need to know news. It’s likely the news will make me feel worse, as opposed to my streaming subscriptions which will make me feel better.

I'm not sure, but I would have thought it would be the opposite — you should not pay to read (or read at all) biased journals such as the NYT, WSJ, or Fox etc., and instead only pay attention to journals with minimal bias like Reuters and AP.

You can't equate WSJ/NYT with Reuters or AP.

They serve completely different purposes. The "biases" of them is hardly relevant unless you are routinely taking their opinion sections as fact.

I pay for NPR. I mean, I know that's different because their content isn't behind a paywall.

My mom pays for the NYT, but I think that's mostly for access to their cooking site.

I think these big news companies need to form a federation or something where you buy access at one and get rights to read over multiple different magazines.

> I think these big news companies need to form a federation or something where you buy access at one and get rights to read over multiple different magazines.

Exactly! I tried coil.com for a while and it would be amazing if you could pay a monthly subscription and then it distributes to articles that you end up reading.

Apple News+? I know it's not necessarily the most popular or well thought of, but it's the only widespread platform (I'm aware of) that provides that kind of service for the price point I'm wiling to pay; i.e., Netflix-ish monthly fee.

I'm essentially an Apple Fanboy but I've tried Apple News + a few times and I just don't like it. It spends too much time trying to suggest stories, bother me with news, there's ads I can't block, etc. so I just don't use it. Leave me alone! I don't want your suggestions. I don't want to discover new content or follow some trend. At least sequester those things off to some tab or setting or something.

I'm with you on those downsides, they all bother me too. The value add for me is that I get access to publications I'd have to pay separately for otherwise; e.g., WSJ, Wired, etc. My use case is primarily to open it and navigate to the content I want under the Subscriptions tab.

Yea definitely. I like the idea of it, I just wish I could turn off all suggestions and discovery unless I go search for something. Oh and turn off ads too if I'm paying.

I suspect people whose living depends on keeping up with the news will pay. Consider Bloomberg, FT, WSJ, etc. Many people pay for those, and for good reason.

They seem to be aiming at professionals, although it also says they're after their current audience, whatever that is.

> the newly revamped Reuters.com www.reuters.com is hoping to attract professional audiences prepared to pay $34.99 per month for a deeper level of coverage and data on industry verticals

They should consider https://www.digitimes.com/index.asp 's model:

   The news articles are free for a few days.   After that, access to older articles require premium subscription.   This generates eyeballs and ads revenue for the site especially for hot news.

   They also generate the premium quarterly industrial reports which are very informative and marketing, product folks of certain industrial love to pay for them.

This reduces the number of reliable and reasonably neutral news sources accessible to the majority of people, which is a bad thing.

I would not call Reuters neutral. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuters

Gee, I'd always considered Reuters and AP to be as close to neutral press as there is. Who is neutral if not Reuters?

I think they are about as neutral as you will find. The wider environment has just become hyper partisan. It has certainly influenced both organizations (which I read daily), and I would agree they're not as neutral as they were once lauded to be, but I don't know that you'll find a better option.

Checking out allsides.com, and their bias ratings, is a good way to see just how bad the other options are.

Reuters is quite neutral.

Which means the right thinks Reuters is left.

The right thinks every media outlet but Fox News is somewhere to the left of Pravda, and sometimes they have their doubts about Fox.

As far as I can tell it is 'reasonably' neutral. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/reuters

Hopefully the addition of a paywall does not skew things.

The “controversies” section in the Wikipedia article doesn’t point to any coherent bias in Reuters or deliberate organization-wide ideological judgments. I am really not sure what you are trying to say other than “one of the largest news agencies in the world has made mistakes” which... ok?

It is true that Reuters tends to hew towards US-centric conventional politics and sometimes has problems with politically-biased reporters and editors. This is endemic to any news organization run by Americans, and similar issues will arise in any non-partisan news agency. Reuters is only “non-neutral” in the sense that any news organization will have some ideological baggage and some viewpoint.

It is useful to keep this in mind when reading any particular story, since any journalist is capable of bias and any story should be read critically. It is not useful to pretend that this human imperfection is somehow a problem with Reuters. It seems like an unfair (and dangerous) way to discredit legitimate journalism.

> Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat participated in covert UK Foreign Office-funded programs to “weaken Russia,” leaked docs reveal

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-of...

Paying $6-10/month for every subscription site is untenable. There's going to be something that will replace all this, but I'm not sure what. I would rather just watch ads than have to endure death by a thousand subscriptions.

The sad fact is that producing real journalism costs money, and there are too many parasitic content providers that steal journalism for ad eybeballs. The whole system is unsustainable. People used to be accustomed to paying for newspapers and supporting the journalism field, but have gotten used to it for free. Ad prices can no longer sustain all but the largest, and the ad model presents a conflict of interests with juicing click through rates and returns.

You're omitting numerous alternative compensation mechanisms. Ads and subscriptions aren't the only options. Nor are micropayments or patronage the only novel notions (neither ultimately are effective).

A few decades ago, we chose one or a few print sources and read those regularly. We read some others at the hairdresser.

I believe sooner or later it will be fixed by bundling subscriptions. Just like TV channels are bundled today.

My guess is that it has not taken off yet because everyone wants to be the top dog in that kind of business.

How long until we get SciHub for news?

There is already Archive.is to bypass paywalls. You wait until someone with a subscription archives the site (no more than a few hours for NY Times articles, for instance), and then you can read the archived copy after entering the URL.

This makes the decision to kill their RSS feed last year a bit easier to understand.

If this trend accelerates isn't one unintended consequence that fake news (which will remain free to access) will propagate even faster than it already is?

Can we reflect back for a moment that come the age of mass-media (Gutenberg), literally the first things off the press were:

1. Propaganda. In the word’s original sense, as The Bible.

2. Cheaply-produced, high-cost status indicia / devices for separating fools from their money, a/k/a Papal Indulgences.

In the ensuing 568 years, nobody’s come up with an alternative business model, modulo rounding errors.

Since Reuters stopped its RSS feed, I found an interesting alternative : Aljazeera English.

Aljazeera English has almost the same content than Reuters (like literally, exact same articles words by words), has RSS feed, and also has interesting news and viewpoint about Africa, Asia and Middle East.

Thompson Reuters business model at least used to be similar to Bloomberg’s: create first to market reporting and use that data as Alpha to sell financial services.

While moving to monetize the news side certainly doesn’t preclude this, I wonder if it will produce more friction than value?

Already switched to getting most of my news from AP so no big loss I guess.

Guess I won't be reading much Reuters any more. Just the way she goes, if it doesn't load easily for me, I back out and move on to something else.

A few years ago I might have payed for Reuters news, but they sort of destroyed themselves this past few years perhaps because of financial incentives or mismanagement or simply the journalism zeitgeist. Maybe just another casualty of 2020.

Your comment is useless without proof. Give some examples.

I wonder if this is signs of troublesome financial forecasts. They’re pushing a huge focus on digital transformation now and have just hired an ex-Amazon guy to be their new head of design.

I wonder at what point Google needs to pay attention to this. If a large number of websites are behind registration or paywalls, then the chance that any individual person searching would have a subscription (or registration) to any individual news site is pretty low. People might have some small number of subscriptions, but not for many sites.

So, why keep returning search results that the end user can't use without registration or purchase? It's essentially "page cloaking" when the rendered page doesn't match google sees.

To me, if you want a paywall, that should come with the consequence that your site isn't included in search results for the general public.

Edit: It's also getting irritating here on HN. I might have a subscription or login to one or two sites, but HN regularly shares stuff from Medium, WSJ, NYT, Wired, and so on. I have to imagine that most people following these posted stories hit the reg/pay-wall.

Perhaps Google can get info on how many article-views the user has left, so they can take that into account when returning search results.

I've been wanting the "Show only free/non-subscription results" checkmark in Google (and other search engines) for a while, but I don't think it will ever happen.

could not agree with this more and this has gone on far too long.

why does google allow this? as you say it is 100% cloaking to have the entire article indexed but not present it in the subsequent page.

Sure, publishers feel they need paywalls for revenue purposes; have at it. That should not absolve them from the "rules" everyone else has to follow.

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected. [0]

[0] - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

If they are cloaking, can we get around the paywall by using the Google crawler user agent string?

That is one of many workarounds the various paywall-buster browser extensions use. Either setting to the Google crawler user-agent, or the Google AdBot agent. I would guess you would need to not send cookies also. They could also be clever and check that your IP/Netblock is a Google owned one.

Huh, I thought they published a range of IP addresses they used to prevent this, but apparently they don't use an entirely consistent one and you need to do a dns request [1] to actually check if something is google's crawler. I'm willing to bet most organizations aren't doing that... so maybe.

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...

I just installed a user agent switcher and tried it on a prominent financial news site. The offer to subscribe was replaced by the article when I reloaded using the Googlebot user agent.

Pretty sure it's fear of it being added to anti trust complaint.

It is really frustrating as a user, and undoubtedly Google knows this. So an impending lawsuit is the only reason I can see for them not blocking nyt/other sites that do this.

I'm also curious whether googles core business will be affected.

It stands to reason that a subscription model reduces the dependency on ads and strengthens the negotiation position of publishers.

I'm pretty sure Google has made an art form out of being a rent seeking middle man.

Google used to have a policy of banning cloaked sites but they also don't want users to search for 'New York Times' and get some result that is not 'The New York Times'.

So that rule seems to go out of the window for this reason?

Yes, let’s hide one of the most objective news sources..

vested interests will celebrate and put more money towards warping the minds of people (edit, just to be clear, I’m not excluding myself here)

Terrible shame. I read news off it (with nojs). Seems I'll be on the hunt for a replacement when this comes.

This is my new HN hobby: looking up pricing for aggressively paywalled content. Annual digital subscription costs (not promo pricing):

Reuters: $420

Bloomberg: $419

Financial Times: $372

The Economist: $189

vs Audible $149.50/year 12 books

While I understand the need for revenue, the end result now is that rags that put out conspiracy garbage is widely accessible to anyone with an internet connection - Breitbart, Fox et al.

Sources with a relatively objective viewpoints are going behind paywalls.

Four-plus decades of micropayments advocacy have failed to poduce a viable system that works and people will use.

People are drowning in accounts (well over 100/person in a 2015 survey[1]) and subscription services. Offerings are fragmented amongst these, and control battles lead to withdrawal of or blocking of materials during inter-corporate wars.

OECD per-capita spend on all publishing runs about $100/person, roughly the same as per-capita ads spend within the same countries, itself a tax of sorts.

A natural gateway exists --- not a perfect one, but good enough at the level of the ISP provider.

Aggregation, not disintegrations, is the general trend in payment systems. Both buyers and sellers benefit from predictable flows, income or revenues.

Regionally-pro-rated payments allocate costs according to ability to pay, which for information goods is a net social benefit.

Rolling an information access fee into fixed line and mobile internet service, with an indexing of content accessed and a tier-and-bid based reimbursement schedule for publishers, seems to me the most viable path forward to something vaguely resembling a content tax, without actually going through a content tax mechanism. It would ensure universal access to readers and the public, compensation for creators, and the ability for those actually engaged in the process of creating new works to access the materials they need, legally and lawfully, answering in part the "why should I pay for information I don't use" objection: the inforation you do use is itself predicated on information you don't access directly yourself. The other answer to this rather tired objection is that you live in the world created by information access or denial of access, and in general, access to high-quality, relevant, useful information should be a net positive.

(Yes, events of the past decade temper my enthusiasm for that belief somewhat, though information rather than propaganda still seems likely a net positive.)

The concept could be trialed on a regional basis, rather than globally. It should offer any willing publication within a set of quality and bias tiers (there are third-party rating services, such as Ad Fontes Media, amongst others, which might serve as arbiters). A bidding process in which given tiers are compensated at specific rates, subject to competitive alternatives, should help address the "who gets paid and how much" question --- high-bias low-accuracy clickbait is a cheap-to-produce product, but would also be compensated at a low rate.

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Notes:

1. Dashlane came up with this number in 2015, archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20150919202348/https://blog.dash... Experian cites a similar number, without source, in a 2019 identity fraud report https://www.experian.com/blogs/news/2019/01/30/global-identi... A NordPass study finds > 100 passwords/person on average https://tech.co/news/average-person-100-passwords HN readers report upwards of 700 accounts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488899 Data quality here are poor, but the general scope is clearly large. Whether its increasing on an annual basis or if 100 accounts/person represents a metastable plateau is unclear.

They could ask for more money from the UK government to avoid the paywall:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-50637200

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-02-25/Reuters-BBC-participat...

"Its a bold strategy Cotton, let's see if it pays off for em."

For some reason I figured Reuters and AP would be the last to go behind a paywall for the retail consumer. I remember those always being the safe neutral sources I could use in debate or extemporaneous speeches back on the debate/speech team in high school. Sucks it'll be harder to get access to now.

I used to read Reuters religiously, but have drifted away from them as I've felt their neutrality falter a bit.

They're still one of the better organization, and I'm sad to see them go behind a pay wall as it leaves fewer outrage driven outlets available. At the same time, I understand it is difficult to fund journalism in the current atmosphere.

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