USA Today is getting a paywall. Who’s the audience for it?
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Surely the NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc realize that at $10 per month per paper, few people are going to maintain more than one or two subscriptions. Since the incremental cost of online distribution is nearly zero, this means that the news outlets are leaving money on the table.
Make everyone's first subscription cost $10, then provide access to additional papers for 50¢ each. Or use some other type of sliding scale—I'm sure there are numbers that would make sense.
The alternatives are either that a major tech company comes along and does it for them (as Apple is attempting), or that all the papers ultimately merge into 2-3 huge outlets. I don't like either of those outcomes.
Plenty of people, offices and venues do. What's more likely, and the direction we've been heading for years, is we see a population that consumes paid journalism and the broader market that has ad-supported filler.
What we need is a system of pay-per-view+quality news that uses a rating system to determine how much people pay for the article. Imagine a pay scale where users pay x/log(2+x/1000) cents to the service per month (where x is number of articles read, or some similar metric), and the authors/publishers of those articles split that money based on how highly the user rated each article. This would mean that someone reading 10 articles a month would pay 30 cents/mo, someone reading 10 articles a day would pay $9/mo, and someone reading 100 articles a day would pay $40/mo. At the same time, it would mean that users have an incentive to rate articles fairly, since they're charged regardless of their ratings, but better quality articles would get rated higher and get paid out more per view, incentivizing publishers to put out higher quality content and disincentivizing click bait.
Ad supported content leads to click bait and emotional manipulation. We are living in the news dystopia and only finding a way to get rid of ad supported content will save us.
This happened in the 20s too btw. Those "extra extra read all about it" boys selling newspapers by the headline caused a decrease in news quality too. Subscription news came along and saved us then. Unfortunately, there are too many different news sources to be supported by subscription services without massively fragmenting what people can read (just like video streaming services have massively fragmented what people can watch).
I'm also concerned that your ratings system would perpetuate the sort of think-piece journalism in which authors proclaim whatever their readers currently believe, as opposed to challenging their assumptions. We already see this sort of thing in what types of articles get shared on social media.
> your ratings system would perpetuate the sort of think-piece journalism in which authors proclaim whatever their readers currently believe
The idea is intended to solve the problem of low-quality news, not thought-bubbles. People will always gravitate towards their own biases, this won't solve that, nor will it make it worse. It could make it a bit better for people who are actually looking to escape their biases, because those people could rate articles more highly if they actually convince them to change their views, or at least teach them about an alternate viewpoint in a non-infuriating way.
People have also had an entire century to become inured to utility pricing.
A better comparison might be data-limited cell phone plans. Even though spectrum and network capacity are legitimately scarce resources (especially in the early days), basically all of the carriers have been forced to offer some kind of quasi-unlimited data plan, where you might be throttled but you won't be charged overages, or you won't be charged on specific streaming services.
The only exception I know if is Goodreads, where people seem to put a great deal of effort into their ratings (which I find super interesting). You might argue this is a better analog because the audience would have more overlap with newspaper readers, but people aren't going to put as much thought into a short article versus a long novel.
Because youtube videos aren't rewarded based on votes. People generally want creators to be rewarded for their work when its good, and they'll almost certainly put more effort into rating if they know that's how those creators get rewarded.
Also, you seem to think that youtube's voting system has failed somehow. In what way do you think its failed? You do know that youtube doesn't recommend things to people based on upvotes, right? Views are what youtube cares about, not votes. Votes are mostly just for show on youtube.
But why would pay-as-you-go be bad for the class of entertainment? The vast majority of entertainment options out in the world are pay as you go (live shows, movie theaters, vacations, restraunts, etc etc).
> Even music, which was trending towards digital purchases for a while has largely moved to all you can eat subscriptions.
Music has been an interesting outlier here because people are increasingly listening to music playlists and not hand-picking their own music. Hand-picking music is time consuming and a pain sometimes, so why not let the algorithms decide what to listen to? By contrast, people still hand-pick news articles, TV shows, movies, and things like that - and they'll likely continue to do that because they're activities that generally require engagment - whereas music is generally listened to in the background while doing something else.
The movement towards the subscription model has primarily been about improving things for businesses, not for customers. The rhetoric is "customers don't want to think about paying", but we can clearly see countless counterexamples in the world. Businesses, however, like the subscription model because it makes it easier for them to predict their revenue and it puts up a (small) barrier in place for customers to stop paying them.
However, while the subscription model is great for single items (eg high-end software) where the subscription is basically just a way to pay-as-you-go automatically, the subscription model is actually a pretty bad payment model for networks of content when you think about what it incentivizes. The user pays a fixed price for unlimited content. This incentivizes the user to consume as much as they can. A user who use the service 100 times more than another user both pay the same price. This means it necessarily excludes users who don't consume a lot, and raises the price for people who consume a below average amount. There is a deadweight economic loss there.
In addition it provides no net incentive for the subscription provider to increase the options available in the system or the quality of those options. In fact, there is an incentive to release low-quality content as filler so that their high-consuming users don't run out of content (which they do anyway). Take a video streaming service for example. If they increase the number of options available to customers, they don't earn any more money but each item available in the system gets watched less, which means owners of the content would would to be part of that subscription network less and less as the content grows. Either that or they charge customers more as the library grows - which customers wouldn't pay for since most people wouldn't actually consume more just because the library's bigger.
What results is that video subscription services have necessarily fragmented and will stay fragmented for as long as people keep drooling over the subscription model. People are locked into one or two networks of content which are primarily all they watch. They don't have access to other content without paying significantly more or making a burdensome leap of ending service with one network and beginning with another (which loses them access to content they had there).
News is even worse, where individual newspapers have their own siloed subscription services. That's great if you read most of the content on there, but its terrible if you just want to read an article someone sends you ever once in a while. There's some more aggrigated news services that have come out recently, but these will also have the fragmentation issues that video streaming has because of the subscription model.
As for video services, lots of people argued against the $100/month bundle as augmented by the $5/each Blockbuster payment. I actually prefer the current fragmented services plus a la carte even if it's annoying sometimes. Certainly saves me money.
ADDED: >In addition it provides no net incentive for the subscription provider to increase the options available in the system or the quality of those options.
Not sure I understand that. While there's certainly inertia, if your subscription isn't providing me with value, I cancel it. (Some companies make it difficult to do so but that's a separate issue.)
I think a lot of people believe its saving them money, but in reality its actually costing more and at the same time lower quality than it would be with a correctly-priced pay-per-view model. You can't compare to blockbuster because that system was old and there have been many things that can bring the cost down these days.
> if your subscription isn't providing me with value, I cancel it
Yes, that's why streaming video services have some quality content, and its why they price them so cheaply - so its worth it despite the fact that most of the content is low quality and lacks a variety of quality content. If they increased the options available, they'd have to charge more money than its worth to cover the costs of that extra content. If they increased the general quality, same thing. There is a limit to how large these subscription content networks can get before it must fragment.
No, in the same way that Netflix is different from renting movies on Amazon Prime. It’s SVOD vs TVOD vs something like youtube without a subscription that is AVOD. There’s a reason that Spotify is hugely popular while it’s a lot less common to buy an album on iTunes. It’s the reason AYCE KBBQ and buffets are popular. Even if pay-per-use ends up cheaper, flat-rate subscriptions are easier for people to see value in, and they can consume without concern of overages.
Yes, but the reason is not the subscription model. People like variety. The subscription model actually prevents good variety in a network. Read my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27804511 . You bring up Spotify, but music is a fundamentally different product than news or videos.
> flat-rate subscriptions are easier for people to see value in
What you're saying is that people are getting duped into paying higher prices for lower quality content. While you might be right, this isn't a point in favor of the subscription model.
> they can consume without concern of overages
There is no reason a service can't help a user track their consumption and let the user configure a warning if they're hitting the configured limit. The subscription service is a very inflexible way of ensuring people stay within their budget.
The real problem is that pay-per-view content is massively overpriced. Of course people opt for subscription services when for the price of 3 pay-per-view movies, they can watch 30 movies on a subscription service. If pay-per-view content were priced commensurately with subscription services, it would change the game.
Normal people being informed today costs 0 bucks.
Yes, at the cost of being inundated with ads and being informed by low quality "journalism" that is really just entertainment in disguise. By paying 0 bucks we need to spend more time reading things to be well informed, or we'll just accept being less informed by news that's more entertainment than journalism.
> High quality public news is also still available
Sure, but increasingly you need to pay for it or you need to be good at finding it. Not everyone has the skills to sus out good journalism, and almost nobody can avoid their time being wasted by garbage articles and click bait. This is the price we're paying.
uBlock or AdGuard Home for everything on your network does pretty well at cutting out most ads.
Cable linear TV was / still is expensive and gates trash content behind unskippable awful advertising, so paying is not always the solution. We must demand better journalism, even though everything seems to be trending toward entertainment and sensationalism.
Sure, adblock is nice, but its kind of irrelevant to the discussion. The fact that you block ads doesn't change the fact that most news is paid for by ads (that people who don't have adblock get). In fact, adblock probably reduces the quality of news even further, because the people who don't have adblock are probably less smart on average than the people who do use adblock - and thus the articles who cater to that group more earn more money.
> paying is not always the solution
You're creating a straw man here. Did I say that "paying is the solution"? No I didn't, I said ad-funded news has lead to the trashy news dystopia we live in today. The reason is not because of ads per se - its because these pages get paid on a per click basis. If you click, they get paid, even if the article ends up sucking. This incentivizes massive amounts of low quality click bait. If there were such a thing as an advertisement mechanism where low-quality content wouldn't get paid, that would solve the problem without paying.
> We must demand better journalism
Sorry, but you don't just get better things because you demand it. We live in a world where the only way to actually make your own tiny individual impact on journalism quality is to purchase subscriptions to quality news sources and to avoid clicking on anything online. Ever. If you're still going to click on things online, you're not demanding better journalism in a way that will make an impact. And how many people do you expect to do that? Very few. I doubt you'll do it yourself, even tho you care about getting better journalism.
What we need are better tools that allow people to only give money (ad revenue or otherwise) to publishers of quality journalism.
In the US, there simply isn't enough quality news available for free, and many essential stories and reporting are behind paywalls (especially the NYT and Wash Post).
I don’t know how people think they’ll survive with a tenth of the revenue. Maybe you think three times the number of people will subscribe so then a third of the revenue?
So then what? Publications look for alternative means of supplementing income. Which means ads and skewing content towards clickbaiting.
Maybe it’s fine not trying to be for everyone when not everyone values them.
But it's also possible I'm wrong—I certainly have no background on this industry. For example, someone on the TWiT podcast said the reason there's no effective "Netflix for Books" is because the industry is highly dependent on a very small number of "whales" who will buy five books per week.
It’s not easy to differentiate the product enough to collect maximum money from the both groups.
But I do agree with your thinking. For me it would be almost enough if I could get access to just those articles posted on HN for $10/month (across many newspapers and with no risk of falling to some subscription trap).
There’s a market for good paid content and there has been for 400+ years.
Substack is valued at close to $1B because people will pay for good writing.
So why share any revenue with the smaller papers?
There is precedent for the major papers working together in markets where it makes sense to do so, see the International Herald Tribune.
Agreed. And furthermore, why haven't TV/film streaming services also not realised this. Is it because it isn't true? Do people really pay for Disney+, Netflix, and Hulu all at the same time?
“Does anyone actually want to read any of these specific sites that badly?”
-> The Times reported a total of 7.8 million subscribers across both print and digital platforms, with 6.9 million coming for online news or its Cooking and Games apps. The company added 301,000 digital customers for the first three months of the year…”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/business/media/nyt-new-yo...
Never used it, tho. I prefer reading HN comments instead of articles, because news nowadays is huge longrid with only ~10% of usable information in it. I'm not ready to pay $10 for such thing, IMO.
But if you are the NYT or WSJ, you believe, reasonably, that one of those subscriptions will be for you.
I agree generally. Aren't micropayments supposed to solve this problem?
With that principle, I always figured that the endgame of the Gannet company would be to make their local papers USA Today with a small local supplement folded in.
Maybe the same applies online-- you'll buy usatoday.com for national news, and also subscribe to a local rag. Over time, the local papers may scale back the national/global/wire service stuff.
As the sibling notes, a lot of USA Today's were left outside hotel rooms at one point when that was common in an era where the WSJ was very oriented towards finance types and was deliberately stodgy. (There was also the International Herald Tribune internationally which was at least at one point, a joint effort of the Post and the Times.)
But, yeah, an American political junkie might get the Post and the Times today. I'm not sure why someone would pay for USA Today. It completely generic in digital form.
- Current, high quality news sources
- For free
- With no ads
Lots of people say the content isn't worth paying for, but see enough value to want to consume it.
In the pre-internet era, the media property was the centre of the ad universe. You'd call up your local paper to put in an ad, and they'd have control over presentation and pricing, and keep all the revenue. Standards were upheld, and the papers did well.
Now, they're farming out boxes on heir page to middlemen networks. They have little or no control over what ends up there, and they're getting a fraction of the revenue. What's worse, their content, being wide in scope and often full of brand-unfriendly news, isn't hugely friendly to algorithmic targeting paths. The only way to try to stay above water is to run more and more aggressively obnoxious ads.
It's the kind of thing they only get to pull once, and I'd expect them to save that for something huge that would draw an enormous audience to subscribe (something on the level of Stranger Things or Game of Thrones).
Sweet Tooth was nice, but clearly a bit slapped together. They keep the CGI to a minimum, but what's there is pretty cheaply done. The practical effects are nice, but simple in a way that feels like it was done quickly. It's neat that the show was in production before COVID, though I'd be curious to know how much of it was prescient.
The acting is great and the writing pretty good. But it's not going to be a breakout hit. So I'm a bit surprised they'd promote it so hard to attract and audience that will surely say, "Hey, that was OK. Glad I'm already subscribed. But I'm not rushing out to tell my friends about it."
So how do I expect the content creators to make money? I assume there are some people who are watching their ads.
In the digital age, there are a lot of people who decide that we get to price the content however we want. We decide that because they are trying to use terrible ads to make money, that we can just go around that and take their content for free.
That doesn't fly real well with physical products (This loaf of bread is priced at $1, but I only want to pay $0.50, so I'll just give them $0.50 and take it), but seems to be accepted with products that have infinite free reproducibility.
They can put themselves behind a fence, without letting anybody in who doesn't take their flyer. That's fine, I'll just skip their bread. They can charge for their bread. That's fine, I'll just skip their bread. No hard feelings on my end, it's all fair. But what they cannot reasonably do is give away free bread and then complain that I won't take their ad flyers.
"Intrusive" doesn't being to describe the modern ad tracking infrastructure, data collection (and attendant leak vulnerabilities), and exploitation.
The pop up ad, autoplay video/audio, and epilepsy-triggering flash ads are just the beginning of the predatory nature of this that has been deeply entrenched as the biggest companies that effectively make up the modern consumer web rely on this for their massive revenues.
It is orwellian in every sense of the word, not just dangerous for individuals in a data privacy and identity theft perspective, and dangerous at the civilization/society level in that it is a direct threat to a free, liberal, and democratic world.
Advertising was already a dangerous psychological influence back in the era of print ads. Now that we are essentially entering the first cybernetic era with our online personas and screen time, it is directly manipulating personality, mental stability, opinion, and belief.
It's nonsensical to equate being shown an ad (even in this third party tracking day and age) with victimhood.
Histrionics aren't the answer.
It's not "showing" an ad. It's a popup ad, with a tracking cookie, with a stored identity and list of urls tracked over years, tied and shared to a dozen databases, probably shared with governments (willingly or otherwise).
I get a huge percentage of people on HN work for FAANG and are a part of this meat grinder, so go ahead and downvote. But blaming a consumer for not wanting to be tracked and characterizing it as them being cheap is shifting blame to the consumer. Which is victim blaming.
You know how you avoid all those ads? You avoid their site.
Steal their content and publish it elsewhere, such as in posts on Reddit or HN.
Trying to paint anything black or white will just lead to a model that doesn't represent reality and what people are going to do.
The odds of a random reader (whether from Google SERPS or HN or similar) having a subscription are very low. I don't personally know anyone that has a subscription to the top 10 paid sites, and there's quite a few more than 10.
Google used to call the practice "cloaking", and would de-index you if you presented content to its crawler that didn't match what it provided to a visitor. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
I.e. "never show me NYT, Amazon, Pinterest, or any site that is a scrape of StackOverflow or Wikipedia"
I don't see how it would help me if Google failed to show me information relevant to my problem just because it is paid information.
It only works on HN because we use things like archive.is or browser extensions to go around it. If it weren't possible to work around it, it would die off pretty quickly as a discussion.
Some of the most interesting and informative things I've read on HN were comments on articles I did not read. I almost always read the comments before reading the article, and a significant fraction of the time I don't even try to read the article after seeing the comments.
I can use this argument against you.
Not sure why would users around the world pay for US newspapers.
They do because it’s relevant to them.
I don't hear anybody actually expecting free news with no ads. Everyone knows journalists need to be paid a salary. So that feels like a strawman to me.
But the idea that content isn't worth paying for is more that it's not worth paying for any single news source. I see links to news articles I read from 20+ sources a day. If somebody builds a Spotify for news where you pay $10/mo. and can access 99.9% of news articles including NYT, WaPo, etc., I think a ton of people (most, even?) would have no problem paying for it at all. But I sure as hell can't pay $10/mo. across 20 different sites, and that still covers less than half the sources people regularly link to.
Journalism doesn’t have the same revenue stream to fall back on.
With a population of 331M, that's $5.01 per person per month, or half the population paying $10/mo.
Now obviously you're not going to get half the people in the country to pay, but if you call it $20/mo/household, and compare it to the average $100-150/mo/household people pay for cable TV, I'd news absolutely could survive on numbers like this. It's not "tiny" at all -- it's ballpark.
I'd happily pay for news. I just don't want to pay to, say, the NYT just to read a couple of pieces a week. (Ignoring the NYT shady unsubscribe practices)
The solution seems to be either micropayments or some form of paid news aggregation.
I pay for a Coil[1] subscription which solves micropayments, unfortunately very few sites have implemented it (and no major news sites AFAIK).
I signed up for a student-priced NYT subscription a while back and realized I didn't really use it. I trudged through their cancellation information and got on their chat. The representative threw everything at me why I shouldn't cancel and they offered me a discounted rate of exactly what I was paying currently. So silly.
If they'd fix the ad problem this could work. I'm surprised ad supported sites haven't demanded better.
If Reason can send out a physical magazine for $20/yr some of these other news outlets can figure out how to trim some fat and offer a competitive rate.
The influx of money-incentivized noise swamped that out, and now we're left with a continuum from aggregator sites (eg stackoverflow, forums, etc) to just straight up webspam. I'm not saying there is an easy way to get back to where we were, but there is a standard to compare to where all of those qualities existed together.
In the present, why would I believe that a news site which demands payment would be any higher quality than the ones who do not? The basic business dynamic is to market to gain a sale, and then deliver the minimal cost product that doesn't violate the expectations.
Ultimately it goes back to the fragmenting of authority. You used to be able to trust the NYT or whatever because it was all you knew, everyone else trusted them, and therefore there was little reason to break that lock step, even when they did end up misleading you. But with the modern plethora of voices, there are more opinions to choose from and we can easily see when "authorities" ended up misleading us. If you want quality news sources, this lack of authoritativeness/trustworthiness is the genie you need to put back in the bottle, not simply funding.
Free content is provided not for informational value but for propaganda purposes.
https://prospect.org/health/juul-taking-academic-corruption-... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769978)
And paid-up services still include ads. (Which have higher advertiser value simply because the audience is known and sufficiently affluent to pay for content.)
But I think the answer then is simply not paying for it, and not consuming it. Which is the interesting part to me. It's low quality, but people still want to read it for free.
If I'm preparing food in my house and people want a part of it, it would be weird to me. But if after preparing my food I use a complex system of fans to blow a delicious odor over my neighbours while having a beautiful table set up visible through my windows, and do this every single day, I can understand that they can't stay indifferent to the situation.
Also, if there were an easy way to pay for just the article, say, 10¢, most people won't mind. But wherever it exists, it's not easy, and generally the big players are not interested in implementing it, even if it were technically trivial (it's not), because they prefer a smaller but captive audience which pays more (and watches ads).
Good luck finding that.
You’re welcome. Here’s my cryptocurrency address:[just kidding]
On All Things Considered on NPR a couple of weeks ago one of the hosts was interviewing someone about perceived media bias, and she seemed flabbergasted that people thought they had a bias. It seems to me they (and other organizations) might be in such a bubble they don't even realize it anymore.
What doesn't work for me is this pretend "unbiased" highly biased lets turn journalism into a partisan infotainment team sport form of journalism.
I do enjoy this though: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
Take even the Supreme Court. Multiple “right” judges voted to uphold the ACA and abortion restrictions; things that would certainly be top on the list of “left vs. right”.
Pay attention to the specific issues.
A lot of the ACA arguments the court heard were incredibly stupid. And they still have struck down parts of the law.
Like all actual policy discussions happen within parties because of this. It’s easier to get the Democrats to be a little more conservative than get Republicans to support trans healthcare.
[1] in the colloquial usage don’t @ me with X is 49% of the population
Thanks! You just gave me my new favorite news source.
The problem with my local Hearst paper’s online presence is that there are literally hundreds of irrelevant ads, pop-up videos, 40+ trackers, tabloola or something similar and other junk.
That stuff doesn’t go away when you pay.
I’m no expert on the metrics here, but since the economics of the online ad market are so awful, and the ads are mostly shit, I don’t understand why the paper can’t sell ads online like they do in print.
No one wants to pay a business that angers them all the time, if walmart pissed every customer off in every visit they would go bankrupt
Rage Bait has been a mainstay in "journalism" of late in part to the Ad revenue nature of the business, however in doing so they pissed off most of the customers that they now want to pay for their product.
People happily tolerated ads in print media for at least a century. The pivot from display ads to surveillance capitalism is what I hear most (non-tech) people complain about.
Also, per-user targeted ads undermine the value of premium ad real estate, letting middlemen (like Google) eat the content producers’ lunch, all while providing minimal value to web sites and consumers.
(Yes, they subsidize their “free” services with the revenue they extracted from the publishing industry, but that’s just predatory pricing, with the goal of precluding consumer-friendly computing stacks.)
There’s nothing fascinating about that. I’d love to drive a very expensive car too, but I don’t want to (can’t!) pay for it. This is basically just the law of demand.
The internet gave the layman all the tools they needed to do their own followup on what they were told, and to access new perspectives about it. That's when cracks started appearing.
In practice, every long-term viable media support model has attached a public good model for distribution to some rents-generating activity. Those inlcude patronage, church tithes (or other contributeions), political organisations, member/donor contributions, and of course advertising.
Or taxes.
The problem with each funding mechanism is that it is at the least distortionary to the interests of the funder or that funder's controlling body. In the case of advertising, the issues are well known, with a remarkably insightful account coming from the dawn of the modern mass-media and mass-advertising age, Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909), a short, highly readable, insightful, and information-packed quick read (it's based on an address given at UC Berkely by the author, himself a magazine publisher). Online at the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
Advertising's distortions are its drive to sensationalism (which increases the audience) and an antipathy for publishing anything which might offend the paymasters --- advertisers themselves. Holt quotes John Swinton (anonymously):
There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
Philanthropic support leads to donor-influence along largely similar lines (the Tiny Sparks podcast frequently addresses such distortions in the non-profit world: https://nonprofitquarterly.org/podcasts/)
Other options are that propagandists run media services for their own benefit or interest (RT, Sputnik, Newscorp, OANN, Sinclair), or that "news" simply panders to the minimum viable user, at the lowest possible cost, choking out all but a tiny minority of high-quality services, themselves only affordable to a few.
The free market utterly fails information goods, due to the mechanics of the market itself.
Static images as ads would work, wouldn't be blocked by ad blockers, and would be effective as ads.
When I was a kid I actually would read the newspaper every morning, though mostly I was just looking at box scores. I do distinctly remember getting USA Today when we went on vacation.
If you’ll forgive my ramble, one other thing I remember now was my parents always complaining about the quality of the newspaper. We moved around a lot, and they really missed things like the New York Times, which I suppose was too expensive to get so far from New York. When I was a kid, I couldn’t understand why one news paper would be better than another, I think I thought it was the quality of the writing. But we’re my parents really complaining about the political slant of Midwestern papers? Did people care about that in the 90s? The lack of investigative journalism? I’ll have to ask them next time I call.
I think USA Today is (or was, last I read it, ~5-10 years ago) underrated. They did some important investigative reporting and good journalism, and while they can lack depth in their short, digestible format (which is their intention, per distant memory), they also can be more succinct, which is a good thing. I thought the lack of depth was a real limitation, but I thought they also suffered from projecting themselves as a simple, easy (my words, maybe imperfect) source of information: People looking for the best information don't associate it with simple and easy.
The NY Times addresses serious topics in much greater breadth, depth, and sophistication, and their investigative reporting is unparalleled (and taken for granted - if you step back and look at the stories they've broken, and think of what the world would look like without those stories, it's astounding). Certainly it has its flaws, including IMHO sometimes long-windedness - rarely do I wish an article was longer!
You mentioned the NY Times but it has peers, IMHO, in the Financial Times and, to a degree, the Washington Post.
Soon craigslist popped up and destroyed the market for classified ads (which used to be the primary source of revenue for local papers). Free internet news didn’t help either.
Since then, more and more ownership rules and things like the equal time doctrine (if you let one politician on the air, you need to let their opponent on as well) were eliminated.
No other paper was like that.
This would allow content providers to be compensated from a far larger subsection of the population, and correspondingly, allow a far larger subsection of the population to consume paywalled content.
So, if few reader in its heyday paid direct for it, and Gannet hasn't really changed the structure or content of USA Today in the last 25 years, what makes them think that readers will pay directly for it now in the internet age?
This part you’re wrong about, USA Today has always had its own reporters, a fair number of them, although it’s probably true they ran plenty of wire service stories as well, and may have run stories from other papers run by the parent company (Gannett).
It’s true about the hotels and as far as I know few people ever bought direct subscriptions.
Yes, though because it was provided by a hotel for free. I can't imagine paying for one.
A major USA Today revenue model has been passive consumption through hotel distribution. To the tune of $82 million/year. (Total revenues are estimated at $3.4 billion for the privately-held company.[1])
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/08/02/how-us...
(This Forbes article is in fact linked in the Nielsen piece anchoring this thread.)
Edit: Hotel revenue contribution downgraded from "a principle" to "a major" w/ information from Owler.com.
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Notes:
For the other half... now it's got me wondering what hotels pay USA Today on average per newspaper? I'd always assumed it was free or at least nearly free, just an ad delivery mechanism. But now you've got me curious.
I'd like to think I'd have noticed that, at least once. That's a pretty shitty tactic.
Back in the day, it was common for people to grab their favorite local paper and a USA Today. USA Today was great at national coverage of sports which apparently drove newspaper sales.
I don't think there is anything to be done to save these larger newspaper organizations. I used to consume them but their signal/noise ratio is now so low I wouldn't read them even if they were free. The sacrifices in integrity and quality to satisfy low attention span, lowest common denominator readers signed their death warrant. No longer journalists, they transformed into ideologically reinforcing entertainment.
For example much of the political reporting and conversation is being moved to longer form chat online.
It seems like it would be impossible to start a news business off the ground today without a powerful investor, which means the publication would have some intentional bias.
The more people will do that - the quicker this annoying business model die. Unless your content will help me to make money (courses, tutorials, specific investment analysis) I aint' spending a penny on you.
In a controversial note - I'd totally pay monthly subscription to some pirating service that extracts content from behind paywall, strip pages from ads and provide access. This will be valuable service.
Ideally I'd prefer to have a single legit service aggregating dozens of good content sites of my choice and pay monthly flat fee to access.
But because each of them are fighting with each other and each of them have their version of infestation with ads, paywalls, popups, content restrictions, accounts requirements - I don't envision any legit service to make peace with all that nonsense.
Pirate who will equalize all this into clean subscription based content is going to make a killing and I'll totally pay for it.
I am willing to invest into clear message that I don't like their current business model. I also want ads-based sponsorship of anything to die. I'm willing to put money where my mouth is. Let them sort it out.
I'd be willing to pay more for legit service to do all above - i just don't envision it happening any time soon.
They do have lots of "tabloid" content not worth paying for, however there are some interesting bits.
My problem with paywalls is I don't want to buy a full NYTimes subscription just to finish reading one article.
I want to pay $.10 to finish reading that one article, then $.10 to finish an article on USA today, then $.10 for something on Wall Street Journal.
That's one of the benefits of streaming services in the music industry. Nowadays it's much easier to discover artists which deviate from the mainstream because you don't have to spend any extra money to discover a new artist. I think this is healthy for the music scene and I suspect the same is true for journalism.
Also if you have a subscription you are probably going to read more articles than if you would have to purchase every article individually even if it's less expensive to do so. People reading less is hardly a desireable goal.
It's pretty decent imo depending on where you live and what you want to read. It includes some solid newspapers like the LA Times, SF Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald, Globe & Mail, Sacramento Bee, WSJ, etc. Plus some news-oriented magazines like the New Yorker and Atlantic. It's conspicuously missing a few of the top names though, who probably correctly think they can do better maintaining their own subscriber bases and don't want to be commodified in a bundle (NYT, WaPo, The Economist, Financial Times).
Even worse, the Mac app does not let you print or even select text. It's taking web content and making it as un-web like as it can. I can't even share the article to Pocket!
I subscribe to the NYT and Globe & Mail. I print articles I want to read to PDF (or save as a SingleHTML file) and have them auto-synced to my tablet. This gives me a permanent copy of the article that supports annotation.
I'm never going to go the bundling route.
If you get to a paywalled WSJ article on the web, you can often use the “share” icon to “Open in Apple News” and read it just fine.
And this is the exact problem with this sort of bundle - it centralizes something that is better handled in a decentralized way, and the platform owner then gains power that they can abuse. The GP comment mentioned Spotify, and they suffer from the same issue. They entered the podcast market, acquired Joe Rogan's show as an exclusive, and then immediately proceeded to censor vast swaths of content based on their employees' ideological biases (https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/04/06/joe-rogan-spotif...).
Few will have the patience for that when you're an adult. And especially when we're talking about pennies per article, for potentially a lot of articles.
What killed blendle was the lack of newspapers willing to sign on, and the lack of integration for the few newspapers that actually did - if I was presented with a micropayment option instead of a $10/no paywall when I clicked a link to an article on Twitter, Facebook, or hacker news, it might work. But blendle payment was only an option if you found the article through the blendle website, and their website sucked.
but my point is i'm not going to buy a $10-15/mo subscription to some regional newspaper in the middle of nowhere just because i clicked a link on twitter or hacker news to the one article they publish this decade that might interest me. i would be willing to pay to read an article, but newspapers are leaving money on the table by only offering a monthly subscription option which is obviously unsuitable for social media traffic.
Edit: Found the name. https://contributor.google.com
Investigative journalism is expensive. So out the door, articles would need to be differentially priced to avoid adverse selection. That's a new friction the newspaper would need to incur to provide this pricing. Add to that the cost of cannibalizing subscriptions and the volatility of non-recurring revenue and it's a deal only newspapers who couldn't otherwise get subscriptions would take.
That might be more manageable given the current reality of payment systems today than trying to charge on a per-article basis.
Kindle books can be updated with the publisher’s changes. Would be interesting if the single NYT issue purchase would be updated throughout the day. That would make it as useful as a day pass.
$1 single-serve songs with minimal friction to purchase was an attractive proposition relative to file sharing.
I'd argue we never moved past the Napster era. Spotify was freemium at birth, it was Napster with a subscription option. Nobody is paying piecemeal for audio or video these days.
Over the past decade the Internet became mobile-centric rather than desktop-centric. A generation of users grew up connecting entertainment with phones and tablets, rater than computers. Mobile devices are opaque and locked down in ways computers never were, but they're also much easier to use.
So it's not a surprise that someone today might look at you pityingly if you show them how to get something from a torrent or p2p client. They'll pull up the Youtube/Spotify link in a couple of seconds, and for them, it's the exact same thing.
In my strange way of thinking it's just another form of civic duty.
That said, subscription fatigue is real. WaPo, Economist, Atlantic, NYT Food, a few specific interest magazines, and my local online newspaper starts to add up. I'd love to read more from some of the other major metros where I still have family, but I can't justify another $20-30 a month for the handful of articles I would actually read.
None of them.
My question based off of that, are 29% of Americans funding paywalled media?
I don't care about the newspapers "survival" problem, I personally do not derive any benefits from them. I just want my Google/DDG results clean and actually be able to read them. If a link is paywalled, it should be ranked way lower. Google cache trick doesn't work all the time.
>I want to be able to read them
Uh? Being able to read is deriving a benefit. I don't disagree that the current situation is a complete mess, and that subs everywhere is ridiculous. It's perfectly possible to imagine technical/business solutions that would match reasonable budget/month for news to what people read and valued. And it's also easy to see real collective action problems, incentive issues and so on that might make that impossible. All tied together with advertising, privacy, public education issues and so on as well.
But claiming you derive no benefit from newspapers at all would be a stretch even if you didn't want to read them, but claiming you don't while one sentence later saying you do want to read them? That doesn't seem quite reasonable.
Any article is plastered all over the internet in hundreds of websites. Same topic, different headline.
>I want to be able to read them
I want to be able to read ANY of those "free non-paywalled" articles instead of the one that's paywalled. I have no loyalty to NYT, USA Today or The Blaze.
It's almost like it's not the same content. Something breaking on the Times and then being summarized elsewhere are not interchangeable, which is why Google ranks its results as it does.
From the perspective of the search engine (and us readers), it feels like a bait-and-switch to present the full article to a crawler robot in exchange for a better search ranking, only to hide it and demand payment from a human.
But over in Australia, old media organizations have successfully lobbied for a "link tax" which allows them to demand payment from search providers who link to them. We've still got a long way to go before we reach a consensus on the independence of search platforms and the idea that human viewers should be served the same content as web spiders.
Also strange that some people would care more about a clean search result than the survival of media being consumed.
My reasoning is the same as yours - there's nothing wrong with Paywalls, but they're no good in search results, since chances are, a given user doesn't have an account with an arbitrary paywalled site that shows up in search.
When it comes to SEO, the content is all there but the paywalls are usually client side so it’s harder for crawlers to dock down paywalls.
Overall I agree that paywalls are annoying. But I do want quality publications to survive else we are going to be stuck with content like USA Today
For $9.99 I month I can access to a library of thousands of hours of videos (netflix, prime, discovery+, etc) , thousands of hours of music (spofity, prime music, etc) , or thousands of hours of PC Games (Xbox Game Pass)
Sorry but the USA Today is not as valuable as these services... maybe $2.99 but more likely something like $9.99 a YEAR at most $1.99 a mo would be a price point I would consider.
Do you think it'd be worth it if you had archival access to the paper? It'd be interesting to be able to read NYT from its inception in 1851, for example. I know there are some papers that have done digital archiving, but I wonder if a research pass would be a way to generate revenue, too...
Another valuable feature would be to have access to a git style record of all edits... which no newspaper would ever do either
It could be good for some use cases, but not for the primary one which is getting fresh food for consumption.
even so I think there's a need for deeply reported careful work...and that takes money. archives might work. I also like the git diff idea in a sibling comment.
None of your comparisons get you actual, recent news. Do you see this all as simply entertainment?
No news like a movie or a tv show is something to pass the time when you have nothing else to do.
Also keep in mind Trust in news is at a all time low, in part because the news themselves treat it as entertainment by sensationalizing everything, "if if bleeds it leads" and other High Drama "news"
Compared to what?
Compared to a dozen or so of the most liberal countries in the world, all of which are located in Europe - fair enough.
Compared to the world as a whole today, including Asia and Africa? Almost everything in America is left wing, including the republican party and USA today.
Compared to virtually any government anywhere prior to 1800? Again, almost everything in America is left wing, including the republican party and USA today.
That is just not true. For example, Rwanda, Burkina Faso, Iran, and Sri Lanka has universal health care - the United States does not.
Go ahead. Tell me about how Iran is more left wing than the United States. Perhaps they have especially generous rights for women?
The majority of those countries have had coups in the last decade and severely restrict basic liberal political freedoms like free political speech.
Your examples are pretty much an admission that you're wrong, afaict.
I just did. Iran has universal health care - the United States does not.
But I don't think it's about one issue - it's about all of them, taken as a whole. And I think you know that and I don't think you're arguing in good faith by acting otherwise. So I'm not going to reply anymore.
I'm not sure why you are asking for a source.. you didn't provide one for your perspective, and the facts are not really in dispute here, only the analysis.
Why do we have these paywalls then?
Having papers that are more reputable by having a sustainable business model that allows them to produce better quality content, to me would be worth it over fake news sites.
The Washington Post: the paper of the seat of the power. Similar to the times, it’s…sigh…thought leadership. Big political stories break in the Post, and people pay for that.
The Wall Street Journal: the paper of Wall Street. It’s business news. It’s valuable. People pay for it. People have been paying for it for a looooong time, too—they’ve had a paywall for quite a while, and a not particularly porous one.
USA Today: the paper of…uh…the door mat at the Hampton Inn I stayed in because that AirBnB ended up being terrible? I have no idea who would pay for USA Today. It isn’t the national voice on politics or business. They do have some solid reporters, but what differentiates them from either the Post or The Times? Why would I pay for USA Today above and beyond any of these other papers?
WSJ is fine for business news if you don't look at the editorial page, which has been the case for decades.
USA Today was "TV that you can wrap fish in."
Yeah, USA Today and a paywall doesn't make sense, but USA Today doesn't make sense so who knows? I guess we'll find out soon enough.
The original Xanadu project had the concept of micropayments, but until now the only way to really achieve it was using lotteries (I think it was Ron Rivest in the 90s who suggested this?)
The question is, how to monetize open source or journalism - online content that can be easily copied. Any sort of effective payment system requires a network effect. People could forj the system but they’d have to start from scratch, as no one would accept their payments.
Imagine if every app and plugin on wordpress could have its own currency to earn money as people use it on various sites, and still continue to be open source. Imagine if social networks like Facebook were the ones paying for their users to read it, settling balances once in a while. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp fought for something like this in Australia and won.
Would welcome feedback and thoughts. Why the massive amount of silent downvotes?
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudia...
How does it apply in our case, by the way? In our case we take the payment decisions out of the hands of users and into the hands of community administrators.
In a tax-supported scheme, the tax collector serves that role. In a ticketbox, it's the literal gate or door itself. For advertising-supported media, it's the publisher or broadcaster, gatekeeping in a three-way branch between advertisers, creators/talent, and audience (similarly, cable providers). In donor-based broadcasting, the broadcaster intermediates between individual donors and content producers.
As an alternative to a governmental progressive-tax-based system, a natural gateway exists at the ISP level, for which a sufficiently effective gating, revenue-collection, and content-payment system might work. I'd outlined that about three months ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26893033
There are access-based royalty systems such as ASCAP / Harry Fox, though my sense is that for more substantial text-based content (similarly: data-backed reporting, deep analysis, and probably a fair bit of serial media of the video or podcast variety), linking payment to publishers or studios, who can support a staff of creators (writers, artists, actors, directors, support personnel) would be preferred to the music/broadcast model.
Your problem is you're trying to dam a flat plain. You need to find a suitable dam site, and it's probably the ISPs. On the other hand, they're going to need systems for that service: content negotiation, payment collection, royalties or subscription payments, etc.
The distinction my model has from a traditional micropayments or subscription model is that the provision level is universal. A service subscriber pays in a flat fee, they get an all-you-can-eat plan. The payment differentiation is between the aggregator and the creating studio (somewhat similar to current cable subscriptions).
Note that total OECD content spend is roughly $100/capita. Advertising runs many times that, at ~%$600 billion for the 1 billion inhabitants of the OECD, about $600/capita. "Free online content" costs the average household of 4 over $2,400 a year.