I think it's fascinating how many people want:
- 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.
- 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 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I do enjoy this though: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
Thanks! You just gave me my new favorite news source.
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.
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
A lot of the ACA arguments the court heard were incredibly stupid. And they still have struck down parts of the law.
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.
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.