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.
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.
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.
Normal people being informed today costs 0 bucks.
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).
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.
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.