Hacker News Reader

Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

> I watched first-hand as the media industry not-so-slowly starved, my startup failed, and my friends lost jobs and businesses. Google took all the revenue as media turned to trash, and ad tech, clickbait and content marketing took over the Internet, and made using the web awful.

This paragraph made me believe you might actually have the interests of publishers in mind. Instead, I find that you're re-publishing articles from publishers, in order to keep people on your website. Not cool. How are publishers supposed to make any money at all, if search engines copy just their content, and republish it on their websites, without permission? You did that with our content -- making it virtually impossible for us to build our email list, sell any products, or gain any subscriptions, much less make any money from advertising at all. Please think carefully about the consequences of this choice, especially if your product achieves widespread success.

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Can you give an example, please? I did a search and got a blurb, with a link to go to the original. I think that's a balanced compromise that serves both sides well.

Thank you. We really are trying to keep a good balance here as you say - strong branding for the original source using their own Open Graph tags for title, description and image (we try to respect the intent of the content producer).

And so far the response from media companies to Andi (early days) has been very positive.

> much less make any money from advertising at all

I firmly believe nobody should care, because by using advertisements you make everything worse. For everyone. It is a giant industry entirely focused on fabricating the desire to give them money in my mind.

That's a great question.

Two things here:

1. The reader view only displays publicly available web content (it is made available to search engines and any public web client. We render through an anonymous proxy to protect user privacy.

2. We will share revenue with any media organization that wishes to partner with us from paid plans, and we hope that many will offer higher levels of paywall content (not publicly available) to Andi users.

Micro-payments never worked out for media companies. And no one will subscribe to every site on the web. We hope to offer a way for media companies to share in search revenue. Google and Facebook took away their revenue and leave media and content producers with the crumbs left over. Our model is to share any revenue from paid plans 50/50 with content makers. We are only a 2-person team in alpha right now, but we'e already talked to contacts in media and they are incredibly supportive of what we are doing. Media companies hate Google and what they did to quality journalism and democracy.

>publicly available web content

What are you talking about? You don't have the right to steal our intellectually property and publish it on your website. Full stop. That's exactly what you're doing.

> We will share revenue with any media organization

Oh great, so first you steal our property, then we have to beg you for a portion of the money you make from it.

No thanks.

> Micro-payments never worked out for media companies. And no one will subscribe to every site on the web.

Why are you blathering on about failed business models? We have a perfectly good business model. However, our business model doesn't fit with people stealing our intellectual property. Please, just stop.

I have to agree. Basically if your users will just use the reader, they will never hit the real websites.

Owners might make the partnership with you to get ad revenue, which most likely will be much much lower than their current income.

They might send you DMCA for copying their content.

I don't see how can be a win win situation if you republish articles...

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