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marban

Worst thing is even if you pay, they'll throw them at you. Looking at WSJ, FT, NYT,...

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No longer a WSJ/NYT subscriber specifically because of this; why is my subscription money not enough?

Because their subscription revenue does not cover their cost of business and/or revenue goals.

They're free to provide a tier that does cover costs and provide profit, why don't they do that?

The usual reason is people who are willing to pay to avoid ads are also the most valuable people for advertisers to advertise to. That decreases the value of their advertising business, which means they have to push the subscription prices up even further, which may make the business unviable. Especially because they have to compete with other businesses that will happily copy their content and put ads on it with no paywall.

As someone who has worked with WSJ/NYT/LAT/Tribune on adtech in the past: that completely ad free subscription cost is significantly more expensive than you think.

Partially because those sponsored articles (native ads) pay a lot of money to be there.

Partially because they'd have to build and support a whole other version of the newspaper without ads, and if the subscriber count is low, that engineering/infrastructure cost isn't spread as much.

Those Google display ads do pretty much pay garbage though.

When we ran the numbers, it'd have to be a 3-5x increase in subscription cost to replace advertising completely. None of those newspapers think anyone would be willing to pay those costs.

Newspapers were never free of ads even with subscripts. Ads subsidized your subscription. $0.25 for a full news paper and $1.50 for the bigger sunday addition is never going to pay for everything on its own (assuming a subscription actually lowered the full rate).

The only thing that I recall that was ever advertised as free from ads with a subscription was premium cable like HBO. Even magazines were full of ads. Hell, certain magazines were bought more for the ads than the content (thinking fashion mags).

Back when newspapers involved paper, providing an ad-free experience for people that subscribe would have been extremely expensive: A very large part of a newspaper's footprint was actually setting the paper into pages in a sensible fashion, printing and distribution. Printing an extra copy of the paper that has no ads would have been quite expensive, regardless of advertiser revenue.

Today, it'd be quite simple, as most ad blockers prove every day. I'd argue that today, many small newspaper websites are virtually unreadable without an ad blocker. 2-3 videos playing all at once, plus regular banner ads, while trying to make close buttons invisible. The same number of ads appear in a mobile browser too, leaading to basically no space to read any of the actual content.

I'm not buying your premise. You seem to be implying that the cost of running the paper could have been sustained by subscription only foregoing any ad sales. I'm saying the exact opposite in that even if 100,000 people paid full price for the paper every day, that would not raise enough money to run the paper. This is why it is said subscriptions were subsidized by the ads. To eliminate ads, the subscription price would have to increase significantly beyond what people would accept.

You seem to only be coming from the expense of layout which is just not true. The world has increased in size from only paying attention to the local news with maybe a few specialty sources. Now, you can have access to news from any country at any time. Expecting people to pay for subscriptions to that is not realistic either. So since people are not paying for subscriptions, each company is depending on income for other places which has always been ads. The key difference today for me is that ads can now be malicious beyond their original purpose. Seeing an ad in print or tv or hearing one on the radio was never able to drain you of resources whether that be compute power or something much more nefarious. Because they cannot (or will not) control that, they have lost all sympathy from me about ads.

Because nothing is ever enough. You were already enough of a sucker to pay for one thing, why shouldn’t you be suckered into paying a little more?

I know this isn't exactly the same, but I used to work at an adtech startup and my boss was very savvy in the industry, and right in front of me did some quick napkin math showing that Hulu probably makes about $20 a month off of people in the free tier, and only $13 from their ad-free* subscription.

So by subscribing Hulu makes less money off of you.

The main reason is video ads pay the most, which doesn't apply to papers, but does apply to websites. So what's their excuse now?

*Their "ad-free" tier has ads.

Because if you have the disposable income to pay to block ads, your attention is absolutely tantalizing to an advertiser.

Does the clothing you wear sport a logo? That's an advertisement, right?

Does your computer have an Intel Inside sticker on it? An Apple maybe? Perhaps it's emblazoned with Lenovo.

How about the car you drive? Does it not proudly display the manufacturer's logo? Did you ask the dealer to remove their stickers and plate surround?

As I look around my house, all I see are ads! For things I paid for!

> Does the clothing you wear sport a logo?

Yeah but it's not against their TOS to buy the clothes and cut the logo out.

> Does your computer have an Intel Inside sticker on it?

Yeah but it's not against their TOS buy an Intel processor and take the sticker off.

> An Apple maybe?

Yeah but it's not against their TOS to buy an Apple laptop and put a sticker with a 4 pane window on top of the Apple sticker.

> Perhaps it's emblazoned with Lenovo.

Perhaps it is, but it's not against their TOS to put an IBM sticker over the Lenovo sticker.

> How about the car you drive? Does it not proudly display the manufacturer's logo? Did you ask the dealer to remove their stickers and plate surround?

Yeah but it's not against the TOS to..

Hopefully the point is clear.

I was being cheeky and besides, the person I was replying to didn't mention Terms of Service. So this is a new argument. But it's not against the TOS to block ads on WSJ, FT, or NYT either. Here's NYT:

https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014893428

I didn't check the others.

Why are you being cheeky and muddying the waters in a serious discussion?

We're discussing more than if the WSJ, FT, and NYT allows ad blockers or not. We're discussing how stupid it is that a service shows ads in the first place for premium service people pay for. WSJ and NYT are only two examples.

We're discussing how there's precedent to pay for a service and still see ads and how it wouldn't be a shock if Google pulled the same stunt.

We're discussing concepts and ideas, not specific companies and their policies.

Furthermore, the link you provided has a section "4. PROHIBITED USE OF THE SERVICES" which is an overly broad section that reads exactly like Google's TOS and could be interpreted as banning ad blockers if NYT wanted to say that's its purpose.

No, no and yes but also yes for me. I won't say it's particularly common, but there are absolutely some of us out there that will go out of our way to be a free walking billboard. For me personally, a manufacturer identifying their product is fine but anything else I will aggressively squash (e.g. My car manufacturer's logo is fine, but I absolutely make the dealer remove anything they've added with their name/logo on it for every car I buy).

If left uncontested, yes, yes, yes, and yes. All of those are ads, offensively and intolerably on things I paid for.

I don’t understand how everyone else seems to be okay with this norm. I dyed the advertisement on my rain jacket black to make it invisible. I disassembled my phone dock and ripped out the glowing advertisement. I sought out a foil-backed sticker to fully block the illuminated advertisement on the lid of my laptop. I ordered custom printed stickers to cover the advertisement on the frame of my bicycle. I ripped out the advertisements embroidered onto my shoes.

As I look around my house, I see sanctuary from our dystopia.

Now I’m thinking about a world where the architect’s name/logo is massively and obnoxiously engraved on the front of everyone’s home.

Anyway rlly enjoy your comment you’ve given me some great inspiration

I've seen brass plaques set in the concrete advertising for driveway companies.

Slightly expanding on my previous comment, the only “individual billboard” logos that would seem justifiable in principle would b certain foss projects since the overall community benefits from greater awareness. With anything else, the increased brand awareness only serves to further enrich that company.

Is at least my quick assessment. Interested in your thoughts

Agreed, there’s a distinction between absentmindedly promoting commercial schemes and deliberately promoting causes that you think are worthwhile. I’m certainly not without agenda and several of the commercial ads I’ve covered are replaced by designs with socio-political purpose.

Good to make that distinction of intentionality (tho the people buying a good solely to purport “status” is a whole different topic lol)

Specifically that car point struck me the other day when I was walking on the street and took in how blatantly car manufacturer logos are plastered about. The subconscious brand awareness is a hell of a thing

I sure wouldnt be caught dead in a shirt that says Nike on it.

I buy things with the least amount of logos and adverts as possible.

Unless I explicitly choose something with a logo, it's gonna be plain, or even a pretend logo, advertising nothing

The Economist does this too. It's infuriating to see ads in the app when I pay for a yearly subscription.

Whats even worse are the newsletters from news organizations imo. There's no ublock origin for Apple Mail content viewers. I either lose content like imagery or I have to go all in and load all their remote content, tracking pixels, the works. The ads will be for things like "pills the doctor doesn't want you to know about" and other phishy sounding stuff.

Exactly!

I was a subscriber more than 10 years ago but gave up when they started to have pushy, navigation blocking ads. It was like being unable to turn page before some time passed on the ad. How hostile is that?! Very! Analogy: you see an ad in the street and you are not allowed to walk on for some period of time, forced to stay at the ad. I requested ad free subscription for elevated price or promising cancellation, it became a cancellation.

I still buy the paper format occasionally, I love their articles - it is also easy jumping over ads in the physical format -, but I will not subscribe for paper version due to the amount of paper used and my trust in their electronic version is gone. I did not try their app since (and my tablet use sinked too, I might need much more push now to give a second try).

> I requested ad free subscription for elevated price or promising cancellation, it became a cancellation.

I listen to the audio edition nowadays, that has no ads. Also, I haven't found any good alternatives to it. The weekly issues and the regional columns are a very convenient format for me to consume the news.

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