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Comment by I_Am_Nous | Hacker News Reader

>The Wall Street Journal noticed a decline starting about 18 months ago ... “We are at the mercy of social algorithms and tech giants for much of our distribution,” Emma Tucker, The Journal’s editor in chief, told the newsroom in the meeting.

The news used to distribute itself instead of relying on others to do that work for them. Now that social media is no longer distributing news and generating hate clicks in the same way, they might have to go back to the old fashioned days of distribution.

Does this mean clickbait will stop being as lucrative? You mean news might need to be relevant and accurate to have value?? Say it ain't so!

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> Does this mean clickbait will stop being as lucrative? You mean news might need to be relevant and accurate to have value?? Say it ain't so!

I guess the question is what will be lucrative for publishers, if clickbait fades? In broad strokes, they used to rely on advertising and classifieds, then craigslist killed classifieds. Things didn't go great for a decade-ish, but then social media took off and brought tons of eyeballs. If the social media wave recedes, what will be left? Or what will replace the old business model?

Media companies might have to go back to primarily subscriptions, especially since adblock is ubiquitous and people aren't visiting from social media like they were. They might also have to settle for making less revenue because the "stonks only go up" economy doesn't really exist anymore and I feel like there will be a lot of correction in a lot of companies as a result.

I can only speak for myself, but here is what I would happily pay for: I would happily pay up to 20 cents to read a single article, ad free (or even, I suppose, not ad free), and for perpetual access to that article. And I would happily pay up to 50 bucks a month for all of the articles I read from all publications combined. What I will not do is purchase 20 subscriptions with recurring charges to 20 different media publications, none of which let me read articles from any other publication, and then remember to cancel them and reactivate them on a continuous basis so I can fly through paywalls. What I will also not do is hand over a bunch of personal contact information for the privilege of reading a single article, subjecting myself to all manner of unsolicited marketing emails. I have a feeling I'm not alone.

The sooner we can get to where this is all going, which I believe is tiny, contactless, trust-less, anonymous micropayments on a per-page basis, not a coercive subscription model built on dark patterns like recurring charges and call-to-cancel, the better it will be for everyone . Paywalls and other gating have totally ruined the user experience of the Internet and it is totally orthogonal to how the Internet and its protocols were designed to function. The sooner media realizes that they have to band together to adopt some sort of per-page or per-view micropayments solution in order remain aligned with the content model baked into the web's architecture, the sooner they will figure out how to support their profession with a continuous revenue stream and also, yes, even profit.

And for those who say that will warp the incentives of news reporting: they are already warped by page views and ad revenue. It's self-deluding to think that subscriptions somehow prevent that.

The Apple News subscription is basically what you are asking for.

The main problem is that it pays publishers by article view, so it still incentivizes clickbait.

I’d love an alternative where you choose N publications that each run their own feed. Payment would still be done by articles read, but the financial incentive would change to having a good feed instead of having good clickbait headlines.

I thought of Apple News also. My understanding is you can get access to most of the content from some publishers, but even then discovery is an issue. That is, you can't easily read the WSJ cover-to-cover.

Yes, I'm an Apple News subscriber, and it is the closest thing to what I'm talking about, no doubt because Apple is the only company with enough sway to convince publishers this is in their own interests. But even Apple can't push them nearly far enough. Having to look up the same article in Apple News when I'm paywalled through the web site even though I can legitimately access it is extremely annoying. These publications are definitely not going out of their way to take me to my legitimate, paid-for Apple News copy of their article - and I'm sure that's by design. Secondly, only a subset of publications are available. I want there to be equal access to all articles. But media does not want to compete on a level playing field like that.

> But media does not want to compete on a level playing field like that.

I think they would say they don't want to build in someone else's sandbox.

Then they can make their own sandbox that doesn’t treat their readers badly. But I see no signs of that.

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