The Sun and other publications roll out "Pay to Reject personalized ads" | Hacker News Reader

The Sun and other publications roll out "Pay to Reject personalized ads"

help.thesun.co.uk

26 pointsalex_suzuki31 comments

> You are paying for an ad-tracking free experience so you will still see non-personalised advertising.

I get paying for an ad free service. (I pay for YouTube Premium today.) I don't get paying and still seeing ads.

It’s the Mr. Krabs money meme.

They’ll take as much as they can get away with before people seriously push back. I mean, it’s nothing new, really - see how some paid streaming services have converted their paid, ad-free tiers to have ads, and added a more expensive tier without them again.

Removal of ads has been a feature of paying for a service in some instances but not others. Why is that hard to understand?

I understand why it's offered, I don't understand why anybody would sign up for it.

I feel like the segment of the population who is willing to pay for a free service in exchange for additional privacy but not willing to pay a bit more to remove ads entirely is vanishingly slim. Am I missing something?

There's billions of people out there, man. They're way more varied in their values and behaviors and internal logic than you could imagine.

I'm much less informed today than ten years ago about what movies are coming out, what concerts will be in town, what pizza places have opened in my area, etc. But those are cool things. In becoming fully tolerant of any kind of advertising, I've denied myself some useful info. I still reflexively block all ads, but there's been consequences to that. Sometimes my interests align with an advertiser in that I do want to know what products or services are available in a given category. It doesn't mean I'm going to believe an advertiser's claims unquestioningly. I'm an adult, I know how the game works.

It's easy to get into a bubble and let it make you too extremist so you start to miss the big picture.

I see that viewpoint too, but if you see value in ads, why would you want to pay $5/mo for less relevant ones?

I'm certainly in a bubble here, but I'm really struggling to imagine the combination of privacy conscious, frugal, and not-bothered-enough-to-just-install-ublock-and-ghostery as a winning combination.

To put it differently, I'm confused why there's not a $10/mo ad-free tier, as that's what I'd personally prefer.

You could definitely be right that it's too niche of a tier to make sense. I can just see the logic (on paper) that surveillance is the worst part of advertising.

I used to pay for physical newspapers and magazines that had ads in them, without complaining. It was a simpler time. But then internet content was free for so long and Google etc. abused us for so long that I can't feel good about paying for a news web site at all now. Even if it was ad free I don't trust my traffic isn't being sold in at least some obfuscated way.

> I used to pay for physical newspapers and magazines that had ads in them, without complaining.

That is a point I had not considered.

Absolutely never, of course. I'll stick with ublock origin and noscript for news sites. Although I am trialing apple news right now. I land on so many news sites randomly that any individual subscriptions to any of them is absurd. This is NOT the solution and is probably not even realistic if I had to guess.

Apple News has been surprisingly good. I notice they dilute their premium sources in Canada with free news articles from AP, Canadian Press, and Reuters. Unfortunately, those articles tend to be news gruel.

Are you referring to the specific articles they choose, or are you suggesting those 3 publications generally only put out "news gruel"?

My own perception is that wire articles in general tend to be distilled to gruel because of the need for mass appeal.

When I read local and national sources, I get familiar with the tone and style of individual reporters and somewhat know what to expect.

"Pay us enough, and we won't tell others what we know about you"

Sound familiar, doesn't it?

I would rather this than a hard paywall. I think this is the future of the internet. The masses get their data harvested and the rich and smart can opt out.

You don't have to be rich or smart to just buy the newsstand version and avoid tracking altogether.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BookScan

Newspapers in Italy have been doing this for years, by the way. You don't want third party cookies? Subscribe!

There was an investigation by the privacy watchdog[0].

I'm not sure how it ended. Last news I can find is that they were continuing the investigation one month later.[1]

[0] https://www.garanteprivacy.it/web/guest/home/docweb/-/docweb...

[1] https://www.garanteprivacy.it/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/d...

Interestingly, the Information Commissioner's Office calls it "Consent or pay" instead of "Pay to Reject". Or is this another model?

https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...

A protection racket for surveillance, geniuses. How about, I don’t give a shit about your publication?

I know it existed and did not work but I would like to have micro transactions setup on publications. It would be great to just deposit $N to go and read an article without the burden of having a subscription.

I'm holding out some hope that EU regulatory action will be swift and severe to act as a deterrent. These "accept or pay" walls are clearly against the spirit and likely against the letter of GDPR.

> 4. When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia (among other things), the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/

> Consent should not be regarded as freely given if the data subject has no genuine or free choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw consent without detriment.

https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-42/

I don’t understand why legislation is passed that is this clear on something but then it’s not enforced?

Unenforced regulation is even worse than no regulation because it makes it very unclear what the regulation actually is. Worst case it forces the actors on the market to all be in violation because it’s such a competitive disadvantage to comply unless everyone does. This regulation is supposed to (I hope) make non-tracking ads more profitable because advertisers simply can’t show tracking ads. But if half the sites still show tracking ads then the revenue from displaying dumb ads will be next to nothing.

The EU Data Protection Board ruled that Meta's similar proposal is illegal under GDPR. Forced consent is not consent.

https://noyb.eu/en/statement-edpb-pay-or-okay-opinion

Was there any sanction? Or is it just an EU level ruling guiding national bodies going forward?

Because the problem isn’t that the regulation is vague or that EU level bodies don’t interpret them, it’s that there aren’t any big fines handed out. Like in this case you’d have low-ish first fine and then if they repeat the offense it should be the max X% of global revenue right away.

Great.

Maybe next they'll adopt micropayment systems.

Paywalls are OK. People need to be paid for their work. Paying for the pleasure of not being surveilled upon - not so much.

Yeah no. I can pay for news and you can even put friendly ads in the news if it makes it cheaper.

I’ll do no business with anyone who does the “pay with money or with your info” business model. And I’ll keep reading their news for free while they contemplate their business model further.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

so .. pay or see ads. then adblockers are instantly outlawed.

You still see ads even if you pay. Just not targeted ones. Yes, really...

sounds like ryanair for content. one of my early (non-starter) startup plays was going to use a similar technology but instead of pay to reject, you'd get a login that came as a customer benefit for buying certain higher end products.

e.g. buy a tesla or fancy sunglasses and it comes with access to paywalled articles from mainstream publishers. idea being products can differentiate by extending their brand experience to other platforms, where a new mercedes should come with some basket of economist, wsj, and FT subscriptions the way you get the first year of satellite radio.

I don't know what product connection The Sun's content would be good for, maybe aftermarket rims or if there were a royal warrant holder for stab vests, but the model may still apply for some future startup.

the business was to bulk buy content access from publishers and sell the access to retail brands via the portal/app to bundle for their customers with their products. This idea of, "we're going to make it insufferable, but you can make it just more sufferable by paying," is like discount airlines, HP's printer business, and I guess legacy media is there now too.

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