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Comment by intellegacy | Hacker News Reader

What happens to all the newspapers/ news sites that run on ads? Advertising money has allowed the public access to non-subscription news on the web for some time now.

If you take all that money away, doesn't the free content mostly dry up?

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I don't think internet advertising ever has actually funded that much news. For the 1990s and 2000s, non-subscription news on the web was mostly cross-subsidized by print subscriptions. Taken purely as an online operation, sites like wsj.com and nytimes.com didn't make nearly enough money from ads to pay for the cost of their reporting.

It's only recently that newspapers seem to be trying to make the online business actually fund the reporting, and the NYTimes, at least, is going back to a quasi-subscription model to try to make that work.

Now there are some sites that are purely ad-supported, but imo most of them don't produce particularly high-quality news. Stuff like, say, TechCrunch or Gawker.

That's where we NEED to move toward some easier way of frictionless micro-transactions that are secure, safe, and ubiquitous... how to do it is unclear, but perhaps a mega-site like Facebook could create such a thing.

If you are referring to micro-transactions whereby readers pay content authors, tipjoy and others have already tried the "e-tip" model and failed.

Also, paypal's donate feature has existed for some time now but it doesn't seem to be able to replace ads. If anybody could implement the safe, seamless microtransaction model I'd think it'd be paypal as they have the existing infrastructure already. Either they have overlooked it or they've decided that the model wouldn't work.

Many good ideas have to be tried a few times before someone gets them right. Witness Sun's "network computer" ideas in the '90s. As far as I can tell Flattr is doing well and gradually growing.

Paypal? No. I just signed up for an account using my debit card. Instantly, my account is suspicious. They then demand access to my bank accounts and scans of my social security card, birth certificate, photo ID, etc. No thank you.

There is more than enough will to write. If newspapers are providing anything more valuable than amateur bloggers, people will start paying for it. If not, then I guess their time has come.

Free content is not always necessarily honest content, especially at scale. Large sites aren't charities, but a personal blog often can be.

Free content will never dry up. Free content from organizations that produce at scale will dry up.

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