The H is closing down

That's sad. I was never a regular reader of the H, but when I did come across their articles, I found them very well written and informative.

I'm surprised they haven't tried a subscription model like LWN. LWN has encountered similar problems, and been on the brink of shutdown before, but every time they have announced this they have subsequently managed to increase subscriptions enough to stay afloat. The nice thing about subscriptions as opposed to a one-time donation drive is that it becomes a sustainable revenue stream that they can depend on, rather than a one-time injection of cash that dries up quickly.

LWN's subscription model seems to work really well. A subscription just means you get access to subscriber's only articles a week before everyone else; so if you don't need to stay absolutely on top of every development, you can read for free. There are different levels of subscriptions, ranging from $3.50/month to $50/month, so it's close to a "pay what you want" model (there are some slight differences in features you get at the different levels, but they are mostly equivalent). And subscribers are allowed to generate links that they can share with other people to content that is still subscriber-only, so you can still discuss an article if you feel like, submit it to HN, or the like; they just ask that people don't abuse it by providing a feed of all subscriber-only articles or something of the sort.

If you loved The H (heise UK), try http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=ht... (heise Germany). It's the same company, has same excellent quality, a vastly larger offering - but it's in German. They don't have the same monetization issues, though. Heise is a magazine publisher and printing house based in Hannover, Lower Saxony. I was really surprised and amused when I saw they also printed the phone book...

Oh, no! I love The H! :(

It is THE one serious IT news web site, no bullshit or sensationalistic crap; well written articles by competent people. I'm so sorry it did not work out for them, both for them and for myself.

That's a pitty. I went there daily because they had good quality coverage, sometimes of topics I didn't read anywhere else. You will be missed, The H....

I have no idea what The H is, however they seem to have a strong community?

Have they tried the "we need money and to rails $50,000 before x or we will shut down" method? That seems to work for many popular sites, where people are happy to contribute $10-$100 for the value in their lives.

This is a loss, The H covered a lot of interesting material that other titles frankly just didn't understand!

It's sad that a serious site like this gets shut down. I kinda see why online news papers often are shit; it's the only way to make money.

Why don't we as users make sites like these able to monetize? In a weird way, most sites are the way we don't like them, because in some weird way that's what we "like" and that's what pays off.

Can anyone point some sensible alternative? On a daily basis, I've been reading only The H and HN for many months.

Why did I learn about this site only now, when it is closing? :( Looks very interesting, it's a shame.

This is a shame. The H was a great way to keep up with open source software news, and they had great feature articles. LWN also has great articles, but I don't know of anywhere else with similar quality news.

http://www.h-online.com/open/

So after reading this, my only question is why they couldn't make it profitable.

One of my favorite things about The H is (was) that it always seemed to have a handle on how many news stories to run. Many of my RSS feeds (I'm looking at you, Ars) get skimmed simply because of volume. With the H, I generally at least peek at the article for each story. Other news sites come and go from my feeds (since for high-volume feeds it seems like the most important stories will bubble up through other, less chatty aggregators), but I always kept the H around due to the fact that it seemed to consistently run stories I couldn't find anywhere else.

This is sad news.

The H is/was the english speaking child of heise.de - the biggest German tech news website and a big publisher of tech magazines and books. They belong to Springer.

Why give up so easily? Put up some donation links and monetize it that way if so many people here love it.