Bezos In 2012: People Won’t Pay For News On The Web, Print Will Be Dead | Hacker News Reader

Bezos In 2012: People Won’t Pay For News On The Web, Print Will Be Dead

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47 pointsRobAley45 comments

You know what I will pay for? The newspaper on my Kindle, at a reasonable price, with all the features of the print version. Let's take The Washington Post just as an example. Home delivery can be had for ~$10/mo [1] (I don't live in DC, so this is the only price I could easily find for delivery). Meanwhile, the Kindle newspaper version of the Washington Post is $12/mo [2] and according to the reviews, is missing:

1) Letters to the editor

2) Editorial cartoons

3) The comics pages

4) The crossword puzzle

5) The box scores

6) Classified ads

7) Sunday inserts, including coupons

8) Pictures

[1] http://www.subscription.com/washington-post/

[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Washington-Post-Kindle-Ad-Free/dp/...

Almost all the things on that list are better distributed and consumed via your phone than your Kindle.

How's that? My phone isn't 6", isn't geared towards holding with one hand while the other hand shovels Rice Krispies into my mouth, isn't terribly comfortable to read on compared to a Kindle, and requires touching the screen while I might be eating breakfast.

While some of the things might not be fit for the Kindle, the Kindle version should have a price to reflect that (and also reflect the lack of printing and delivery costs). Instead it's damn close to the price of the print edition, if not more.

My phone is my kindle. As is my tablet. I no longer have kindle hardware, although I use the app a lot.

I think you're under the misconception that Amazon wants to sell Kindles. Amazon doesn't want to make money selling Kindles. They want everyone to have a Kindle.

That's why they have smartphone/tablet apps for iOS, Android, Windows (phone and 8) and even (gasp) Blackberry. They don't care what you use, they just want you to buy their stuff for it.

Good point.

Phone, Kindle, iPad, doesn't matter much to Amazon. The point is, you aren't going to pay $12/month for the Post. You could, but you won't. Instead, you're going to start paying $79 a year for Prime, which'll get you access to the Post on any device you want. And also instant video, so you can drop netflix. And free fast shipping. And that will make it so easy to buy other things from Amazon that you will. Often.

1-click was brilliant, but that's just one part of their overall strategy to remove absolutely every obstacle they can that might possibly come between your intention to buy and the action of doing so.

I like the idea - but this would make a lot more sense if it was a straight Amazon acquisition rather than a Bezos acquisition.

All of the things you listed are things that would be much better on a mobile delivery platform. No wonder WaPo can't make any money.

Classified ad syndication is begging to be disrupted. Crossword puzzles too. Letters to the Editor needs to be a heavily moderated forum. Sports scores with realtime updates?

> You know what I will pay for?

That's a damn good question, and should be asked more often.

Our regional newspaper kept annoying me for several years with sales calls after we cancelled their subscription. Finally one of their sales reps asked what was wrong about the paper and what would it take for me to pay for it. My response: "I won't pay for reprinted, two days old glorified gossip. Give me news reporting that can go counter to the paper's official line, with depth and bredth comparable to that of Salon or Guardian."

This was nearly three years ago. They haven't called since.

I still think that what I call "microsubscription" will fix this -- pay a subscription to a clearinghouse, who then pays out to publishers according to usage. If you read mostly WaPo this month, they get most of the money. If next month HN is the main activity, HN gets the lion's share.

I am not the first to this idea. Kachingle made a flashy start but fell to pieces first when they got into a crazy vendetta with the NYT and then afterwards when a business-method patent application fell through.

Readability tried but ran into the problem of holding money on trust for websites whose owners can't be identified. They also carried the overhead of running a proxy server. Not worth it for $5 a month.

(I don't include Flattr in this list. I still think that making people think about it is asking too much to make the model work.)

I stumbled on the same basic business model in 2008 and I've been chipping away at it ever since. My honours project at university was based on developing a secure mechanism to track users as they visited different sites. That scheme turned out to be broken. I developed a new tracking scheme, which is currently passing through the digestive system of IP Australia and the USPTO.

I guess the moral is: watch this space.

(Or: give me money, I promise to do smart things with it)

I came up with this without reading it from anybody but thought that this will be something that would not benefit the content producers like the Post. Similarly to how most individual channels wouldn't benefit if I just paid for the ones I watched on my cable subscription.

Actually, it would benefit the Post and any other participating publisher -- any money is better than no money, after all. In particular, my design is structured so that service subscribers could penetrate paywalls with the guarantee that some payment will be made.

This creates a new segment in the market: people who would pay if the marginal transaction costs are zero.

VigLink is already there.

VigLink appears to be a referral scheme. Quite different.

I always wonder why people go out of their way to dig up old quotes which contradict current behavior. People change their minds. Or come up with new ideas. Or have a breakthrough of some kind.

I highly doubt Bezos would have spent $250m (even if that is small time money to him) if he still believed what he said last year.

Or maybe he still believes that, and he feels he can still do something with a major news paper that sits within those lines.

Either way I am unsure why this is making it as an HN post.

There's also the corruption angle. I wanna buy xyz. "Hey guys XYZ sucks don't buy it". I get xyz for cheaper price.

Because it's interesting, and there are a lot of possibilities about what may have caused his change in thinking - I highly doubt Bezos would have spent $250m (even if that is small time money to him) if he still believed what he said last year.

Of course, there may not have been a complete change in his thinking, and he feels he can still do something with a major news paper that sits within those lines.

Either way, Bezos is currently finding print news a worthwhile thing to invest in, and if your business intersects with either of his (or you're just curious), it might be interesting to read a post on HN in which he expresses a very different opinion a very short time ago simply in order to have a historical perspective on the evolution of his views.

An oldie but a goodie from John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

I'm more interested in what exactly changed his mind than I am in the fact that his mind has changed.

Not the same meaning, but potentially also applicable, is Walt Whitman's quote:

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

Bezos “said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds.” http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/10/19/jeff-be...

funny thing is that there is nothing that contradictory in what Bezos said in that article and his actions in buying the newspaper

“There is one thing I’m certain about: there won’t be printed newspapers in twenty years. Maybe as luxury items in some hotels that want to offer them as an extravagant service. Printed papers won’t be normal in twenty years.”

This seems true, I haven't read a printed paper in almost 10-15 years and the kids coming up today are probably not going to either. So this feels right to me.

“On the Web, people don’t pay for news and it’s too late for that to change”

This is true too, news it commoditized. A story breaks on Twitter or CNN within minutes. And within a day, you've discussed and argued over it with all your friends ... so why would anyone pay for information thats free everywhere else. What they will pay for is exclusive, well written content, that isn't available, for free, anywhere else. That I think, is where the secret of Bezos acquisition lies.

Steve Jobs in 2003 "We have no plans to make a tablet computer", meanwhile the iPhone itself was a spin out project from original iPad development efforts that I believe started at least a year earlier. Don't take things people say prima facie.

>Don't take things people say prima facie.

This deal was just announced, and we don't know enough to say that we shouldn't take Bezos's words at face value. His plans for the Post may be taking it digital, turning it into a boutique printed offering, or a combination of both. From the article:

>There is one thing I’m certain about: there won’t be printed newspapers in twenty years. Maybe as luxury items in some hotels that want to offer them as an extravagant service.

He can take it digital or upscale print and remain entirely consistent with his quoted stances." Heck, -he could even keep the current model exactly as is as long as he turns a profit and be one of the "last men standing"

>Printed papers won’t be normal in twenty years.”

Really, all he was saying it that we're trending away from print. In the same sentence that he said there would be no print in twenty, he implied there will be some print in twenty...

I think the biggest issue is that newspapers, just like magazines and cable, are bundled content and consumers hate being forced into bundled content. "I just want to read the one article that peaked my interest. Is that so hard?". The problem is the economic model then goes from paying steady dollars for the brand name of a good institution, to paying pennies per article (maybe based on sensational headlines and yellow journalism).

Can't really be done effectively. Banks charge for using your card. If the cost of the transaction exceeds the cost of the content, then you can't make money doing it that way.

And since banks rely on maintaining a reserve they have no real motivation to allow you to make rapid transfers - especially since it would introduce people hunting for the best interest rates.

Could hold user's accounts until they've reached a certain threshold but that introduces risk on both ends of the transaction.

So you're telling me that Jeff Bezos has just bought an asset which appears currently to support no long term business model, but that, if there were such a thing as a viable micropayment technology, could suddenly become immensely more valuable?

I wonder if Amazon has anything interesting in the works in the payment-cost-management space?

Amazon can already trivially batch up payments, as most of their customers won't just buy a single $0.50 thing (and if they do, the loss is miniscule) and never make another purchase.

Do you mean the virtual currency they announced a while back?

https://developer.amazon.com/post/Tx2EZGRG23VNQ0K/Introducin...

Nope. Not as such anyway. I was saying you can't seem to go from paying steady dollars for a brand name to paying pennies per article.

Personally I think there's a minimum pain point for parting with your money, and if the value of a product falls beneath that for enough people, then it's just not viable under any conditions in that market - it won't matter how well you do what you do, or how cheaply, you'll have to change the product somewhat. I suspect newspapers are going that way for a couple of reasons. One being that to appreciate high quality news requires a high-quality education so they can't leverage that aspect of things particularly well to win that way.

I think. -chews her lip- I suspect if you want to look at news as a product then you have to look at where its value comes from and start splitting that out and optimising for it. Information is part of it - where does most of that come from these days? Press releases. Journal articles - which is to say when scientists want to push their press releases. Aggregating others news sites - which is to say the press releases of press releases. Most of the information content of news these days is aggregation, not writing.

The commentary? The commentary in news isn't up to much. (Well, see appreciating HQ news requires HQ ed - not a good value proposition, I suspect.) You read a couple of books on the history of an issue and then read the newspaper about it and the newspaper rarely has anything to say that would impress a first year student. And there's a more serious problem represented by comments - if people ever manage to fix the rating systems to allow trust metrics to generalise properly - how many reporters can you retain vs how many commentators are their on the net? Someone out there is going to be an expert, if we ever find a way to leverage trustworthy reputation in a meaningful manner then the odds are the people who are going to be listened to aren't in your newsroom.

What's the other service news serves? I think that one's obviously entertainment.

So. If you wanted to do news and make money at it... how might you do it? I guess you might make your newspaper a bot, and have it process press releases. And you would tag those with metadata and run a ticker service - like the stock markets. And when a subject was clicked on in the ticker, that would link into short summaries of all the press releases on the subject - ordered chronologically and by how closely they related to the original subject - as objects, linked tiles perhaps, on the same page. Commentary from the top rating authors according to your rating system could be in boxes connected to the individual stories when someone clicked to expand them, or rolled over them.

And that might be how people could use your service to explore the information side of things from a perspective that they couldn't do on their own. Your service could become an aggregation/visual research tool that people could use to rapidly walk through very large subject areas.

And the other side of things? Entertainment? I think we've seen it. I think it's reddit. Oh, maybe not Reddit reddit - but something similar. You might organise your front page using drag and drop stack rating of the summary tiles and just do it so that it doesn't organise them by relational metadata but by time and popularity.

---------------

I don't know, that's one way you might try to shake things up - and that's a service that I might consider buying into because it would allow much more powerful capabilities for researching a subject than google does.

However, the long and the short of it is: I think news is going to have to change fairly radically to leverage what value there is left in it. Because at the moment you have to look at a newspaper and ask yourself: What does it actually do in terms of creating value? Does it give people any new ways of looking at things, does it make anything easier for people that they won't shortly be able to do for themselves?

I can't see it managing to reach over that pain barrier of actually parting with your money unless there are no less painful alternatives available otherwise. If it's just a middle man, and nothing else besides, then I think its disease is terminal.

FYI: s/peaked/piqued/

Never notice it if others make mistakes in language. To notice by word or look such errors in those around you is excessively ill-bred.[1]

[1]http://www.artofmanliness.com/2013/06/19/37-conversation-rul...

One of the reasons Link bait titles kind of suck at times. The author of this just like many of its readers KNOWS that Bezos didn't buy the Post to keep it running as it is.

The reality is he's an innovator and there probably are very few people who know exactly what he plans on doing with it(he may even be included in that group)

But one thing I can say with absolute certainty is that he intends to change the way news is consumed.

In the world as it stands it only makes sense that digital newspapers are delivering stories straight to our devices as they happen.

With the Whispernet network Kindle has Bezos has an amazing opportunity to allow papers to distribute devices for consumption that consumers can keep in their homes and have updated as the news happens.

This is the way for them to become relevant again and I'd place a bet saying its part of his thinking for the new way forward too.

No more newspaper delivery boys, but the writers who have for the last decade struggled to remain relevant can come back into their own again with the relevance of articles fresh off the wire and they already have the added advantage of being perceived as a more reliable source than most bloggers.

I hope this becomes what it can. because it CAN be great

In the journalese about Bezos's latest buy and wondering why, I have yet to see a mention of why Bezos quit managing hedge funds to start up Amazon. He noticed that there was a tax benefit to selling across state lines, i.e. no state sales tax had to be paid. Hence he setup in favourable Washington state rather than anywhere else, to keep things a lot more tax efficient than his competitors. At the time those competitors did not notice what he was doing.

With where we are now there is the real possibility that Bezos has outwitted everyone again with some loophole/tax perk that you would have to be an investment banker to really appreciate.

Do you really think he set up Amazon in order to exploit a tax loophole and not because he is a visionary who wanted to change the world?

I think he bought "WaPo" for the same reason he bought "Goodreads:" the users of both are readers and he sells books. Specifically, the Book Review section.

Even if the print edition operates at a slight loss, controlling a popular (perhaps the second most popular) newspaper Book Review section would be of immense value to Amazon.

At one point in time, daytime TV existed simply to sell detergent (hence, "Soap Opera.") I could definitely see a time where newspapers exist to sell stuff on-line.

I have to disagree. In my opinion, the kindle reviews are far more influencial than the Book Review section of WaPo. I think you are seeing in the wrong way, Newspapers are getting less and less influential as time goes by, who wants to read news from yesterday? So, the best move is to leverage the actual authority WaPo has, and give them more relevance in the actual world.

>kindle reviews are far more influencial than the Book Review section of WaPo.

They're not. It's hard to get your book reviewed by an actual periodical of note. Everybody has Kindle reviews. Kindle reviews can either seal the deal on a sale or stop a sale at the last second. You probably would have never read the Kindle reviews or even heard of the book if it hadn't been reviewed by someone with an editorial policy.

1. Just because he is rich and famous doesn't mean he is an oracle with a time machine. He puts on his pants one leg at a time; makes predictions just like the rest of us, gets them wrong too.

2. After thinking hard about it, I have decided to pay for the NYT. I still can break through the pay wall. However their content is amazing. Saving stuff, using their rudimentary recommendation system and occasionally getting the print version is nice.

I think you've hit it on the nail. People pay to consume on their devices. That's the model Amazon is going for (they've explicitly said it's not the hardware, it's the subscriptions stupid). So a Post which tantalizes you on the web but delivers the actual articles you can only read on your device, via a subscription. The devices are locked down, and it's not the web. Boom.

Its not any newspaper. Its the one with most political influence. $250M is a small price to influence all policy makers.

Hm, is the patronage idea from the table already? What would I do if I had one billion dollar of leisure money? I guess I would buy a world-leading, still struggling social institution that has a high value for society - for just a quarter of my fortune.

Who talks about news? It is an asset purchase.)

What assets? The Washington Post real estate is not being sold. It's just the people, their pensions, and the brand that was purchased.

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This statement has already been proven false. What it should read is:"people won't pay for tabloid news on the web. Print will be dead."

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