Amazon’s Twitch Acquisition Is Official
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Just because they aren't based in the valley and make Apple look positively liberal when it comes to secrecy and working practices doesn't mean they should be ignored. Quite honestly I think they're the single most terrifying company in the US today, an idea Bezos would take as a compliment.
The big picture is they are gunning to become the universal middle men for when people actually spend money on the net. Google only have the ad side of things together, but never really cracked getting end users to open their wallets, yet Amazon are in the position of starting in front of users, and slowly moving themselves into being the background glue between everything else, facilitating transactions between everyone while taking their cut and enforcing their rules. Terrifying, and brilliant.
I'm not seeing people use it for splitting bills and the like as much, but I got the impression Square was making a conscious shift away from that market and toward small brick-and-mortar (or truck-and-van?) businesses.
Square reached too high a valuation off of low value business with merchants. They have burned through staggering amounts of cash, canceled high profiled products, and purchased payment-unrelated startups and made other changes. The high valuation they've had in funding rounds makes them an unattractive purchase because the business they have isn't worth what it would cost. To get new money they'd have to do something like foursquare did to raise money, which dilutes everyone's current equity to very little.
They probably can turn it into some kind of business but the growth has stalled, the equity employees have is at risk and they've all but lost the sparkle that excites the press when they talk about the company. They could gain momentum back, it's not impossible, and they have really, really good engineers and designers so that's a plus.
The key point about Square's business is that they're in a new market. Their primary users are small businesses that would not otherwise be able to accept credit cards. I just bought a bottle of vodka directly from a distillery using Square: they had no cash register, no front office, you walk up to the door and the guys who run it will sell you a bottle on an iPad. Last Christmas, I bought our Christmas tree directly from a family-owned tree farm in the Santa Cruz mountains using Square. I paid for Maker Faire with Square.
If you follow Steve Blank's Lean Startup thought process, new markets take an average of 7 years to reach profitability. It's not just a matter of convincing customers to switch; you have to wait for people to enter the new lines of business that you have made possible. That's finally starting to happen for Square: I see people on HN down on it, but I talk to their actual customers, the ones who pay money for it, and they are all very happy with it.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2014/04/21/why-squ...
[2] http://fortune.com/2014/05/14/squares-status-its-complicated...
I know an engineer who works at Square, they are not a lean startup, they have all the various excesses that people love to hate which is expensive catering, free shit, expensive furnishings. Square is not lean, and when you're losing $100,000,000 a year, I don't care if you're an ancient business like Ford or IBM, that's not good, and you wont have 7 years to reach profitability profitability, you got about half that, if you don't hire anymore. If Square stops hiring, that's also not good. They're going to have to let people go, like their recruiting operation, which is world class.
"Lean" in this context doesn't mean "cheap." http://steveblank.com/2009/11/02/lean-startups-aren%E2%80%99...
The key point from the article: "If you confuse Lean with Cheap when you do find a repeatable and scalable sales model, you will starve your company for resources needed to scale."
Your point about lean and cheap is fair but a bit confusing in context.
The reason this works is because once you have that repeatable and scalable business model, you can be fairly sure that hiring a person (plus all the other operational costs) at $X will bring in >$X in new business. So you spend money for growth; the expenses are booked this year, the revenue doesn't happen until next year when contracts are inked, product improvements are launched, more people hear about Square, etc. The number to pay attention to is gross margins (the amount of money they make off each transaction); the 2nd article I linked lists that at 34%, which is comparable to Amazon's 30% and Apple's 39%. As long as that is positive and high enough to cover fixed operational costs, Square can instantly get to profitability by laying off people (or, with current revenue growth, simply by slowing down hiring).
The risk with this strategy is that the market turns out to be smaller than expected, and your product appeals only to a small number of early adopters. Growth then slows down markedly right as expenses ramp up, and there's no way to jump-start growth again. I think this is what's happened with Quora. Square seems different, though: the customers I've talked to are decidedly non-technical, and yet they love the product.
Me, too. I live in Japan and it blew me away when I saw Square readers for smartphones in convenience stores the other day.
I buy tons of wierd automotive parts that are not 'well known' and usually end up using Google to find products on Amazon.
Their search engine is actually pretty limiting in some ways.
They also advertise some of their working practices when it benefits them (eg datacentre physical staff don't have logical access), but to be honest, there aren't a lot of big companies out there that openly advertise their internal processes. They're also being extremely open about wanting to be The Middle Man when it comes to cloud, nothing stealthy about it at all. I just went to a free AWS summit, where the VP giving the keynote said as much - how is it possible to accuse them of secrecy when they paid for a big venue for me to visit, just in order to tell me exactly that factoid?
They are worth watching due to monopolistic concerns, sure, but there's so much FUD out there about them.
Amazon has a strong history of expanding their business and building new highly valuable products with staying power. Google has only expanded a little in terms of actual functional products, most of their additions have been via acquisitions, and they have not done well at monetizing or even supporting many of their new product offerings. Google is primarily search + backbone ISP, that's where almost all of their revenue comes from, everything else falls into a tiny "other" category. Indicative of their utter inability to effectively spinoff new products and high revenue businesses.
The only downside is that the work environment is more than a little dysfunctional.
Google is good at launching products, they're not good at maturing them. Chrome is a fantastic piece of software, and it fulfills it's purpose for google quite well, but it's not a product in the way that AWS or the kindle is a product.
Google is good at development, excellent in fact. But they get stuck in the hard middle parts of product development. They fail to monetize products well and they fail to mature products into their full potential. Partly that's because product development at google is basically just play-time. As I said, revenue for google derives from a tiny subset of products (search and network almost exclusively), everything else is just a side project. As such, when a product doesn't meet its potential or doesn't bring in billions in revenue that is not an issue at all at google, it's the expected case. In some ways that's good, but in other ways it's bad. Docs/drive has stagnated relative to what it could have been for years.
Amazon is almost diametrically opposite. They productize well, extremely well, but they have a horrid working environment in regard to devs.
In general, we want the best article out there on a given topic, where "not being behind a paywall" adds points toward "best".
Amazon or Google will piss off or drive away the Twitch user base. The users will all move to Hitbox.tv or any number of new sites that will pop up. It's easy to do live streaming, it's just expensive. This acquisition will bring funding and Yahoo will buy the next popular live streaming site.
There is already a lot of money in esports, so I'll go out on a limb here, and say that it's only a matter of time before it becomes mainstream.
But just watching someone else play Fallout 3? Talk about a lack of immersion. I don't get it...
I think it's just like any physical sport - having knowledge about a game and watching someone skilled play is interesting. People watch to learn and get better at something they find interesting. That said, watching someone play Fallout definitely isn't what gamers think of when you mention "eSports" - generally eSports refers to some level of competition, which is why real time strategy games and first person shooters are so popular - both require a lot of skill and knowledge of the game to be good at.
Getting back to the "Official Video Game Olympics" - there are actually some pretty serious competitions out there. Certain game developers have been known to self-host their own tournaments for millions of dollars in prizes (League of Legends and Call of Duty being two examples). There's also plenty of companies making a profitable business out of running these tournaments: ESL in Europe and Major League Gaming in the US being two of the bigger names out there right now. So in fact, the competition and prizes are very real, so anyone interested in a game may be interested in seeing who's going to win $1,000,000.
It's nice that I don't have to invest the time it takes to get up to speed to know what's going on if the commentary's good -- and it's a solid, mindless contrast to TV for me (which has been phenomenally engaging lately. it's impossible to read emails and watch house of cards, which isn't true for game streaming :D)
1. People like to see someone of a very high level play a game that they too play.
2. You often get to see someone playing a game that you never heard about. For instance: The recent speed running marathon streams have showed a lot of obscure and old games.
3. And most important: People are entertained by the commentary from the streamer.
If you just run a game with no commentary you will be hard pressed to get any viewers. It is more that with the younger generation games have become a huge part of culture and to see someone playing games you play as well and chatting give the viewer a social experience. There is chat too and the streamers often address people in chat. If you look at the most popular personalities on YouTube many of them are gaming related. People spend a lot of time playing today's very immersive, social, and large scale games so it follows that they can be entertained by personalities involved with them.
I'll often leave a stream on in the background at work, or watch someone playing while I'm rocking my son to sleep.
With video games its a bit similar. If you played the game or something similar before you can appreciate whats going on but otherwise you will be completely lost and everything feels pointless.
Competitive game players watch replays and streams to increase their level of play in e.g. RTSs, etc.
When players do watch a streamer play a single player game, it's usually because the game has recently been released, and they want to make an opinion on whether or not they should buy it. Or because they enjoy the streamer's personality and commentary. They're not watching Fallout 3, they're watching TotalBiscuit play Fallout 3.
It's not very fun watching someone play Fallout, but it's entertaining watching someone play Fallout role-playing as a homicidal maniac that uses nothing but his bare fists. The sheer difficulty is impressive, and if coupled with a talent for presentation/humor it can be a pretty fun time.
I don't really get it, but she came up with the idea and started doing it by herself. There must be some sort of attraction to this thing.
1. Sometimes you just want to veg out and watch something, not be an active participant. You can enjoy the game without putting in any effort.
2. There's a community aspect to it. In a single-player game like Fallout you get to see someone else enjoying and talking about what you enjoy, and you can interact with others who share the same interests.
3. Many of the people who stream are really good players. Almost no one reaches that level of play so for most people watching a streamer is the only way to experience it. They can also offer insights and help make you a better player.
It is kind of weird and not traditional... but it does make sense to a young'n like me.
I never understood how people could watch soccer/football and not get bored to death until the rise of esports. Now I often watch the league games for my favorite team and most of the world championship games.
What I find astonishing are Youtube "clip shows" on cable channels. These are "shows" where the hosts screen videos they found on Youtube and talk about them or rip them apart. I don['t get the appeal but apparently they fill the air time. Something which was a curated set of videos about a particular video game might actually have appeal to me, either from a shopping (I wonder if I would like it) to a mastery (I wonder what other people do at that stage) kind of thing. Not saying it would make money but I would be tempted to watch it. Some of the Eve commentary would make for an excellent show as well.
[1] - Blizzard however is doing what they can to make it unnecessary much to the demise of the 'fun' aspect.
Think of it this way: imagine if Kasparov and Fisher live streamed all of their chess practice, informal competition, and formal competition. Odds are chess fans would line up to watch.
It's just like that, but with strategic online games instead of strategic board games.
Also, some of the streamers are practically comedians, so they sometimes watch for general comedy and enjoyment as well. Or a mix.
Other way around, I think. Competitive video games ought to be called "competitive games," like chess. The whole "e-sport" label is stupid: "sport" has always meant a primarily physical competition, and competitive games of the sitting-down type--chess, checkers, Go, Scrabble, etc.--have been their own thing, with leagues and tournaments and titles, for decades or centuries before video games came around. Video games are more dependent on quick thinking and reflexes, but they're still primarily mental competition--see also speed chess, etc.
But competitive video gamers are too full of themselves to be happy rubbing shoulders with something as unhip as chess. They insist that they deserve the same (arguably equally undeserved) acclaim and money and fandom as sports, so they keep pushing the "e-sports" label and all the associated silly trappings and theatrics. After two decades of fruitless flailing, it seems like it might finally be about to stick, more's the pity.
When they play Minecraft, they make up their own commentary and they're dying to have their own show.
http://www.twitch.tv/giantwaffle is primarily a minecraft streamer, and he generally doesnt curse and explains what hes doing. Beware, he does do nightstreams with Lirik, including cussing. He'll announce these, though.
Single player / non-competitive games (such as your example, Fallout 3) are indeed much less exciting and get less viewers. There are also streamers that aren't very good at playing anything, but they're entertaining in one way or another and have built up a following that just watched them play whatever.
A stadium. For video games.
The barrier to entry is just so much lower for video games when compared to professional sports - nearly anyone can play and get good enough to compete against the pros without even leaving their house. Personally I prefer "real" sports over their virtual counterparts, but millions of people disagree with me - and that number will only continue to grow. I think eSports are going to grow dramatically over the next 5 years.
That's the only point. Not much of one.
The internet is a pretty big stadium.
NFL like status is not attainable so lets not say that this is the business plan. Yes the users can move somewhere else, but for gaming twitch is the de facto site for streaming right now. There has been talk of switching sites whenever some streamers get aggravated but it would have to be a huge failure to have people switch en masse.
It is also not easy to do live streaming. It uses massive amounts of bandwidth, and you have to keep this going live to people all over the world. Twitch is the YouTube of video game streaming at the moment and it would be hard to unseat them.
Keep in mind these are concurrent video viewers over the course of many hours. If you take video plays like Youtube does it measures in the many millions for a tournament like EVO.
I don't care about a random keyboard or video card advertisement. But what keyboard or video card your favorite streamer is using seem like a far more valuable ad to pursue. The NFL and others have a lot of branding. And merchandising among teams. YouTube can't get people to buy shirts or random things of random funny fading videos. But I think it'd be a lot more likely for many to buy something relateded to longer term Fandom
Look at Audible - they still have their own crufty website (which uses the same credentials as your Amazon site, sure) and discovery and reviews are less usable there than on Amazon.com.
Also see Goodreads, DPR and IMDB - all places where things have essentially gone on "as before".
Amazon could clone Twitch fairly easily (bandwidth is the limiting factor and Amazon happens to have gobs of it), but they still bought the Twitch brand. It would be a ridiculous waste to throw that in the trash.
Audiobooks (both Audible and physical CDs) are listed side-by-side other types of book media on Amazon.com. To pick a random example, if you look up Steel World by BV Larson: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FCXPC94/ - you'll see the paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible audio edition, and sometimes others.
Some titles have "Whispersync for Voice", which I think is an impressive type of integration. With those titles, you can sync your progress between the Audible and Kindle formats, so that you don't lose progress when switching from reading to listening. Additionally, when you own one format, the price of the other format drops substantially (if I recall, usually to a few dollars). I count that as a deep and sophisticated type of integration between the Kindle store and Audible.
Whether I visit the Amazon.com site or Audible depends on my motivation. If I want to find a good book, and I'm willing to either read or listen, then I'll hit Amazon. If I'm looking specifically for an audiobook, I'll hit Audible. Also, I think the Audible site might have been redone since you've last seen it. The home page doesn't look like what was around before the acquisition. I see a modern, Amazon-style product grid on audible.com when logged in. It's also integrating content from Amazon such as "Based on your Amazon and Kindle book purchases, we think you'll enjoy...". The Audible site to me looks like a curated window into Amazon.com now.
I'm on Twitch.tv more than ABC, NBC, CBS, etc for 8 months out of the year (football season excepted).
And I'm definitely not the only person who is like this.
No kids are leaving Twitch as long as it doesn't get rebranded. Amazon just needs to run it as a separate product.
You may be right, but you may be wrong. Twitch is in a similar sort of space as sports - which are the best kind of content generators (and content is king). Piracy is largely side-stepped because value is highest when it is LIVE. New content is always created by incumbents and new challengers, and there is tons of opportunity for marketing.
I don't know what the future holds, but E-Sports are here to stay. It'll only get bigger.
>Twitch obviously can't believe it's very close to reaching NFL-like status either or it wouldn't sell for a mere billion and change.
Why not? Superbowl has 100 million viewers. 200 million viewers for the total NFL season. I don't think those numbers are that impressive, when Facebook gets 800 million active users per day, on 1.3 billion active accounts and Youtube gets 4 billion views per day. In fact, NFL is pretty much done. There is only so much money you can squeeze out of North America, and nobody else cares about it.
>The users will all move to Hitbox.tv or any number of new sites that will pop up. It's easy to do live streaming, it's just expensive.
It's easy to do Youtube. It's easy to do Facebook. It's easy to do Instagram. It's easy to do WhatsApp. Now go do it and see how well you do.
I mean we already see the start of it with YouTube broadcasting Coachella, etc. More recently, Twitch has been used to stream gaming-related real life stuff, like the Dota 2 International 4 after-party DJ set. Conversely, the big media conglomorates are still wrestling with how to deliver content online and most just mirror your cable subscription to your device, rather than offer IP-exclusive methods of delivery.
I don't think Amazon is the best fit for Twitch - I personally would've preferred some company who is in the entertainment industry and more willing to start breaching into broadcasting live concerts, sport, big events, etc. on it. Valve, for example, already uses Twitch pretty heavily during their events and has shown interest to move outside of gaming (they sell non-gaming software via Steam) but they're probably also not mature enough to really start becoming a fully-fledged media company either. I don't really know of one company who is ideal in that space.
That said, I don't think Amazon is the worst either. It'll be intersting to see how they take it.
The entertainment industry is notoriously short-sighted and generally parasitic when it comes to technology. It's also an industry that is extremely image conscious. Having uncontrolled/unedited content that runs counter to their image is anathema. If any game publisher or old guard broadcasting company had gotten its hands on Twitch, I strongly believe it wouldn't have gone well.
Plus a lot of the people who are streaming there do links back to Amazon, Newegg, and similar, for the gear they use or want. I am curious if Amazon will put pressure on the streamers to limit links to non Amazon sites for goods.
Plus with private streams its entirely possible they may leverage it into a webex type business.
Worth pointing out that's a lot of money -- if it becomes a large cultural force, they'll still get credit, if there's more money on the table... some people don't care about the difference in numbers that huge. So this takes a lot of variability off the table at a fairly marginal cost (no second giant yacht, etc).
http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/24/googles-1b-purchase-of-twi...
The reporter doesn't sound very contrite: http://venturebeat.com/2014/08/25/amazon-could-steal-twitch-...
(That's also the case today, BTW.)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/08/25/amazon-pounce...
2) As Amazon enters the online advertising space to compete with Google Adwords and Adsense, they'll want to own web properties with high impressions for their display ads. User based video creation is great for that but comes with risk for copyright violations. Twitch solves both these issues as it'll give display ads high impressions without much concern about copyright violations as these will mostly be legit user-originated content.
Amazon is really hands-off with acquisitions for the most part such as Zappos and Audible. They primarily add to the offerings by cheaper fulfillment or server/bandwidth/cpu costs and more. I think they will treat twitch better than if it was just integrated into youtube.
Also, it shows a dedication to game developers and supporting marketing of games on their platforms and others. Amazon buying them is actually better for Twitch and the gaming/let's play type new marketing channels.
I wouldn't even be surprised if down the road they'd announce a Steam-like digital distribution thingymagick. Steam and it's competitors are rolling in cash and have been getting quite some flack recently so now might be the best time.
EA has the only competitor that comes close, but their tarnished reputation in the gaming community has sullied the only worthwhile adversary Steam has.
http://blog.twitch.tv/2014/08/a-letter-from-the-ceo-august-2...
For now, Amazon is selling physical copies, but seems reasonable to reuse their content delivery infrastructure for game downloads in the future.
What are you working on, Jeff?
Amazon also has a lot of tv shows and movies through Amazon Prime now. So they have something to do with video. Somewhat.
Edit: If you use Amazon Prime for video/audio content, I'm curious!
Or was that just a very strange anecdote about your person usage of their services?
For all we know you didn't use Prime Video because of any number of reasons, you had satellite internet, it didn't work right, you didn't like their content catalogue, you can't get the video in the right rooms, you didn't know it existed, et al.
"Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept"
Which is to say, it offers all the stuff you use Prime for.
Although the HBO content is tempting, and we do use it to watch Under the Dome as well.
I really wish they'd include Unlimited Kindle as part of Prime :-/
I also use Amazon Fire TV to watch television shows and movies. May are included with a Prime subscription, others can be rented or purchased. My impression is that Amazon's compression and overall performance is better than NetFlix and Hulu Plus.
Also watched all of star trek etc on there. A bunch of stuff.
It's not great, but it gets the job done.
In the past, I have purchased currently running seasons of shows that I don't get on cable, like Doctor Who, Top Gear, and Parks and Rec.
If you have an Amazon FireTV and been noticing all the game updates on it lately it seems they're pretty serious about being a cheap console for the living room.
Does anyone have statistics on whether FireTV is doing better with gaming that OUYA? Does anyone actually use the gaming features?
There was a two year period of time after the dotcom crash was over where they were beaten on pretty heavily about the lack of profitability.
It really doesn't matter if investors beat the drums frankly. Bezos controls enough of Amazon's stock - roughly three times the next largest investor - it would be difficult to spar with him, short of the stock truly plunging (something like a 75% drop from here might do it). The Bezos family controls roughly as much stock as the next five largest owners combined.
The correct answer is: so long as Amazon's sales continue to grow at ... 15% to 25% per year, and the losses do not become life threatening again, the drums will never get loud enough to disrupt what Bezos wants to do.
I expect with a $100b +/- market cap, Amazon can continue to function without much external concern for quite some time. $100b or so mostly keeps them out of range of someone trying to buy them, and will enable continued acquisitions as needed, while not bashing shareholders too much on the downside such that everyone turns against Bezos. I see no reason they can't maintain that perpetually with zero profits, if sales continue to grow, given the sales scale they're likely to reach in the next decade. They will be given a serious sales multiple so long as sales keep growing relatively quickly. Investors will focus on that and be placated by the kool-aid. When sales growth stops, investors will shift to demanding profits and dividends.
There would have to be some catastrophic setbacks, big losses, and a pause in sales growth, to force Bezos into changing his approach. I suspect at that point he would step aside and become just chairman.
However, keep in mind, Amazon would love to have a cash cow. They'd love nothing more than to print up $4 billion per year in profit from the fire phone, or from their new advertising initiative. So they can show profits, boom the stock, and perpetually run a tight margin business everywhere else.
In my opinion the answer to this question is whichever comes first of Jeff Bezos dying, amazon being the largest company in the world or amazon imploding and going broke.
As an experiment: Compare trying to get somebody from Google support on the phone vs. Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/Fire-TV-streaming-media-player/dp/B00C...
Note what Amazon Prime Streaming works on. Then go here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/video/ontv/devices
Note that aside from Apple's devices, Amazon Prime video works only on Amazon's own mobile hardware.
Is this why they're buying Twitch? To make it another "Amazon Exclusive" for Fire devices? Frankly that would explain a lot. If they can lock the content down it will force people into their ecosystem if they want mobile access.
If Amazon wanted a similar service to make exclusive to the Kindle ecosystem, it would make much more sense to grow one themselves with deep integration into the kindle line of products. They've done this with a lot of other products and services, and certainly have the capability.
With Twitch, it would seem to make more sense for them to continue to seek partnerships with gaming platforms so that the Twitch.tv brand is increasingly ubiquitous in gaming, and then use that as a relatively extrinsic source of growth.
I could see them locking out strategic players (hint: Google), and making certain events or content exclusive to the Kindle ecosystem, but locking everything down to Kindle doesn't strike me as a viable move.
Desktops, laptops, iPhone, iPad, iPod, TVs, Roku, PS3, PS4, XBox 360, XBox One, Wii, Wii U, Blu-ray players
None of the reporting outlets have any substantial details yet though.
Granted, that article is old, but I think a pretty serious investment in physical infrastructure has been made by Justin.tv/Twitch. So I'm more willing to believe they're still leveraging some variation of this architecture rather than AWS.
[http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/16/justintvs-live-vid...]
As mentioned, twitch is a very central part of esport community. But in the same time, it might not have enough credibility on "mainstream" startup world. I wonder if google was interested in twitch service more than twitch team.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/25/amazon-will-buy-twitch-for-...
Twitch has the potential to both compete in the same sentence as ESPN ($$$ bil) and provide a new model for content delivery in sports content consumption.
The deal could be announced as soon as Monday, the person said.
Google Inc. had earlier been in talks to acquire Twitch, but those talks cooled in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.
Twitch, launched in June 2011, is the most popular Internet destination for watching and broadcasting videogame play. The startup raised $20 million from investors, including Thrive Capital and videogame-maker Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. in September.
News of the acquisition was earlier reported by tech website The Information.
https://www.theinformation.com/Amazon-Nears-Deal-to-Acquire-...
Looks like it was started on Dec. 04, 2013 [1] and has been subscription-based from the beginning. $40/mo or $400/year seems like a lot of money... any indication that they break news before any other site?
I wouldn't put having a paywall against them. Capitalism will do the work.
The value prop isn't just breaking stories quicker than the next outlet, but we do happen to break a fair amount of news. For instance, we broke a story [1] last week that moved eBay's share price up by 4-6%. [2]
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/PayPal-s-Future-Still-in-Play
[2] http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=EBAY+Interactive#symbol=E...
Ever want to get around a WSJ paywall?
Simply copy and paste the article title into Google search and then click on the Google News link in the search results. Presto you are in.
Hypothetically, they limit the amount of stories you can read like this, but personally I have yet to hit this threshold, whatever it may be.
The full text can be obtained for free by searching for the article and clicking through to NYT from Google.
Imagine what our reaction will be if someone posts a link to their own blog which doesn't allow visitor to read the content without paying $1. Even if they have a work-around like you can inspect element and hide the paywall popup.
The whole point of this site is so I don't have to search, I just have to come here.
For the majority of readers here there is no news at the end of that link, just and advert for the WSJ's paywalled services. It's effectively spam for most of us.
This Google search link should do the trick.
Edit: this is only somewhat reliable...YMMV.
https://www.google.com/#q=site%3Awsj.com+%22Amazon+to+Buy+Vi...
The main issue with it is that it doesn't bode well with the requirement for original reporting. In this case, there are 4 sources of which I'm aware (The Information, WSJ, Bloomberg and Recode) who reported on this, and all of them were original reports. Even if The Information was first to press, they all conducted their reporting indepedently and the fact that four sources have the same information is very relevant. By linking to only one original report, you're depriving the average HN reader of knowledge of this journalistic consensus.
Even if the link had to be to an original report, it would make more sense to link to The Information, which is also paywalled, but was first to press. But really, I'd prefer the top HN link to be to a site like Ars Technica, which diligently compiled all the different reports.
Maybe this means I'm old now?
To use the obvious comparison: If I turn on the television and flip to a random channel and I'm not interested, does that mean TV as a whole is worthless?
I have since found other TV/movie streaming sites, but none are as mature or reliable as JTV was.
You may as well complain "I'm upset that the city bulldozed all of those crack houses; they were a really great place to buy crack."