Hacker News Reader

Comment by dewitt | Hacker News Reader

Apologies about the link to a restricted site. I didn't notice it since I landed on the article via a search.

Out of curiosity, since several comments here complained about the paywall ("paywalls are nsfl"), and an equal number or more on HN run adblockers and/or openly dislike ads in general (the whole "you are the product" meme), how do you think news sites should monetize?

Seems like newspapers still add value in our lives (I know the WSJ does for me), but if they don't find a way to make money, either through paid subscriptions or advertisements, they'll be out of business just as fast as RadioShack.

View on HN

I think there is a distinction to be made here.

Paywalls are fine. If you feel that the Wall Street Journal is worth your time and money then feel free to subscribe to it. But paywalls are a double edged sword. If the source requires people to subscribe to read it, then the vast majority of internet users wont have a chance to read it, and learns to avoid the site.

When you share a link in public forum and the link requires a subscription to read it, that means most readers wont have a chance to enjoy the content and they feel frustrated.

You can usually find an article about the same topic on a public site. The manner the topic is covered, the depth of the article, the quality of the coverage might be different but it will give the general public an idea about what it is all about.

As far as ads and ad blockers. Tivo and tivo like devices are pretty common now that you can skip over tv commercials. I think its the same with web based ad blockers. The truth is that the majority of people who use these things would not have had a positive response to the ad in the first place.

What does happen, both on tv and on the web, is that product placements in the content itself becomes more and more common.

Remember TimesSelect? [1]

Search Engine Land has an excellent write-up on the debate so far.[2]

There are no clear answers but I for one just hate the notion of a single individual businessman - American or otherwise - owning a sizable interest in America's preeminent newspaper.[3] It isn't healthy to the voice of the publication, in the long run.

[1] TimesSelect

http://www.nytimes.com/marketing/ts/ http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/lettertoreaders.html

[2] The Leaky New York Times Paywall & How “Google Limits” Led To “Search Engine Limits”

http://searchengineland.com/leaky-new-york-times-paywall-goo...

[3] Carlos Slim Becomes Largest Individual New York Times Shareholder

http://www.wsj.com/articles/carlos-slim-exercises-new-york-t...

> Out of curiosity, since several comments here complained about the paywall ("paywalls are nsfl"), and an equal number or more on HN run adblockers and/or openly dislike ads in general (the whole "you are the product" meme), how do you think newspapers should monetize?

I adblock aggressively, and I don't think it's my capitalist duty to watch ads for products in order to create wants for products I don't need.[1] I'm very bothered by the idea of being "nice" to a site by watching ads. I don't want to help a site by watching ads; that's supposed to help a third party by creating a need in me to buy something, not the website I actually care about. I much prefer cut-and-dry paywalls or donation buttons.

Thus, I'm fine with newspapers having paywalls. If that's what sells, let them paywall everything. It's their prerogative. However, there are also plenty of unpaywalled sources. At the moment, most news can be obtained from the web without paying, and I doubt that this will change. I don't have a solution for the news industry, but guilting me into watching ads will never work.

Paywalls for academic journals are an entirely different problem, since in many cases the journal "editors" are in fact rather parisitic and contribute nothing but prestige, while the actual work is done by others and is unpaid. Those paywalls are terrible. But you made something and you don't want me to see it until I pay? That's fine.

[1] And I almost never "need" anything. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." If I need something, I'll know it. I don't need ads to tell me what to need. I therefore find the entire premise behind advertising pernicious. Only when I want to buy something, I'll look at ads, so until I actually have a need or want to buy something, don't shove ads down my throat or guilt me into watching them.

It is interesting to interpret not using adblock as capitalist duty. I see it more as a way to respect the terms of the content producer. "But the page is bloated and unusable with ads". Then refuse the contract. Use another service.

Inventing your own terms about the cost of something produced by someone else is never ok.

"guilting me into watching ads will never work". It is great that you accept your own behavior. That doesn't make it right.

> It is interesting to interpret not using adblock as capitalist duty. I see it more as a way to respect the terms of the content producer.

The author has no lordship over my computer or my mailbox. I can toss out junk mail. I can even more easily program my computer to toss out ads. Programmability is a very natural feature of a computer, so why not use it? My home, my computer, my rules.

If you make it more difficult for me to remove ads, then yes, I will eventually stop getting anything from you at all. I'm fine with this arms race. If you want to make your ads so obnoxious as to make them very difficult to ignore, then I'm fine with ignoring all of you.

I will never be fine with having consumerism forcibly shoved down my throat. As long as I can program my computer to ignore ads, we can enjoy an uneasy armistice. If you give me a donation or subscription button for your website or service, we can both be much happier.

Be sure that this arm race is happening. How do you find the overall quality of web media today? Are you satisfied?

As a business, once you realize that 1% of your users are watching ads, what are you going to do? You can either go for a paywall, integrate sponsored content provided as articles, or aim at the less tech savy internet users with click-bait articles.

So what is your solution? You seem satisfied with the current trend of poor quality articles and businesses slowly going bankrupt while this "uneasy armistice" lasts. Why would you be at war with those websites anyway?

> As a business, once you realize that 1% of your users are watching ads, what are you going to do?

A paywall seems like a fine solution.

Manipulating people into wanting things they don't need is not.

This reasoning falls apart pretty quickly when you take into account that you are adblocking content you specifically requested. Effectively, your justifications are the same as those who pirate media, "Give me your content, but I don't feel I should have to pay for it." Pretending there is a difference is a bit dishonest, in my opinion.

I'm fine with paying for things. I mentioned donation buttons and paywalls. I'm not fine with making my computer do things I do not want it to do or forcing me to watch things I do not need to see.

Are you claiming that someone or something is forcing you to visit certain websites?

Don't be disingenous. I'm saying that when I merely visit certain websites, they try to manipulate my computer to do or display things certain things I may not agree to. They try to make my computer run certain code that doesn't suit well with me or make my browser show images or text I don't want to see.

I consider unsolicited advertising pernicious and inherently morally wrong. Manipulating people into buying things they don't need creates an awful consumerist society of people who spend their lives acquiring junk that doesn't make them happy. I have never asked to be advertised to most things that are being addressed to me. I don't think this means I should ostracise myself from society when I can just adblock.

More superficially, if I decided to change font faces or sizes on some website, would you say I've breached a certain social contract of how the website author decided I should see that website? Am I robbing them of their artistic integrity by not honouring their font choices? If I think advertising is pernicious, and in fact react negatively and with anger to most advertising, am I doing them a horrible disfavour by changing the page to not show those ads?

I don't think I am. Once the bytes arrive on my computer, I should have the right to display those bytes in whatever form suits me. I hate ads and savage consumerism so much, that it's really in everyone's best interest if I don't see them.

I understand this thinking, but everyone who believes they should be able to get their content for free without ads will soon find themselves out of sites to visit due to them not being able to sustain themselves.

I'm not sure why people think they should be able to get no-ad sites for free, I get it, but you should understand the repercussions of thinking this way.

Probably because that's the way the Internet worked before the Big Media companies infested it and started the process of turning into Cable TV 2.0.

Not really.

I'd love to know how a high traffic site is supposed to sustain itself with millions of hits every month without advertising if the site itself is free and the users would otherwise scoff at paying? If it were an easy fix it would be happening already.

It's offensive for you to place your opinion in the context of "right and wrong", specifically that your opinion is "right".

If content owners want to block adblocker: They can! They absolutely can use javascript to detect ad-blockers and prevent the majority of all of them from visiting the site unless the adblock is disabled.

Sites like Hulu.com use anti-adblock to ensure that their terms are met and that users view advertisements or are barred from content.

Instead of making a moral argument against the legal and acceptable use of browser extensions, you should be examining the business decisions that lead to intentionally and strategically choosing to NOT BLOCK users who use adblock.

"Inventing your own terms about the cost of something produced by someone else is never ok."

I totally agree, which is why I question your invented ethical cost regarding browser extensions and advertisements.

Their terms are clear, and if they want to block certain users, they are free to do that. You don't need to invent some silly ethical argument where none needs to exist. If adblocking was against the law (like, say, shoplifting) then your argument would have merit. But it's not.

Your argument is similar, in my view, to saying "it's unethical to go to Best Buy to window shop and later purchase on a website. You should respect the terms and businesses intentions of a brick and mortar store and pay extra since you walked in the door".

I agree with about when you say that businesses should not ignore the fact that adblock is wildy used when making decisions.

Imagine now that if a working drm solution existed for films, it would be ok to download the unprotected ones for free? Surely a technical solution is way of making a business profitable, but not an argument to justify a bad behavior.

And yes, even if moral is irrelevant to businesses, it is still something worth considering as individuals.

"Imagine now that if a working drm solution existed for films, it would be ok to download the unprotected ones for free? Surely a technical solution is way of making a business profitable, but not an argument to justify a bad behavior."

Apples and Oranges.

If the movie studio offered an officially hosted version of the movie with advertisements for free online, and I watched without advertisements on their official site (similar to a news organization posting their news online for free, with ads), then yes it's ok. They can (and do! See: Crackle) block that particular behavior from working very simply.

But, to go pirate a movie from a third source? That's not only wrong it's actually illegal.

I don't go to "thenewsbay" and download illegal copies of the New York Times, so it's unfair to make a comparison to pirated movies.

I find it disheartening that the common talk of ads is so distanced from the original social justification for ads: to educate and inform consumers. Primarily, to help ensure that the economy engages in the proper degree of competition.

Unfortunately, ads are so full of misinformation and propaganda that there is no hope to be informed by them, so they do not help with the original goal: the very thing that makes them acceptable practice. An advertisement should inform and educate -- something that increasingly requires communication _without bias_ (how radical!)

Since I use ddg, I can put this in my addr/search bar:

!gn site:wsj.com "RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing"

which brings me to this:

http://news.google.com/news/search?tbm=nws&q=site%3Awsj.com%...

Perhaps for sites that allow this (NYT and WSJ come to mind), it should become part of HN culture to just post links in the second form (the google news link).

Otherwise, I'm sure many people here are capable of creating a bookmarklet that does the above directly from an HN page. I just do the manual op that I described above, it's not that onerous or that often. But I'm rarely reading from a phone either.

This bookmarklet seems to work in the few cases I tested: javascript:var as = document.getElementsByTagName("a");searchurl=as[12].protocol +"//"+ as[12].hostname + as[12].pathname;location.href='http://google.com/search?q='+searchurl

If you click it from a HN comments page, it will Google the story's url. For NYT and WSJ, clicking on the story from the Google results should get you in without the paywall. I have only tested this in Firefox. If anyone has improvements to the bookmarklet, please post it.

Hey, not bad. I just tried it for a bbc.com story and it showed up on search.

Maybe this javascript thing will catch on.

I don't disagree with paywalls generally, but I don't think paywalled content should be (intentionally) linked as the main subject on HN or similar unless that is the only good source of information about the matter in hand. It stops us masses actually reading what you have posted for us to read.

If all the non-paywalled sources are lacking detail, then I'd suggest using one of them for the main link and add a "more detail <here> behind the paywall" comment immediately below.

Obnoxious advertising (pop-ups, auto playing audio, ...) is universally bad though and should not be linked to at all if avoidable. I'd prefer a paywalled source to one that uses obnoxious ads/trackers/other.

> I don't think paywalled content should be (intentionally) linked as the main subject on HN or similar unless that is the only good source of information about the matter in hand.

I think a fair expectation is that if you're going to post a link to a paywalled site, you should add a brief summary of the article as a comment. (Kind of like a companion to tl;dr, only in this case, it's te;dr, for "too expensive; didn't read.")

Usually a good paywalled article will at least present an abstract, which should cover the need for a summary.

If it is an absolute paywall (pay or read nothing, no abstract/summary for free) then yes the poster should provide a summary so others can decide if they want to gain access to the rest or not.

I think paywalls are reasonable good way (from consumer point of view) to bring in money, although I realize that it probably would mean scaling down for many major publications. The LWN model might be the ideal balance point; recent items are subscriber-only, older stuff is free. That should work even better for WSJ style publication where I'd assume most people are more interested in breaking news rather than week old stuff.

I can understand where the anti-paywall sentiment stems from. We have been conditioned for over an decade to get free news from web. Meanwhile piratism has become mainstream and anti-copyright movement has grown, both which have changed peoples ways of thinking about value of information etc. Some might also think paywalls to be exploitative bait-and-switch tactic, which admittedly might be true in some cases.

Of course there is stark difference between supporting paywalls as a concept, and supporting posting links to paywalled content to places like HN (or reddit or /. etc), because you are kinda doing some "viral" marketing for the publication and dividing the community to those who subscribe and those who do not. That will inherently limit the communitys ability to discuss the content.

Complete aside, but I just did a google search for "site:news.ycombinator.com lwn.net" and filtered to "this past week" to make a comment similar to yours, and Google found your comment, which is 24 minutes old right now. I'm pretty jaded with internet search, but frankly I'm astounded (Although I might have just gotten lucky with the spider).

> how do you think newspapers should monetize?

Idea I had is to flip the model. Newspapers pay readers, who for payment agree to see ads tailored to their interests. Users are given short quizzes after article to prove they actually read. Fail, and they don't get paid.

I can't imagine how that could fail!

write an article about it. and please don't call online news vendors the papers

WSJ and NYT are the papers even if you're reading them online, because they literally are newspapers in real life.

People who use adblock are just entitled. They are manipulating the tragedy of the commons and then absolving themselves of any responsibility.

They'll defend their right to use adblock militantly and then go pirate a game using the same defense. It's a personal moral defense rather than a logical justification.

Or, you know, we just don't want to have to deal with bad ads cluttering up our content, or ads that spy on and track us, or ads that start playing sound for no apparent reason, or ads that break our browsers.

Yeah, no, on second thought--it's probably that we're actually pirates. That's a much more obvious answer.

This isn't a rebuttal against the tragedy of the commons argument. Commercial fisherman "just don't want to have to deal with" catching less fish, but overfishing is still a problem.

If I put a bowl of M&Ms out on my front lawn, and then complain that nobody else refills it from time to time, is that the tragedy of the commons, or me just being a fool?

I would gladly fill your bowl with m and ms.

pretty terrible analogy.

there's no point at which you putting M&Ms on your lawn can be self-sustaining. Both professional journalism and fish populations CAN be self-sustaining (from the perspective of individual consumers).

Also, even if your analogy did make sense, the end result would be no more M&Ms (aka no more professional journalism). That's the outcome we're trying to avoid.

IMHO ad blocking is good security practice. There have and continue to be plenty of instances of malware being served up via ad networks. "Malvertising" even has its own Wikipedia page.

I'm not even so opposed to ads. I resent and avoid being followed and targeted mercilessly and stupidly[1].

[1] - Seeing and increase in ads for lawn mowers after purchasing a lawn mower, as if I needed another one.

>They are manipulating the tragedy of the commons and then absolving themselves of any responsibility.

The tragedy of the commons is entirely about that lack of responsibility. This is why we try to use social structure in lieu of 'free for all' decision-making.

A. If you think vehemently defending adblock is 'militant', grow up.

B. Using adblock has nothing to do with pirating games.

Make better ads. People might want to see them. Don't be so repetitive, abrasive, deceptive, obnoxious, etc. (Google made quite a lot of money by offering text-only ads, if you'll remember.)

You can't make a completely useless and shitty product and demand that people eat it, either. Talk about 'entitled'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com