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Comment by kyllo | Hacker News Reader

And she was getting a bit frustrated and worried — that by clicking on something, she was going to install malware or not be able to return to her story.

This is how the news site makes their money and the reason why it's free to view the articles. Betty needs to purchase a subscription to view articles ad-free (if the sites she browses offer it)

Although, one potential option for someone like Betty is SmartNews https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.gocro.smart... That app offers a "SmartView" which scrapes the news sites they link to and provides text-only versions of the articles.

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News sites that offer paid subscriptions, in the main, still show ads to paying users, in much the same way that when you subscribe to a print newspaper or magazine it shows up with ads in it as well.

The reason is the same as in print: ad revenues generally bring in much more than subscriptions do. Here's some data for the newspaper business, for instance: http://ajr.org/2014/02/27/big-shift-reliance-reader-payments... You can see how even with the collapse of newspaper advertising over the last decade, ad revenue is still generally somewhere from 50-70% of overall revenue. So ad revenue is critical, even for subscription pubs.

This is even more true online, because if you make your publication ad-free for subscription users, you're cutting the ads off from the eyeballs the advertisers want most -- the eyeballs of engaged, frequent readers/viewers/whatever, since those are the very people who care enough to buy subscriptions. So doing so drives down the overall value of advertising in your publication.

    > The reason is the same as in print: ad revenues
    > generally bring in much more than subscriptions do

If that's true, wouldn't it be better to not have subscriptions to improve viewership?

"Betty needs to purchase a subscription..."

Now Betty needs to "login" to her news site every time in order to disable the ads (not to mention pay, and renew service each term) I don't think that will improve the process, and it ad more steps with potentially confusing instruction to her process. Even if the site was able to store along term cookie for Betty, I doubt the sublt difference between versions would do much as there is typically a lot of other "junk" (around the article) that can distract the user.

It's even worse than that: not only does she need to login, she needs to remember a separate username and password for each site (which, good luck), or she needs to use a password manager. And if she uses a password manager, she needs to know how to select a usable/secure one, load her passwords into it, integrate it with her browser, sync it across all her devices, keep its contents secure... which, good luck.

In practice, of course, Betty will do neither of these things; she'll just use the same username and password everywhere. So then it's just a matter of time until a hack on one of the sites she visits opens her up to all kinds of new problems.

Username/password authentication is so, so utterly broken.

Agreed. OAuth isn't a whole lot better and has it's own cons. I have seen SQRL (https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm) but not being much of an encryption expert couldn't say how secure it is, and it doesn't seem to be gaining any adoption. But it is at least a novel approach.

Also, don't most news sites with subscriptions still show adds to subscribers?

Pretty much this. Paid placements in the article are the only tolerable ads on mobile. I used to build news sites for a living, the whole ecosystem runs on the fact that there are users who will click anything. It's dirty, and I liken it to making money by selling free trials that people forget to cancel. Which is why I stopped doing it.

I don't think it's so much that Betty need to buy a subscription, most people just aren't willing to do that, they would rather just deal with ad filled pages. How many people for example pay for gmail? Same problem.

The main issue is how do news websites make money? Other than spamming us with ads, which itself has low ROI, no news website has been able to figure a good solution. And if you point to sites like NY Times, ask yourself first if they are really succeeding if they also didn't spam us with ads too...

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