3 ms·
The thing is the paper makes so much money from print advertising that to them it is cheaper to print and deliver papers. It's the old trope people like to reci
by jdavis703 11y ago
The thing is the paper makes so much money from print advertising that to them it is cheaper to print and deliver papers. It's the old trope people like to recite about social media companies that "you're the product being sold to advertisers." For a variety of reasons your eyeballs are far less valuable online.
- a3n 11y agoIndeed. It's why local papers deliver papers to households that don't even subscribe. It ups the "readership" (which in many cases is really the "throwawayership"), and they can con ad buyers into higher prices. Similar is phone books. I used to live in an apartment building where phone books would be dropped in front of your door at least annually (maybe more, there are more than one phone book company). Residents would passive-aggressively leave them out there on the walk, and maintenance would eventually pick them up. I hadn't had a land line for years, and I got one like all the other residents. But the phone book company can then claim "readership" and sell ads. And now we block ads on the last place where ads can reach us. Ads may survive as a revenue source, but it's going to have to change in some way that most of us can't even imagine. And it's going to have to change for "our" benefit, because we've gotten very used to controlling that stream.