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The Washington Post and the New York Times both seem to have excellent engineering teams and both of their websites are in my opinion some of the best news site

by n0us 11y ago

The Washington Post and the New York Times both seem to have excellent engineering teams and both of their websites are in my opinion some of the best news sites that I've seen on the web. (Vox is also very nice in my opinion though they do not have ssl support apparently) I would gladly pay a netflix-like subscription that gives me a "pass" to top news sites with no advertising. I just don't want to manage a dozen subscriptions to sites and it's difficult to choose between the different options that they offer like "tablet, web, paper" "web, paper" "tablet only" etc. Just take the difficulty away and give me access to the content in whatever format I want, with an addon fee for print delivery.

acdha 11y ago
One problem is that the traditional print model is heavily subsidized by advertising – for both the Washington Post and New York Times, it's actually cheaper to get a print subscription which comes with free all-device digital access than it is to buy any combination of digital for more than a single device. (If the ecological cost of all of that unread paper bothers you, you can put in long-duration vacation stops or, in the case of the NYT, have your paper copy sent to a school instead)
- thetmkay 11y ago
  I personally don't see print media going extinct (books certainly didn't) but I'd hypothesise that availability and convenience is more important than price for the average NYT reader.
  - acdha 11y ago
    I think this is complicated by perceived fairness: normal people do not view different formats as separate products and even people who aren't particularly price sensitive will bristle at something which they see as unfair. Since there's no way to buy an ad-free copy of the NYT, all of their existing customers have been trained to think of the fair price as what a paper subscription costs with little thought about how much of that is subsidized by advertisers. Even high-income people are sensitive to these effects – Doc Searls wrote about a similar problem where the New Yorker's intro pricing made him feel like he was being ripped off, even though I'm certain the cost isn't a noticeable financial issue for him: https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2015/05/23/dear-magazines-please-quit-screwing-veteran-subscribers/ https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2015/05/23/dear-magazines-...
benten10 11y ago
I said this on HN yesterday, but I'll repeat again since it's VERY relevant. I'd like the subscription, as you mention too! What I'd like even more (for voluntary payment) is a subscription that divvies up my monthly 'budget' according to the % of the time I spent on different sites. Say I spend 50% of my browsing time on Nytimes, 30% on HN and 20% on New Yorker, and my monthly allocated budget is $20. Then NYT gets $10, HN gets $6, NYer $4, etc. Or perhaps, a monthly budget where the money is deducted for subscription sites, per article/time whatever. Once my budget is finished, I see 'normal' web like everyone else does. I don't really care about ads, but maybe people who don't want to see ads could pay like, 2x as much, etc. There doesn't seem to be a lot of innovation in this field. Perhaps it's the difficulty of integrating everything in one place? Edit after reading the comments: Google contributor just removes ads instead of getting you 'special pass' right? Do the site owners get paid for the 'eyeballs' from the subscribers?
- npongratz 11y ago
  Sounds nice in theory, but I'd be concerned about having my reading habits tracked by yet another Central Scrutinizer. I already block ads mainly to avoid creepy and invasive behavior by the ad networks, as well as the malware that seeps through said networks. I am not going to opt-in to mass surveillance.
  - thetmkay 11y ago
    It doesn't have to be. Assume registration includes specifying a list of "preferred publishers" (like what aggregated news apps ask on sign up in order to curate your feed) Add a client side tracker (i.e. browser plugin) with the ability to track the page views on each site. One of three options: 1) no tracking - split the distribution evenly among your preferred sites 2) offline/batch tracking - at the end of the month, submit an aggregated percentage breakdown of your sites 3) online tracking - sent to the server in real time (i.e. Central scrutiniser) And if you're really particular about tracking, it could just be an API, and you can write to it whatever data you want to share.
  - goodplay 11y ago
    Why do you assume it must be an external, centralized service? why not a browser plugin that you plug in your paypal email into?
chiph 11y ago
A paywall subscription consolidator would indeed be a nice thing to have. Not sure the newspapers would give up their subscriber contact info to a 3rd party though, without some strong guarantees of privacy and continued access for internal purposes.
- thetmkay 11y ago
  Check out Blendle[0] - Dutch company moving to the US soon[1] (launched in Netherlands and Germany). Can't vouch for it myself but was on HN yesterday. [0]https://launch.blendle.com https://launch.blendle.com [1]http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/12/micropayment-platform-blendle-will-launch-a-us-beta-in-early-2016/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/12/micropayment-platform-blend...
  - diakritikal 11y ago
    I work for a UK publisher with paywall sites. We hear (unverified) reports that micropayment revenue from Blendle is extremely lacklustre...
chris_va 11y ago
> I would gladly pay a netflix-like subscription that gives me a "pass" to top news sites with no advertising. This has been tried without much adoption (e.g. https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/). Really the problem is that newspapers make very little online, even with high numbers of ads, compared to print. It isn't cost effective to run an online-only newspaper (with all of the extraneous costs that go into producing "news", and not "blogs"). Thus, they have a strong incentive to crazy subscription models instead of streamlining everything.
- dev1n 11y ago
  Could HN be considered an online-only newspaper? It covers a lot of stuff.
  - bgilroy26 11y ago
    From a reader's point of view it is. On the production side, HN differs greatly as newspapers have traditionally had direct relationships with their content contributors
  - chris_va 11y ago
    HN is strictly an aggregator, which is about 3-4 orders of magnitude cheaper to operate.
- iza 11y ago
  Google Contributor has a few major problems: - 5-50% fewer ads isn't good enough, it needs to remove all ads. - It's too expensive. There is no way my ad impressions add up to $10 a month. - How is the money divided? How big is Google's cut? Needs to be clarified, ideally made user-configurable.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    > - 5-50% fewer ads isn't good enough, it needs to remove all ads. And the space where those ads would have appeared, as well.
jrcii 11y ago
I have to disable JavaScript for NYT, every time I click or double click words in an article (I'm copying and pasting to reference things myself, thanks very much NYT!) they hijack my clicks and change the font size or switch articles.
johansch 11y ago
I think the fundamental problem is that these companies would want to own the customer relationship, rather than simply be a branded content provider for some pay in someone else's solution.
harryh 11y ago
Do you like the fact that when you pay for cable you get a bunch of channels you never watch?
eli 11y ago
I've posted about this before, but charging people to remove ads is a difficult business proposition. It disproportionately devalues the remaining ad impressions. Advertisers aren't likely to pay much to reach the people who are, almost by definition, either too cheap to buy a pass or not invested enough in the site to care. It also creates dangerous incentives: the site will make more short-term revenue in proportion to how annoying the ads are, and the core readers won't even see them to complain. In practice, I think you'd be limited to selling network ads, which don't pay very much and rely on tracking users and building profiles to serve them targeted ads.
- doktrin 11y ago
  > Advertisers aren't likely to pay much to reach the people who are, almost by definition, either too cheap to buy a pass or not invested enough in the site to care Are you speaking from experience and/or data, or based on logical reasoning? I'm honestly curious, so I hope this doesn't come across as a digital call-out of some kind. To elaborate, I feel like a lot of people don't pay for news, or written content, because they expect (and can get it) for free. That doesn't mean they're not good potential widget customers. I'm curious as to what kind of inferences advertisers make / have made about users based on their specific spending patterns. For example, while I'm sure that generally speaking someone who pays for service X may be more likely than average to pay for service Y, I would also expect that variance to grow or shrink a lot depending on the specific circumstances.
  - eli 11y ago
    I haven't specifically tried that exact approach, but I have a fair bit of experience with ad-supported news sites. > I feel like a lot of people don't pay for news ... That doesn't mean they're not good potential widget customers. I'm having a hard time thinking of any advertiser who would be happy about excluding the sort of dedicated reader who is willing to pay for content online. I'm not saying the remaining ad impressions are "bad" just that they are objectively less valuable. That's why this scheme disproportionately devalues ad impressions: you remove the direct impressions from people who buy a pass and you also make the remaining impressions less valuable. Look at how washingtonpost.com positions itself to advertisers: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/mediacenter/html/ad_washingtonpost.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/mediacenter/html/ad_was... and then imagine how much harder it would be to buy into that story if it excluded many wealthy and loyal readers.
andyv88 11y ago
I think news paywalls need to be bundled in not with other newspapers but other subscription services. I'd kill for a Netflix/Spotify/choose-your-newspaper all in one bundle.
manigandham 11y ago
Just to list some ways that advertising is better than subscriptions: - Free, obviously - No willpower/decision required - Faster (due to no decision as above) - More equal access (as wealth/income don't determine how much content you get) - Anonymous (yes more than payments which come with your cc number, address, etc) I do think online ad formats have gotten worse but the model itself works. It's the implementation that needs a severe restructuring today and is finally in progress due to the growing consumer power through adblocking.

by n0us 11y ago

acdha 11y ago

One problem is that the traditional print model is heavily subsidized by advertising – for both the Washington Post and New York Times, it's actually cheaper to get a print subscription which comes with free all-device digital access than it is to buy any combination of digital for more than a single device. (If the ecological cost of all of that unread paper bothers you, you can put in long-duration vacation stops or, in the case of the NYT, have your paper copy sent to a school instead)

thetmkay 11y ago
I personally don't see print media going extinct (books certainly didn't) but I'd hypothesise that availability and convenience is more important than price for the average NYT reader.
- acdha 11y ago
  I think this is complicated by perceived fairness: normal people do not view different formats as separate products and even people who aren't particularly price sensitive will bristle at something which they see as unfair. Since there's no way to buy an ad-free copy of the NYT, all of their existing customers have been trained to think of the fair price as what a paper subscription costs with little thought about how much of that is subsidized by advertisers. Even high-income people are sensitive to these effects – Doc Searls wrote about a similar problem where the New Yorker's intro pricing made him feel like he was being ripped off, even though I'm certain the cost isn't a noticeable financial issue for him: https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2015/05/23/dear-magazines-please-quit-screwing-veteran-subscribers/ https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2015/05/23/dear-magazines-...

benten10 11y ago

I said this on HN yesterday, but I'll repeat again since it's VERY relevant. I'd like the subscription, as you mention too! What I'd like even more (for voluntary payment) is a subscription that divvies up my monthly 'budget' according to the % of the time I spent on different sites. Say I spend 50% of my browsing time on Nytimes, 30% on HN and 20% on New Yorker, and my monthly allocated budget is $20. Then NYT gets $10, HN gets $6, NYer $4, etc. Or perhaps, a monthly budget where the money is deducted for subscription sites, per article/time whatever. Once my budget is finished, I see 'normal' web like everyone else does. I don't really care about ads, but maybe people who don't want to see ads could pay like, 2x as much, etc. There doesn't seem to be a lot of innovation in this field. Perhaps it's the difficulty of integrating everything in one place? Edit after reading the comments: Google contributor just removes ads instead of getting you 'special pass' right? Do the site owners get paid for the 'eyeballs' from the subscribers?

npongratz 11y ago
Sounds nice in theory, but I'd be concerned about having my reading habits tracked by yet another Central Scrutinizer. I already block ads mainly to avoid creepy and invasive behavior by the ad networks, as well as the malware that seeps through said networks. I am not going to opt-in to mass surveillance.
- thetmkay 11y ago
  It doesn't have to be. Assume registration includes specifying a list of "preferred publishers" (like what aggregated news apps ask on sign up in order to curate your feed) Add a client side tracker (i.e. browser plugin) with the ability to track the page views on each site. One of three options: 1) no tracking - split the distribution evenly among your preferred sites 2) offline/batch tracking - at the end of the month, submit an aggregated percentage breakdown of your sites 3) online tracking - sent to the server in real time (i.e. Central scrutiniser) And if you're really particular about tracking, it could just be an API, and you can write to it whatever data you want to share.
- goodplay 11y ago
  Why do you assume it must be an external, centralized service? why not a browser plugin that you plug in your paypal email into?

chiph 11y ago

A paywall subscription consolidator would indeed be a nice thing to have. Not sure the newspapers would give up their subscriber contact info to a 3rd party though, without some strong guarantees of privacy and continued access for internal purposes.

thetmkay 11y ago
Check out Blendle[0] - Dutch company moving to the US soon[1] (launched in Netherlands and Germany). Can't vouch for it myself but was on HN yesterday. [0]https://launch.blendle.com https://launch.blendle.com [1]http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/12/micropayment-platform-blendle-will-launch-a-us-beta-in-early-2016/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/12/micropayment-platform-blend...
- diakritikal 11y ago
  I work for a UK publisher with paywall sites. We hear (unverified) reports that micropayment revenue from Blendle is extremely lacklustre...

chris_va 11y ago

> I would gladly pay a netflix-like subscription that gives me a "pass" to top news sites with no advertising. This has been tried without much adoption (e.g. https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/). Really the problem is that newspapers make very little online, even with high numbers of ads, compared to print. It isn't cost effective to run an online-only newspaper (with all of the extraneous costs that go into producing "news", and not "blogs"). Thus, they have a strong incentive to crazy subscription models instead of streamlining everything.

dev1n 11y ago
Could HN be considered an online-only newspaper? It covers a lot of stuff.
- bgilroy26 11y ago
  From a reader's point of view it is. On the production side, HN differs greatly as newspapers have traditionally had direct relationships with their content contributors
- chris_va 11y ago
  HN is strictly an aggregator, which is about 3-4 orders of magnitude cheaper to operate.
iza 11y ago
Google Contributor has a few major problems: - 5-50% fewer ads isn't good enough, it needs to remove all ads. - It's too expensive. There is no way my ad impressions add up to $10 a month. - How is the money divided? How big is Google's cut? Needs to be clarified, ideally made user-configurable.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > - 5-50% fewer ads isn't good enough, it needs to remove all ads. And the space where those ads would have appeared, as well.

jrcii 11y ago

I have to disable JavaScript for NYT, every time I click or double click words in an article (I'm copying and pasting to reference things myself, thanks very much NYT!) they hijack my clicks and change the font size or switch articles.

johansch 11y ago

I think the fundamental problem is that these companies would want to own the customer relationship, rather than simply be a branded content provider for some pay in someone else's solution.

harryh 11y ago

Do you like the fact that when you pay for cable you get a bunch of channels you never watch?

eli 11y ago

I've posted about this before, but charging people to remove ads is a difficult business proposition. It disproportionately devalues the remaining ad impressions. Advertisers aren't likely to pay much to reach the people who are, almost by definition, either too cheap to buy a pass or not invested enough in the site to care. It also creates dangerous incentives: the site will make more short-term revenue in proportion to how annoying the ads are, and the core readers won't even see them to complain. In practice, I think you'd be limited to selling network ads, which don't pay very much and rely on tracking users and building profiles to serve them targeted ads.

doktrin 11y ago
> Advertisers aren't likely to pay much to reach the people who are, almost by definition, either too cheap to buy a pass or not invested enough in the site to care Are you speaking from experience and/or data, or based on logical reasoning? I'm honestly curious, so I hope this doesn't come across as a digital call-out of some kind. To elaborate, I feel like a lot of people don't pay for news, or written content, because they expect (and can get it) for free. That doesn't mean they're not good potential widget customers. I'm curious as to what kind of inferences advertisers make / have made about users based on their specific spending patterns. For example, while I'm sure that generally speaking someone who pays for service X may be more likely than average to pay for service Y, I would also expect that variance to grow or shrink a lot depending on the specific circumstances.
- eli 11y ago
  I haven't specifically tried that exact approach, but I have a fair bit of experience with ad-supported news sites. > I feel like a lot of people don't pay for news ... That doesn't mean they're not good potential widget customers. I'm having a hard time thinking of any advertiser who would be happy about excluding the sort of dedicated reader who is willing to pay for content online. I'm not saying the remaining ad impressions are "bad" just that they are objectively less valuable. That's why this scheme disproportionately devalues ad impressions: you remove the direct impressions from people who buy a pass and you also make the remaining impressions less valuable. Look at how washingtonpost.com positions itself to advertisers: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/mediacenter/html/ad_washingtonpost.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/mediacenter/html/ad_was... and then imagine how much harder it would be to buy into that story if it excluded many wealthy and loyal readers.

andyv88 11y ago

I think news paywalls need to be bundled in not with other newspapers but other subscription services. I'd kill for a Netflix/Spotify/choose-your-newspaper all in one bundle.

manigandham 11y ago

Just to list some ways that advertising is better than subscriptions: - Free, obviously - No willpower/decision required - Faster (due to no decision as above) - More equal access (as wealth/income don't determine how much content you get) - Anonymous (yes more than payments which come with your cc number, address, etc) I do think online ad formats have gotten worse but the model itself works. It's the implementation that needs a severe restructuring today and is finally in progress due to the growing consumer power through adblocking.