7 ms·

I want high quality content, and I'm willing to pay for it. Wired recently starting blocking ad-blockers, with an offer of $4/month for access. I decided it was

by ollysb 11y ago

I want high quality content, and I'm willing to pay for it. Wired recently starting blocking ad-blockers, with an offer of $4/month for access. I decided it was time to start putting my money where my mouth is. I'm tired of low quality content, I want to be supporting serious, intelligent journalism that goes a bit further than the click-bait we're stuck with at the moment. Even the content traditional newspapers are putting out online has become vapid, they need to start shooting for the standards they used to and become comfortable with charging for it. I've got £50/month waiting for quality content. Maybe not everyone does? But then again plenty of people were happy/able to pay for their daily newspaper. It feels like there's a gaping hole in the market at the moment, I'm hopeful that we're seeing the start of the return to journalism.

peteretep 11y ago
I pay for a lot of content, but individual subscriptions doesn't scale. I have subscriptions to Stratfor, The Economist and NYT. Nothing else has enough for me to buy in bulk. I would probably pay for 538 too. There are Wired articles I would pay to read, but I don't want the whole corpus. Micro payments cannot come soon enough.
- zyxley 11y ago
  On the topic about scaling, I'd give serious thought to a "Spotify model" for it if there was such a service that included enough sites.
- DougBTX 11y ago
  > Micro payments cannot come soon enough. Any idea how to encourage quality content with micropayments? The naive implementation would be to charge on opening the article, but I suspect that would just encourage more click-bait headlines. Short articles can still contain good content, so just tracking reading time wouldn't be sufficient either.
  - peteretep 11y ago
    Blendle allows no-question refunds, and it seems to be working very well. I think you'd have to do it that way.
  - Rexxar 11y ago
    Pay a fixed amount every month to a third party that redistribute money to all the articles that you "liked" with a button.
    - sandebert 11y ago
      That's the model of Flattr. I have no idea how successful they are though. https://flattr.com https://flattr.com
      - icebraining 11y ago
        I have a Flattr account, but I only use it for regular contributions to a couple of open source projects, since I never see a button anywhere.
        petercooper 11y ago
        Being in the content game, it's because it's totally not worth littering pages for the 5 cents a month it'd make. I'm hyperbolizing, but even if it were $100/month, it wouldn't be worth the space. What this space needs is someone with deep pockets to subsidize the publisher growth until the critical mass of users is reached.
      - dave2000 11y ago
        Micropayments have been the obvious - to me - solution for this problem since I got on the internet in 1997. Still never seen it employed anywhere. Yes, heard of flattr. Never seen a single site that uses it.
    - peteretep 11y ago
      I feel like unless it's opt-out per article, you'll forget to click often enough that the price of clicking will have to be high
- hartpuff 11y ago
  > Micro payments cannot come soon enough. I know I must be missing something here, but what is actually preventing a service where a number on your account (which you have funded with $10, because lots of quality news and content sites are signed up to it) decreases by 00.10 and someone else's number (whose article you just paid to read) increases by 00.10? One the face of it, this seems like the easiest thing in the world to accomplish, particularly for already established, trusted and extensively used payment-related companies like Paypal.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
qz_ 11y ago
This. I'd take OP's link seriously if it said something like this.
- k1m 11y ago
  > If ad blocking continues to grow, which we hope it will, other ways of funding will be found. This is one of those ways, so not sure why you think our piece shouldn't be taken seriously.
Freestyler_3 11y ago
Did they really earn $4 a month per user when they used ads? I guess they raised the price a lot because they realised they would lose lots of people. One way to lose lots of people is to immediatly start with a high price. It's going to be hard to get people back once they left.
- ollysb 11y ago
  I'm not convinced that subscriptions per property is the correct model, there's room for innovation here.
  - Freestyler_3 11y ago
    Yes, there is lots of room for innovation. Too bad the big media companies have no feeling of need for innovation. They lobby for laws against adblockers. They look to blame the customer and the ability of the customer to block their ads.
lazyjones 11y ago
Consider theguardian.com, you can become a supporting member for €49/yr (probably $49 in the US), even though you can freely access the content without paying.
- k1m 11y ago
  The Guardian is still heavily dependent on advertising and turning more and more to shady native advertising deals. They took oil money for example at the same time as they were running a 'keep it in the ground' campaign. Media Lens have a good piece on The Guardian here: http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2016/812-rebranding-the-conquistadors-as-social-justice-warriors-the-guardian-corporate-sponsorship-and-branded-content.html http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2016...
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    An increasing number of Guardian pieces seem to be thinly-disguised advertorials. When Adele's last album arrived it ran pieces about the awesomeness of Adele for days without a break, until it became a running joke in the comments. Of course it's impossible to prove the content was bought and paid for, but unless the editor is the biggest Adele fan in the world in the history of ever it's hard to imagine the staff at an international daily spontaneously filing Adele puff pieces without prompting.
7952 11y ago
It would be interesting to have a convergence of apps, community, shopping, and content. A lot of niches benefit from all those things but are separated across different platforms. Packing that together could make the combination feel like a premium product and justify a monthly payment (or gift subscription). It also requires less effort from the user to discover the various elements.
raverbashing 11y ago
I agree Monetization of content is a business opportunity waiting to happen. Something like a network where you put, I dunno $10 per month and every article you read is charged for $0.10, as an example. Or unlimited during the month for $1 If news sites can allow us to Tweet or Fb an article it might be possible to 'coin' an article as well in a seamless manner
- Freak_NL 11y ago
  I like the concept of micro payments, but I am worried about the notion of a single large party providing this service. Can you imagine the worth of all those user profiles correlating topics, interests, articles, and websites? Payment would have to be anonymous for this to work.
leereeves 11y ago
There was so little high quality, original content even in the old days. It was mostly opinions, simplifications of scientific papers, excerpts from press releases and press conferences, or something someone (usually not a journalist) caught on camera. With the communications technology we have now, it's hard for anyone to add significant value in the middle between the source of the news (scientists, inventors, politicians, entertainers, witnesses, etc.) and the public. For example, 25 years ago the media spent a lot of airtime and ink on the beating of Rodney King, and indeed we only heard about it thanks to the media. Now, we can watch similar videos on YouTube, read court documents and the police departments' press releases directly, and hear thousands of diverse opinions on social media. That role of the old media is obsolete. But I'd still pay for accurate, unbiased investigative journalism.
ZenoArrow 11y ago
Sounds like you'd be interested in Brave: https://www.brave.com/ https://www.brave.com/ From the homepage: "With Brave, you can choose whether to see ads that respect your privacy or pay sites directly. Either way, you can feel good about helping fund content creators." So you could choose the ad-free option and have Brave pay the sites you visit.
Sir_Substance 11y ago
>I'm tired of low quality content, I want to be supporting serious, intelligent journalism that goes a bit further than the click-bait we're stuck with at the moment. The thing is, historically speaking this kind of content has been free. The goal of the world wide web was to provide people with the ability to publish for themselves, and it was a smash hit success because it turned out that when you give people the ability to publish their work, they may only write two things in their entire life but they care so much about those things they're a lot higher quality than what you get out of forbes today. With a whole internet full of people only writing (or filming, or recording, or coding, or whatever) one or two things, there's a world of fantastic content out there. Lots of it is in old forums, some of it has been monitized by ads (youtube), but most of it is still free as the authors intended. But then the notion of earning an income on ads came along, and with it came the concept of clickbait. Quality took a dive and formerly free content got jailed up behind paywalls or plastered with ads. The amazing conceit was that the people who did this think because they did the work, they deserve to get paid. It never crosses their mind that we might wish they hadn't done the work in the first place. The honest truth is, I'm tired of low quality content too, so I'm blocking ads to try and kill of the companies making it.
- mahranch 11y ago
  > But then the notion of earning an income on ads came along That's unfair, and almost flat out wrong. Content and ads pretty much evolved hand in hand. Sure, there was some content up before ads came along, but ads came up almost immediately after. There was also practically no content on the 'net compared to today. The net back then was... almost non-existent. It was a ghost town. You had sites like prodigy and compuserve hosting a large chunk of the 'net and they did have ads. This was in the mid 90s.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    I've been online since 1994, and that's not how I remember it. There was plenty of amateur content put up for fun before the ad explosion. There were search engines for the content. And there was a lot of academic and technical information. Then the business types moved and tried to turn the entire web into a strip mall. To some extent they succeeded. Twitchy pointless banners invaded a lot of pages. To a large extent they failed, because the purveyors of twitchy little banners pretended they have the same user impact as print and TV advertising - and that idea has always been demonstrably wrong. The problem is that the twitchy little banners created an entire economy of user sharking, which completely fails to understand that the best ads give real value to users - either by providing truly useful leads, or by being beautiful and interesting. Networked web ads are none of the above. Occasionally you'll see sites that sell space to a narrow targeted niche relevant to readers of those pages. Those tend to do much better. But the scatter-shot nature of web advertising puts it on the same level as email spam. It's not useful, it's not interesting, it's not beautiful, it's just distracting and annoying. Most of it provides no user benefit at all. It deserves to die until that changes. If it can't exist without being parasitic on content, then the market needs to kill it off until it works out how to pays its way. And the content industry needs to get over itself and start producing outstanding, irreplaceable, content that readers genuinely want to pay for. If it can't do that, it needs to die out too.
mahranch 11y ago
> I want high quality content, and I'm willing to pay for it. Now if only the other billions of people on this planet felt the same way. That's why I don't like this sentence. Every time the topic of ads come up here or on reddit, people always say "I'd pay for high quality content". And it gets upvoted, dozens of children comments of people agreeing with them, and everyone pats themselves on the back for such an easy and obvious solution. Unfortunately, that's simply not the reality we live in. The vast majority (95% or more) of internet users would rather have their content subsidized by ads than have to pay. This has been proven time and time again by the countless subscription model failures over the last decade. Sure, some sites have found success, but those that do are the extremely rare exceptions, not the rule. And none have found fantastic success. How many subscription model websites are in the top 10? Top 100? Top 1000? Subscription models just don't work. Nuff said, really. There's 10+ years of data to back it up.
- girvo 11y ago
  > Subscription models just don't work I'm not disagreeing with you, but that still doesn't refute the argument that you're selling your audience to someone else without their consent (and before you say "then don't use the site", you don't get to choose whether or not you're exposed to the given sites ads until you go on it, in which case it's already too late. Unless, of course, you use an ad-blocker -- which is why I'm of the opinion that people should use ad-blockers, but I disagree with the article in that I feel there can be cases of responsible, acceptable advertising. Things aren't so black and white, from either side)
  - mahranch 11y ago
    > but that still doesn't refute the argument that you're selling your audience to someone else without their consent You watch the big bang theory and they play an ad during the commercial break for colgate. Did you get sold something without your consent? It's literally the exact same thing. When you browse the web or when you watch TV, it's inherent to the media that you will see ads and that ads subsidize that content. Admitting to anything else but that inherent truth is (to me) just technicalities and/or pointless pedantry. Unless it's your first time on the 'net, you understand ads subsidize the content you see. Pretending like it's some injustice is almost laughable. It's like you're saying commercials on TV are taking advantage of you every time they cut to a commercial break.
rtpg 11y ago
If you look at the amount of money going into ad businesses, everyone would need to put in about $150/month for there to be no drop in revenue. There's a reason why NYT is so expensive (and, of course, still carries ads) per month compared to what one might think
nemexy 11y ago
I really, reallly wish there was an AdBlock software with a proper acceptable ads. Get a few people to inspect websites with lets say 10-20-30$(cheap for any website which actually wants to make money) application fee to cover the cost of the inspection and whitelist that website. OF course give us plain and precise information about what is acceptable with a few levels of control from the user, plus a button to report a website that is actually not doing good. Once you lose your privileges, you pay double/triple or more to apply again. This is actually what I do for myself, have over 300 sites which i visit semi-occasionally, that have disabled ads because I like those websites and those ads are actually something worth my connection, a nice way to pay out to the website. If AdBlock had done this, I really believe it would have been so much better than as it is right now.
- Sindisil 11y ago
  In most cases the website has little to no direct control of the ad content. The evaluation would need to extend to the ad networks, as well.
tomjen3 11y ago
I am willing to pay about half that, but only on a one of basis with articles I like. Something like flatter, but universal and most importantly very simple to cancel. The reason is simple, I no longer read a particular newspaper, I read whatever I get linked to on twitter, hn or facebook. Somehow newspapers don't seem to get this.
petra 11y ago
There's no lack of high-quality content around the web. True, it's a bit hard to discover it amid the noise. And most often, larger communities are gathered around click-baity content, and that's why we go there. And yes, maybe it's not fresh from the ovens but a bit late. So even if there may be a need in money, maybe it would be better spend on solving those problems first ?

by ollysb 11y ago

peteretep 11y ago

I pay for a lot of content, but individual subscriptions doesn't scale. I have subscriptions to Stratfor, The Economist and NYT. Nothing else has enough for me to buy in bulk. I would probably pay for 538 too. There are Wired articles I would pay to read, but I don't want the whole corpus. Micro payments cannot come soon enough.

zyxley 11y ago
On the topic about scaling, I'd give serious thought to a "Spotify model" for it if there was such a service that included enough sites.
DougBTX 11y ago
> Micro payments cannot come soon enough. Any idea how to encourage quality content with micropayments? The naive implementation would be to charge on opening the article, but I suspect that would just encourage more click-bait headlines. Short articles can still contain good content, so just tracking reading time wouldn't be sufficient either.
- peteretep 11y ago
  Blendle allows no-question refunds, and it seems to be working very well. I think you'd have to do it that way.
- Rexxar 11y ago
  Pay a fixed amount every month to a third party that redistribute money to all the articles that you "liked" with a button.
  - sandebert 11y ago
    That's the model of Flattr. I have no idea how successful they are though. https://flattr.com https://flattr.com
    - icebraining 11y ago
      I have a Flattr account, but I only use it for regular contributions to a couple of open source projects, since I never see a button anywhere.
      - petercooper 11y ago
        Being in the content game, it's because it's totally not worth littering pages for the 5 cents a month it'd make. I'm hyperbolizing, but even if it were $100/month, it wouldn't be worth the space. What this space needs is someone with deep pockets to subsidize the publisher growth until the critical mass of users is reached.
    - dave2000 11y ago
      Micropayments have been the obvious - to me - solution for this problem since I got on the internet in 1997. Still never seen it employed anywhere. Yes, heard of flattr. Never seen a single site that uses it.
  - peteretep 11y ago
    I feel like unless it's opt-out per article, you'll forget to click often enough that the price of clicking will have to be high
hartpuff 11y ago
> Micro payments cannot come soon enough. I know I must be missing something here, but what is actually preventing a service where a number on your account (which you have funded with $10, because lots of quality news and content sites are signed up to it) decreases by 00.10 and someone else's number (whose article you just paid to read) increases by 00.10? One the face of it, this seems like the easiest thing in the world to accomplish, particularly for already established, trusted and extensively used payment-related companies like Paypal.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

qz_ 11y ago

This. I'd take OP's link seriously if it said something like this.

k1m 11y ago
> If ad blocking continues to grow, which we hope it will, other ways of funding will be found. This is one of those ways, so not sure why you think our piece shouldn't be taken seriously.

Freestyler_3 11y ago

Did they really earn $4 a month per user when they used ads? I guess they raised the price a lot because they realised they would lose lots of people. One way to lose lots of people is to immediatly start with a high price. It's going to be hard to get people back once they left.

ollysb 11y ago
I'm not convinced that subscriptions per property is the correct model, there's room for innovation here.
- Freestyler_3 11y ago
  Yes, there is lots of room for innovation. Too bad the big media companies have no feeling of need for innovation. They lobby for laws against adblockers. They look to blame the customer and the ability of the customer to block their ads.

lazyjones 11y ago

Consider theguardian.com, you can become a supporting member for €49/yr (probably $49 in the US), even though you can freely access the content without paying.

k1m 11y ago
The Guardian is still heavily dependent on advertising and turning more and more to shady native advertising deals. They took oil money for example at the same time as they were running a 'keep it in the ground' campaign. Media Lens have a good piece on The Guardian here: http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2016/812-rebranding-the-conquistadors-as-social-justice-warriors-the-guardian-corporate-sponsorship-and-branded-content.html http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2016...
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  An increasing number of Guardian pieces seem to be thinly-disguised advertorials. When Adele's last album arrived it ran pieces about the awesomeness of Adele for days without a break, until it became a running joke in the comments. Of course it's impossible to prove the content was bought and paid for, but unless the editor is the biggest Adele fan in the world in the history of ever it's hard to imagine the staff at an international daily spontaneously filing Adele puff pieces without prompting.

7952 11y ago

It would be interesting to have a convergence of apps, community, shopping, and content. A lot of niches benefit from all those things but are separated across different platforms. Packing that together could make the combination feel like a premium product and justify a monthly payment (or gift subscription). It also requires less effort from the user to discover the various elements.

raverbashing 11y ago

I agree Monetization of content is a business opportunity waiting to happen. Something like a network where you put, I dunno $10 per month and every article you read is charged for $0.10, as an example. Or unlimited during the month for $1 If news sites can allow us to Tweet or Fb an article it might be possible to 'coin' an article as well in a seamless manner

Freak_NL 11y ago
I like the concept of micro payments, but I am worried about the notion of a single large party providing this service. Can you imagine the worth of all those user profiles correlating topics, interests, articles, and websites? Payment would have to be anonymous for this to work.

leereeves 11y ago

There was so little high quality, original content even in the old days. It was mostly opinions, simplifications of scientific papers, excerpts from press releases and press conferences, or something someone (usually not a journalist) caught on camera. With the communications technology we have now, it's hard for anyone to add significant value in the middle between the source of the news (scientists, inventors, politicians, entertainers, witnesses, etc.) and the public. For example, 25 years ago the media spent a lot of airtime and ink on the beating of Rodney King, and indeed we only heard about it thanks to the media. Now, we can watch similar videos on YouTube, read court documents and the police departments' press releases directly, and hear thousands of diverse opinions on social media. That role of the old media is obsolete. But I'd still pay for accurate, unbiased investigative journalism.

ZenoArrow 11y ago

Sounds like you'd be interested in Brave: https://www.brave.com/ https://www.brave.com/ From the homepage: "With Brave, you can choose whether to see ads that respect your privacy or pay sites directly. Either way, you can feel good about helping fund content creators." So you could choose the ad-free option and have Brave pay the sites you visit.

Sir_Substance 11y ago

>I'm tired of low quality content, I want to be supporting serious, intelligent journalism that goes a bit further than the click-bait we're stuck with at the moment. The thing is, historically speaking this kind of content has been free. The goal of the world wide web was to provide people with the ability to publish for themselves, and it was a smash hit success because it turned out that when you give people the ability to publish their work, they may only write two things in their entire life but they care so much about those things they're a lot higher quality than what you get out of forbes today. With a whole internet full of people only writing (or filming, or recording, or coding, or whatever) one or two things, there's a world of fantastic content out there. Lots of it is in old forums, some of it has been monitized by ads (youtube), but most of it is still free as the authors intended. But then the notion of earning an income on ads came along, and with it came the concept of clickbait. Quality took a dive and formerly free content got jailed up behind paywalls or plastered with ads. The amazing conceit was that the people who did this think because they did the work, they deserve to get paid. It never crosses their mind that we might wish they hadn't done the work in the first place. The honest truth is, I'm tired of low quality content too, so I'm blocking ads to try and kill of the companies making it.

mahranch 11y ago
> But then the notion of earning an income on ads came along That's unfair, and almost flat out wrong. Content and ads pretty much evolved hand in hand. Sure, there was some content up before ads came along, but ads came up almost immediately after. There was also practically no content on the 'net compared to today. The net back then was... almost non-existent. It was a ghost town. You had sites like prodigy and compuserve hosting a large chunk of the 'net and they did have ads. This was in the mid 90s.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  I've been online since 1994, and that's not how I remember it. There was plenty of amateur content put up for fun before the ad explosion. There were search engines for the content. And there was a lot of academic and technical information. Then the business types moved and tried to turn the entire web into a strip mall. To some extent they succeeded. Twitchy pointless banners invaded a lot of pages. To a large extent they failed, because the purveyors of twitchy little banners pretended they have the same user impact as print and TV advertising - and that idea has always been demonstrably wrong. The problem is that the twitchy little banners created an entire economy of user sharking, which completely fails to understand that the best ads give real value to users - either by providing truly useful leads, or by being beautiful and interesting. Networked web ads are none of the above. Occasionally you'll see sites that sell space to a narrow targeted niche relevant to readers of those pages. Those tend to do much better. But the scatter-shot nature of web advertising puts it on the same level as email spam. It's not useful, it's not interesting, it's not beautiful, it's just distracting and annoying. Most of it provides no user benefit at all. It deserves to die until that changes. If it can't exist without being parasitic on content, then the market needs to kill it off until it works out how to pays its way. And the content industry needs to get over itself and start producing outstanding, irreplaceable, content that readers genuinely want to pay for. If it can't do that, it needs to die out too.

mahranch 11y ago

> I want high quality content, and I'm willing to pay for it. Now if only the other billions of people on this planet felt the same way. That's why I don't like this sentence. Every time the topic of ads come up here or on reddit, people always say "I'd pay for high quality content". And it gets upvoted, dozens of children comments of people agreeing with them, and everyone pats themselves on the back for such an easy and obvious solution. Unfortunately, that's simply not the reality we live in. The vast majority (95% or more) of internet users would rather have their content subsidized by ads than have to pay. This has been proven time and time again by the countless subscription model failures over the last decade. Sure, some sites have found success, but those that do are the extremely rare exceptions, not the rule. And none have found fantastic success. How many subscription model websites are in the top 10? Top 100? Top 1000? Subscription models just don't work. Nuff said, really. There's 10+ years of data to back it up.

girvo 11y ago
> Subscription models just don't work I'm not disagreeing with you, but that still doesn't refute the argument that you're selling your audience to someone else without their consent (and before you say "then don't use the site", you don't get to choose whether or not you're exposed to the given sites ads until you go on it, in which case it's already too late. Unless, of course, you use an ad-blocker -- which is why I'm of the opinion that people should use ad-blockers, but I disagree with the article in that I feel there can be cases of responsible, acceptable advertising. Things aren't so black and white, from either side)
- mahranch 11y ago
  > but that still doesn't refute the argument that you're selling your audience to someone else without their consent You watch the big bang theory and they play an ad during the commercial break for colgate. Did you get sold something without your consent? It's literally the exact same thing. When you browse the web or when you watch TV, it's inherent to the media that you will see ads and that ads subsidize that content. Admitting to anything else but that inherent truth is (to me) just technicalities and/or pointless pedantry. Unless it's your first time on the 'net, you understand ads subsidize the content you see. Pretending like it's some injustice is almost laughable. It's like you're saying commercials on TV are taking advantage of you every time they cut to a commercial break.

rtpg 11y ago

If you look at the amount of money going into ad businesses, everyone would need to put in about $150/month for there to be no drop in revenue. There's a reason why NYT is so expensive (and, of course, still carries ads) per month compared to what one might think

nemexy 11y ago

I really, reallly wish there was an AdBlock software with a proper acceptable ads. Get a few people to inspect websites with lets say 10-20-30$(cheap for any website which actually wants to make money) application fee to cover the cost of the inspection and whitelist that website. OF course give us plain and precise information about what is acceptable with a few levels of control from the user, plus a button to report a website that is actually not doing good. Once you lose your privileges, you pay double/triple or more to apply again. This is actually what I do for myself, have over 300 sites which i visit semi-occasionally, that have disabled ads because I like those websites and those ads are actually something worth my connection, a nice way to pay out to the website. If AdBlock had done this, I really believe it would have been so much better than as it is right now.

Sindisil 11y ago
In most cases the website has little to no direct control of the ad content. The evaluation would need to extend to the ad networks, as well.

tomjen3 11y ago

I am willing to pay about half that, but only on a one of basis with articles I like. Something like flatter, but universal and most importantly very simple to cancel. The reason is simple, I no longer read a particular newspaper, I read whatever I get linked to on twitter, hn or facebook. Somehow newspapers don't seem to get this.

petra 11y ago

There's no lack of high-quality content around the web. True, it's a bit hard to discover it amid the noise. And most often, larger communities are gathered around click-baity content, and that's why we go there. And yes, maybe it's not fresh from the ovens but a bit late. So even if there may be a need in money, maybe it would be better spend on solving those problems first ?