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Facebook in talks with publishers on supporting subscription models
- owlninja 9y agoThe title makes it seem like TheStreet is the product but it isn't. https://www.thestreet.com/story/14233293/1/facebook-s-campbell-brown-we-are-launching-a-news-subscription-product.html https://www.thestreet.com/story/14233293/1/facebook-s-campbe...
- Torai 9y agoThat's a very misleading usage of the colon (:) punctuation mark. Is it even correct to use it like that in english?
- draw_down 9y agoYes, it is used to denote the source of a bit of news or a paraphrased quote.
- huntermeyer 9y agoWhen the source is leading it makes sense... Source: Headline This reads much better > TheStreet: Facebook to launch news subscription product
- draw_down 9y agoI just said that it's correct. Which it is. If you don't like it, great.
- monfrere 9y agoThis should not be downvoted. One sees the source before the colon more often than after the colon, but it is common to see the source after the colon in some publications. I see several instances (e.g., "Corporate lobbying helped derail border tax: senior Republican") on the Reuters homepage right now.
- draw_down 9y agoForget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- annexrichmond 9y agoI think it is more correct (and less ambiguous) to have 'TheStreet: Facebook to launch news subscription product'
- senthil_rajasek 9y agoI wonder why they did not use this common variant, "Facebook to launch news subscription product. -TheStreet"
- jonnathanson 9y agoIt's a strange attributional convention used in headlines and links by some publications. I've never understood why, as it reads so confusingly, snd the reverse usage (source: topic) seems readily and intuitively available instead. But it's still common to see (topic: source) in certain house styles.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoThis should be the target of the submitted link instead, IMO.
- gregmac 9y agoTo save someone the confusion and clicks: TheStreet is a media/news company [1]. The product in question: > The feature is likely to allow publishers to create a paywall on Facebook's Instant Articles and guide readers to a publisher's home page to opt for a digital subscription This HN entry is actually a Reuters article about the TheStreet article about the product. [2]* [1] http://corporate.thestreet.com/ http://corporate.thestreet.com/ [2] https://www.thestreet.com/video/14234594/you-might-have-to-pay-to-read-news-on-facebook.html https://www.thestreet.com/video/14234594/you-might-have-to-p... * I'm not sure this is exactly what's being referred to, because TheStreet appears to publish somewhere between 1 and 14 articles mentioning "facebook" every hour [3], so this was the first mention I saw as I scrolled through. [3] https://www.thestreet.com/find/results/index.html?q=facebook https://www.thestreet.com/find/results/index.html?q=facebook
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tyingq 9y ago"The feature is likely to allow publishers to create a paywall on Facebook's Instant Articles and guide readers to a publisher's home page to opt for a digital subscription" I wouldn't call that a news subscription product.
- jrs95 9y agoYeah...I'd much rather they offer a Netflix-esque platform for news articles. I can't really justify subscribing to a single site, but if I could get most of the major ones with one affordable subscription I'd probably do it.
- wcummings 9y ago>I can't really justify subscribing to a single site I hear this all the time, it has to be a side effect of getting all your news through facespace and other news aggregators. There's really only a handful of newspapers worth subscribing to (in the US), if you aren't reading at least one regularly enough that you'd pay for it if you had to, your money is pretty much no good. I'd expect to see more and more paywalls in the coming months/years, the economics are better, pandering to large volumes of low value readers is a race-to-the-bottom that won't support good journalism.
- jrs95 9y agoHonestly no, none of them are publishing content that is worth what they're trying to charge. At $15/mo, the NYT seems to be selling a feeling of intellectual superiority more than they're selling better journalism.
- rohansingh 9y agoIf you have Prime, I think the Washington Post subscription offer of 6 months free and then $3.99/month after that is a very reasonable value.
- 9y ago
- cuteaussie 9y agoI'm more in favor of a move like this than I am having my required messenger app spammed with advertisements. At least this is completely optional.
- jarnix 9y agoThe two options are compatible :)
- toomanybeersies 9y agoSpeaking of how horrible messenger is, I was just recently in a developing country, which gave me an opportunity to download messenger light. It's amazing, it's so much less bloated and faster than normal messenger, and uses less data too. It doesn't have stories or the rich integration with giphy etc., but that doesn't bother me at all.
- dabber 9y agoDidn't know there was a messenger light. Maybe because there wasn't when I was traveling a few years back? I'd be really interested to see it. I did install FB light on a phone I bought in a developing country and was so excited by it. The whole app was maybe a few MB at the most and it was nothing but my friends content and the basic functionality of the early Facebook wall/feed (minus graffiti.) Like stepping back in time kinda. Made me remember how simple a concept FB is/was under all the algorithms, data mining and JavaScript. That app, ironically enough, is a major reason I'm not on FB today. When I got home and installed the standard app (at 3xx MB) and immediately felt like I was tricked into installing bloated adware. It ate my data up (comparatively) and provided me with little to no extra features beyond a prettier UI. More ads, more analytics, more shitty newsfeed clutter. I uninstalled it and haven't been back to FB since :)
- izacus 9y agoYou can easily sideload it on Android and works well even on our countries. :)
- taylorswift_ 9y agofacebook is a heaping pile of garbage, the sooner their demise the better.
- Animats 9y agoHow big a cut will Facebook take?
- adjkant 9y agoI submitted a link to the Verge article on this with the title "Facebook to add paywall features later this year" which is the main highlight here to me.
- artorias 9y agoA news subscription product ran by the company that was started by a man who's going to run for President in 2020. Nothing could go wrong there
- alttab 9y agoGoogle gives you the content for free via search as long as they get your search queries. Facebook gives you your friends content for free but could allow publishers to charge for access to their streams. Virtual currency will run the new internet I feel - not neutrality necessarily, but something that will work.
- epmaybe 9y agoQuite a few news sites have paywalls even through Google search, like wsj
- 0x445442 9y agoGreat, yet another source of leftist propaganda designed to guide the masses toward the globalist agenda.
- tacomonstrous 9y agoYour comment would be irrelevant if it weren't also meaningless.
- denzil_correa 9y agoI really wonder if the HN audience really believes in such a drivel. If so, I wonder what is their rationale behind such a belief.
- 0x445442 9y agoI think the HN audience is more diverse than your blue state drum beating image.
- jcmoscon 9y agoThe op comment is very relevant and true. http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/01/algorithm-may-not-fix-facebooks-trending-topics-bias-issue.html http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/01/algorithm-may-not-fix-faceboo...
- dang 9y agoPlease don't respond to a bad comment with another bad one. That makes this place worse in its own right, and is the kind of thing that leads to destructive flamewars.
- amelius 9y agoI always wondered why nobody implemented an App store for news and magazine articles that can be accessed through the internet (i.e. not device specific). Why didn't Amazon do this? Or Apple? Google?
- caryhartline 9y agoIt would be against the interests of Google for people to subscribe/pay for articles rather than searching through Google News for ad-supported articles. It's against Apple's interests to do anything that isn't device-specific and the same could probably be said about Amazon & Kindle.
- amelius 9y agoTrue. However, it can be against your interests, but you should always consider: what if someone else does this.
- epmaybe 9y agoI knew a few people that were trying to do this, but I'm not sure they succeeded.
- miles_matthias 9y agoOkay, that makes FB and the publishers more money, but how does it solve FB's fake news problem? Or does it exacerbate it?