32 ms·

Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

108 points by miiiiiike 9y ago

bayofpigs 9y ago
To block news sources in Google News go to Settings > Sources and add the domain to the Block section. Used to have to add the source, then slide the frequency slider down to 0. Looks like Google automatically moved them to blocked. Better yet, just have a setting to automatically block all sites using paywalls. They have a right to deploy paywalls, we have a right to request never to see them in our feed.
grandalf 9y ago
Paywalls are a dying gasp being uttered by the publishing industry. Here's why they don't work: - If I respect a publication and feel that the content has value for me, I'll happily subscribe. - If I click on a clickbait headline only to arrive at a paywall, it's like a small and unpleasant electric shock, punishing me for clicking the link. - Paywall creators think that the combination of clickbait and paywalls is magical and gets people to subscribe, but it does not, it only creates negative emotion and irritation. - There is no such thing as a free lunch. If publishers want subscribers they need to consistently produce high quality content day after day, week after week. They also need to forego the sugar high of clickbait. - That means there can't be some sort of social virality genius telling the editor how to title articles and showing charts of all the clicks from Reddit, etc. Doing this may generate some incremental subscribers, but it does so at the cost of the publication's brand image. - The approach Salon used of showing the first third or half of the article is better than a "You obviously love great journalism" banner. Let the content stand on its own and earn the subscription. - I have not been able to bring myself to subscribe to the NYT or WaPo for one simple reason -- around half of the articles they publish are very low quality and many have clickbait headlines. The article headlines have the feel of being ads themselves that falsely represent the content of the article. In many cases the articles are pretty solid reporting, but the headlines oversell them as being the article that will bring down the Trump presidency. If I were a journalist I'd be pretty outraged if I took the time to write a thoughtful article and then some virality genius retitled it something silly and tribe-oriented to get the shallowest of readers to thoughtlessly click it.
- dheera 9y ago
  Agree. Also, the websites that try to get you to unblock ad blockers are equally irritating. Usually I just leave, and find another source of the same news. In many cases their ads are super annoying and CPU-intensive, which is the main reason I block them; it's not that I hate advertising itself. If they were just a simple <img> tag and a hyperlink without a huge pile of JavaScript bloat I would probably not bother blocking them.
  - grandalf 9y ago
    Indeed. It's true, in a world where a major newspaper will decide to write a multi-page story about one of Trump's silly tweets and run it on the front page, it's not all that hard for a large number of news orgs to write a similarly informative story, and many make it available for free. I agree about ads, but my least favorite are the ones that begin playing video in a tiny window that devours laptop battery life... It's strange to imagine the marketers who are designing these pages. They must imagine that all of us read only when watching TV is not an option, so they try to make the website as much like TV as possible, complete with a tiny screen that you can click on to simply shift into couch potato mode.
  - Karunamon 9y ago
    I find that the Anti-adblock killer list in uBlock takes care of most of these. There's an additional addon you can install that pushes it even further. The fight against browsers rendering markup in the way their users want is a losing one.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  You're correct in that reader attitudes towards paywalls are generally negative [1]. You're incorrect in that (a) advertising appears insufficient to sustain a modern press apparatus, and (b) the Wall Street Journal, at the very least, showed paywalls can be financially lucrative [2]. Roughly comparing, on one hand weak paywall deployers, the NYT and Washington Post, and on the other hand strong paywall deployers, the WSJ and Financial Times, the latter appear to benefit more from said paywalls. [1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f3f8/85f3876f9c098bac89e5a152de733bd51b1a.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f3f8/85f3876f9c098bac89e5a1... [2] https://hbr.org/product/the-new-york-times-paywall/512077-PDF-ENG https://hbr.org/product/the-new-york-times-paywall/512077-PD...
dheera 9y ago
Just change your web browser's User-Agent to the Google crawler?
- Operyl 9y ago
  That said, some publishers are smart and also check to see if your IP is in a Google range. EDIT: That is, you can check the PTR record of an IP: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en
  - marindez 9y ago
    You can set the PTR record of an IP to a domain you don't control. Most ISPs won't let you do that, though. Also, whatever host you set as the PTR record won't resolve back to your IP.
    - Operyl 9y ago
      Sure, but like you said most consumer ISPs don't let you ;). A business is most likely going to subscribe if they need it, and us "hacker" types aren't cutting into their profits that much by circumventing heh.
    - lucb1e 9y ago
      XS4ALL in the Netherlands lets you. I never knew I should be using it for that -- I just set it to match my email domain to end up in less spamboxes.
  - dheera 9y ago
    Hmm, I wonder if setting up a VPN on Google Cloud would do the trick.
- solomatov 9y ago
  IANAL, but this is probably a violation of DMCA anti-circumvention provisions.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
davidgerard 9y ago
archive.is still captures text from most of these.
erentz 9y ago
I have no problem with this. But in return I should be able to opt out of results that I cannot view. A result for a news article that changes when I click on it to a "Please subscribe..." plea is not the result that was returned that I clicked on. Unfortunately, like the AMP fiasco, I doubt this is what will happen as Google doesn't exist to serve it's users.
- mathattack 9y ago
  AMP fiasco?
  - matthewmacleod 9y ago
    The whole thing where AMP is being enforced in Google, such that what were previously links to third-party sites are now served entirely from Google with a moderately-broken shell around them, and with no ability to opt-out of having search results hijacked in this manner.
- baldfat 9y ago
  You block the sources in your Google News feed. https://news.google.com/news/u/0/settings/sources?hl=en https://news.google.com/news/u/0/settings/sources?hl=en
  - FireBeyond 9y ago
    So "blocking paywalls" that appear accessible in Google Search is now "opt out"? Ewww. This might be the time I hit Duck Duck Go. To be clear, I have no issue with paywalls. But they should be flagged as such. "Article title: blah blah blah [Subscription required to view content]" even. But they won't do that, because publishers, who buy advertising, will scream because they KNOW their click through rates would plummet. After all, even with a paywall, you still get plenty of metrics and advertising bumps on that first click to the site.
    - baldfat 9y ago
      > Google Search is now "opt out"? No, not at all. It just doesn't let you get free articles behind the pay wall. So now you can either avoid the pay wall websites or you just block them.
strictnein 9y ago
Not the best headline. Here's the gist of it: > "Google’s plans include doing away with the “first click free” policy, which requires subscription-based news outlets to offer three free articles a day through its search and news features, allowing users to skirt pay walls. A new program, which Google plans to start this week and is calling “flexible sampling,” will allow those publishers to determine how many free clicks to give Google’s users." So sites can still give access to Google visitors (which I bet many will), but they just have more say over the specifics.
TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
I happily pay for lots of services, but I just don't think many of these publishers are worth paying for. I'm pretty tired of shitty clickbait headlines, and stories which cherry-pick a handful of twitter posts to make it seem like there's outrage over something. Even worse, it seems like most publishers are dead set of trying to feed you their agenda. Why would I pay for misleading or intellectually dishonest articles?
- baldfat 9y ago
  These news paid sources are usually only valuable for local content. My local news paper' only redeeming value is it is local but it isn't $4 a week valuable.
  - TheCowboy 9y ago
    I agree that $4*52 is expensive, but it could cost less if more people were subscribing. Unfortunately, even at a more reasonable price per month or week, I think papers wouldn't see a surge in subscribers in the current environment. Short-term, I think people undervalue the value of local news. There are often a lot of info holes when it comes to local government and politics. I wonder if this has adverse affects that lead to less involvement in local politics except when a NIMBY issue appears, which doesn't seem like good governance. Local news coverage, with the exception of major cities, tends to be sparse and often non-existent. Even for some major areas there can be a lot of holes in coverage. This problem makes itself apparent to me when come election day I try to look up all of the candidates, and find no info for many of them that isn't from their own website (if it even exists).
    - baldfat 9y ago
      It is going to bot created I am afraid to say. My city has good local coverage, a wee bit biased but it is local people in a School Board meetings and City Meetings at least. Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/08/google-is-funding-the-creation-of-software-that-writes-local-news-stories/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/08/google-is-funding-the-crea...
baldfat 9y ago
Block the paid wall sources so you are not annoyed anymore. I have CNET blocked due to their CBS and CES Fiasco and never unblocked them. https://news.google.com/news/u/0/settings/sources?hl=en https://news.google.com/news/u/0/settings/sources?hl=en
mindcrime 9y ago
Subscriptions are just the wrong model for news publishers. There's NO way I could possibly afford to subscribe to every news output I occasionally read news from, unless the subscriptions were so close to free as to be useless as a revenue source for the publisher. It's just not going to happen. What we desperately need is a real, useful micro-payments model where you can pay per-article. I'd be happy to pay you a few cents, or a dollar, or whatever, for each of the 3 or 4 articles I read on your site per month. But I'm not buying a subscription just to read 3 or 4 articles. The economics just don't work.
- visarga 9y ago
  > What we desperately need is a real, useful micro payments model where you can pay per-article. That would incentivize hit-and-run articles that cause sensation to milk micropayments, leading to a spiral of clickbait even worse than that caused by advertising.
  - sp332 9y ago
    I don't see it. Clickbait headlines just need to get you to the page even if the article is crap. Microtransactions would require articles to be worth something to the reader.
    - davidcbc 9y ago
      How will the reader know that the article is worth something unless they pay?
      - infinityplus1 9y ago
        Won't they pay after reading the article and decide if it's worth it?
        sp332 9y ago
        That's what I was thinking. And if not, they'll have to convince people like any other kind of media: reviews, previews, or even refunds.
j-c-hewitt 9y ago
Maybe non-subscribers should get a lite reader's digest type abstract of the article instead of the truncated/cloaked stuff that currently gets served on sites like WSJ. Most articles can probably be described in 50-100 words or less. The automatic truncation is often less descriptive than a good meta description would be.
wnevets 9y ago
As a side note google gave me a free digital subscription to the nytimes for posting reviews on google maps. Is google or nytimes making money off of this?
throwaway2016a 9y ago
The O'Reilly Safari system is a great alternative to paywalls. You pay for Safari and it pays out royalties to the authors proportional to how many users read your book that month. So an author of a book that had 200 readers would get roughly double the pay of one that has 100 readers. I would gladly pay for a kind of all access pass that divided up my subscription money to the news sites I visited the most. Of course, if someone goes to 200 different sites equally an individual publisher would get less from that customer but I think that's fair.
- pmyteh 9y ago
  There's an older version of this principle used to compensate authors for library borrowing in the UK and other countries called Public Lending Right. The government puts some tax money into a pot, and it's paid out to authors in proportion to the number of loans of their books. There's also a cap to stop the bulk of the money going to a handful of bestselling authors. In some ways, this can be seen as croudsourcing decisions on government subsidy, which is an interesting model.
15charlimit 9y ago
Cue massive drops in traffic (again) and news orgs whining about it (again) and blaming the next boogeyman, whatever that is. Probably something something "piracy" etc. Paying/subscribing for general-purpose news is old news. It had its time, and that time is over. Much like music industry CD sales with the real rise of p2p, news orgs will have to figure out what their "ipod" equivalent is going to be.
bluetwo 9y ago
Like others I think a well done micro-pavement or bundle of payments would be nice. One thing I think that is missing from the discussion is metrics. If you do a nice job building the site, and let users give an indication whether they want to see more or less coverage on the topic, you can offer this metrics data back to the news outlets, which can give them far better direction than simply looking at website clicks (which encourages click-bait). This, along with a slice of micro-payments would be valuable to them.
graphememes 9y ago
Unfortunately there is no need to pay for news articles, there is a need to pay for RESEARCH and MEDICAL papers. News? No.
AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
GoFundMe? Patreon? Those who could find people to buy what they are producing, are already doing it on social funding platforms. The models that are struggling are those who are not able to sell what they have to sell... a product that not only sold ad-space but infoticles, just like infomartials on TV or product placement in movies, there was paid bias in articles. In the days of Internet, no body wants to watch ads, not in the sidebar clearly labeled as an ad, or in the center of the page in terms of a info(ar)ticle. I would rather pay to hear the bias of the person speaking, than letting a corporation tell that person what he or she can or can't write. There is banding together of like minded people to pool resources together to keep making progress on a cause, much better model than a corporation. Much efficient use of funds, time, energy. The only one to loose is the investor or influence seeker, who would have to do much more digging than just walking into an top floor office with a check in hands.
downrightmike 9y ago
We should just go back to having newsies selling newspapers on the street corner for a nickle. Study has found that there is a direct correlation to musicals about newsies when they are a significant portion of the news ecosystem.
ThomPete 9y ago
Publisher have one and mostly one way to be profitable. Shrink the overhead with 90%. If they cant do that most of them are simply not going to survive. Subscription or no subscription.
chatmasta 9y ago
Called it [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15383058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15383058

108 points by miiiiiike 9y ago

To block news sources in Google News go to Settings > Sources and add the domain to the Block section. Used to have to add the source, then slide the frequency slider down to 0. Looks like Google automatically moved them to blocked. Better yet, just have a setting to automatically block all sites using paywalls. They have a right to deploy paywalls, we have a right to request never to see them in our feed.

grandalf 9y ago

Paywalls are a dying gasp being uttered by the publishing industry. Here's why they don't work: - If I respect a publication and feel that the content has value for me, I'll happily subscribe. - If I click on a clickbait headline only to arrive at a paywall, it's like a small and unpleasant electric shock, punishing me for clicking the link. - Paywall creators think that the combination of clickbait and paywalls is magical and gets people to subscribe, but it does not, it only creates negative emotion and irritation. - There is no such thing as a free lunch. If publishers want subscribers they need to consistently produce high quality content day after day, week after week. They also need to forego the sugar high of clickbait. - That means there can't be some sort of social virality genius telling the editor how to title articles and showing charts of all the clicks from Reddit, etc. Doing this may generate some incremental subscribers, but it does so at the cost of the publication's brand image. - The approach Salon used of showing the first third or half of the article is better than a "You obviously love great journalism" banner. Let the content stand on its own and earn the subscription. - I have not been able to bring myself to subscribe to the NYT or WaPo for one simple reason -- around half of the articles they publish are very low quality and many have clickbait headlines. The article headlines have the feel of being ads themselves that falsely represent the content of the article. In many cases the articles are pretty solid reporting, but the headlines oversell them as being the article that will bring down the Trump presidency. If I were a journalist I'd be pretty outraged if I took the time to write a thoughtful article and then some virality genius retitled it something silly and tribe-oriented to get the shallowest of readers to thoughtlessly click it.

dheera 9y ago
Agree. Also, the websites that try to get you to unblock ad blockers are equally irritating. Usually I just leave, and find another source of the same news. In many cases their ads are super annoying and CPU-intensive, which is the main reason I block them; it's not that I hate advertising itself. If they were just a simple <img> tag and a hyperlink without a huge pile of JavaScript bloat I would probably not bother blocking them.
- grandalf 9y ago
  Indeed. It's true, in a world where a major newspaper will decide to write a multi-page story about one of Trump's silly tweets and run it on the front page, it's not all that hard for a large number of news orgs to write a similarly informative story, and many make it available for free. I agree about ads, but my least favorite are the ones that begin playing video in a tiny window that devours laptop battery life... It's strange to imagine the marketers who are designing these pages. They must imagine that all of us read only when watching TV is not an option, so they try to make the website as much like TV as possible, complete with a tiny screen that you can click on to simply shift into couch potato mode.
- Karunamon 9y ago
  I find that the Anti-adblock killer list in uBlock takes care of most of these. There's an additional addon you can install that pushes it even further. The fight against browsers rendering markup in the way their users want is a losing one.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
You're correct in that reader attitudes towards paywalls are generally negative [1]. You're incorrect in that (a) advertising appears insufficient to sustain a modern press apparatus, and (b) the Wall Street Journal, at the very least, showed paywalls can be financially lucrative [2]. Roughly comparing, on one hand weak paywall deployers, the NYT and Washington Post, and on the other hand strong paywall deployers, the WSJ and Financial Times, the latter appear to benefit more from said paywalls. [1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f3f8/85f3876f9c098bac89e5a152de733bd51b1a.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f3f8/85f3876f9c098bac89e5a1... [2] https://hbr.org/product/the-new-york-times-paywall/512077-PDF-ENG https://hbr.org/product/the-new-york-times-paywall/512077-PD...

dheera 9y ago

Just change your web browser's User-Agent to the Google crawler?

Operyl 9y ago
That said, some publishers are smart and also check to see if your IP is in a Google range. EDIT: That is, you can check the PTR record of an IP: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en
- marindez 9y ago
  You can set the PTR record of an IP to a domain you don't control. Most ISPs won't let you do that, though. Also, whatever host you set as the PTR record won't resolve back to your IP.
  - Operyl 9y ago
    Sure, but like you said most consumer ISPs don't let you ;). A business is most likely going to subscribe if they need it, and us "hacker" types aren't cutting into their profits that much by circumventing heh.
  - lucb1e 9y ago
    XS4ALL in the Netherlands lets you. I never knew I should be using it for that -- I just set it to match my email domain to end up in less spamboxes.
- dheera 9y ago
  Hmm, I wonder if setting up a VPN on Google Cloud would do the trick.
solomatov 9y ago
IANAL, but this is probably a violation of DMCA anti-circumvention provisions.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

davidgerard 9y ago

archive.is still captures text from most of these.

erentz 9y ago

I have no problem with this. But in return I should be able to opt out of results that I cannot view. A result for a news article that changes when I click on it to a "Please subscribe..." plea is not the result that was returned that I clicked on. Unfortunately, like the AMP fiasco, I doubt this is what will happen as Google doesn't exist to serve it's users.

mathattack 9y ago
AMP fiasco?
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  The whole thing where AMP is being enforced in Google, such that what were previously links to third-party sites are now served entirely from Google with a moderately-broken shell around them, and with no ability to opt-out of having search results hijacked in this manner.
baldfat 9y ago
You block the sources in your Google News feed. https://news.google.com/news/u/0/settings/sources?hl=en https://news.google.com/news/u/0/settings/sources?hl=en
- FireBeyond 9y ago
  So "blocking paywalls" that appear accessible in Google Search is now "opt out"? Ewww. This might be the time I hit Duck Duck Go. To be clear, I have no issue with paywalls. But they should be flagged as such. "Article title: blah blah blah [Subscription required to view content]" even. But they won't do that, because publishers, who buy advertising, will scream because they KNOW their click through rates would plummet. After all, even with a paywall, you still get plenty of metrics and advertising bumps on that first click to the site.
  - baldfat 9y ago
    > Google Search is now "opt out"? No, not at all. It just doesn't let you get free articles behind the pay wall. So now you can either avoid the pay wall websites or you just block them.

strictnein 9y ago

Not the best headline. Here's the gist of it: > "Google’s plans include doing away with the “first click free” policy, which requires subscription-based news outlets to offer three free articles a day through its search and news features, allowing users to skirt pay walls. A new program, which Google plans to start this week and is calling “flexible sampling,” will allow those publishers to determine how many free clicks to give Google’s users." So sites can still give access to Google visitors (which I bet many will), but they just have more say over the specifics.

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

I happily pay for lots of services, but I just don't think many of these publishers are worth paying for. I'm pretty tired of shitty clickbait headlines, and stories which cherry-pick a handful of twitter posts to make it seem like there's outrage over something. Even worse, it seems like most publishers are dead set of trying to feed you their agenda. Why would I pay for misleading or intellectually dishonest articles?

baldfat 9y ago
These news paid sources are usually only valuable for local content. My local news paper' only redeeming value is it is local but it isn't $4 a week valuable.
- TheCowboy 9y ago
  I agree that $4*52 is expensive, but it could cost less if more people were subscribing. Unfortunately, even at a more reasonable price per month or week, I think papers wouldn't see a surge in subscribers in the current environment. Short-term, I think people undervalue the value of local news. There are often a lot of info holes when it comes to local government and politics. I wonder if this has adverse affects that lead to less involvement in local politics except when a NIMBY issue appears, which doesn't seem like good governance. Local news coverage, with the exception of major cities, tends to be sparse and often non-existent. Even for some major areas there can be a lot of holes in coverage. This problem makes itself apparent to me when come election day I try to look up all of the candidates, and find no info for many of them that isn't from their own website (if it even exists).
  - baldfat 9y ago
    It is going to bot created I am afraid to say. My city has good local coverage, a wee bit biased but it is local people in a School Board meetings and City Meetings at least. Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/08/google-is-funding-the-creation-of-software-that-writes-local-news-stories/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/08/google-is-funding-the-crea...

baldfat 9y ago

Block the paid wall sources so you are not annoyed anymore. I have CNET blocked due to their CBS and CES Fiasco and never unblocked them. https://news.google.com/news/u/0/settings/sources?hl=en https://news.google.com/news/u/0/settings/sources?hl=en

mindcrime 9y ago

Subscriptions are just the wrong model for news publishers. There's NO way I could possibly afford to subscribe to every news output I occasionally read news from, unless the subscriptions were so close to free as to be useless as a revenue source for the publisher. It's just not going to happen. What we desperately need is a real, useful micro-payments model where you can pay per-article. I'd be happy to pay you a few cents, or a dollar, or whatever, for each of the 3 or 4 articles I read on your site per month. But I'm not buying a subscription just to read 3 or 4 articles. The economics just don't work.

visarga 9y ago
> What we desperately need is a real, useful micro payments model where you can pay per-article. That would incentivize hit-and-run articles that cause sensation to milk micropayments, leading to a spiral of clickbait even worse than that caused by advertising.
- sp332 9y ago
  I don't see it. Clickbait headlines just need to get you to the page even if the article is crap. Microtransactions would require articles to be worth something to the reader.
  - davidcbc 9y ago
    How will the reader know that the article is worth something unless they pay?
    - infinityplus1 9y ago
      Won't they pay after reading the article and decide if it's worth it?
      - sp332 9y ago
        That's what I was thinking. And if not, they'll have to convince people like any other kind of media: reviews, previews, or even refunds.

j-c-hewitt 9y ago

Maybe non-subscribers should get a lite reader's digest type abstract of the article instead of the truncated/cloaked stuff that currently gets served on sites like WSJ. Most articles can probably be described in 50-100 words or less. The automatic truncation is often less descriptive than a good meta description would be.

wnevets 9y ago

As a side note google gave me a free digital subscription to the nytimes for posting reviews on google maps. Is google or nytimes making money off of this?

throwaway2016a 9y ago

The O'Reilly Safari system is a great alternative to paywalls. You pay for Safari and it pays out royalties to the authors proportional to how many users read your book that month. So an author of a book that had 200 readers would get roughly double the pay of one that has 100 readers. I would gladly pay for a kind of all access pass that divided up my subscription money to the news sites I visited the most. Of course, if someone goes to 200 different sites equally an individual publisher would get less from that customer but I think that's fair.

pmyteh 9y ago
There's an older version of this principle used to compensate authors for library borrowing in the UK and other countries called Public Lending Right. The government puts some tax money into a pot, and it's paid out to authors in proportion to the number of loans of their books. There's also a cap to stop the bulk of the money going to a handful of bestselling authors. In some ways, this can be seen as croudsourcing decisions on government subsidy, which is an interesting model.

15charlimit 9y ago

Cue massive drops in traffic (again) and news orgs whining about it (again) and blaming the next boogeyman, whatever that is. Probably something something "piracy" etc. Paying/subscribing for general-purpose news is old news. It had its time, and that time is over. Much like music industry CD sales with the real rise of p2p, news orgs will have to figure out what their "ipod" equivalent is going to be.

bluetwo 9y ago

Like others I think a well done micro-pavement or bundle of payments would be nice. One thing I think that is missing from the discussion is metrics. If you do a nice job building the site, and let users give an indication whether they want to see more or less coverage on the topic, you can offer this metrics data back to the news outlets, which can give them far better direction than simply looking at website clicks (which encourages click-bait). This, along with a slice of micro-payments would be valuable to them.

graphememes 9y ago

Unfortunately there is no need to pay for news articles, there is a need to pay for RESEARCH and MEDICAL papers. News? No.

AmIFirstToThink 9y ago

GoFundMe? Patreon? Those who could find people to buy what they are producing, are already doing it on social funding platforms. The models that are struggling are those who are not able to sell what they have to sell... a product that not only sold ad-space but infoticles, just like infomartials on TV or product placement in movies, there was paid bias in articles. In the days of Internet, no body wants to watch ads, not in the sidebar clearly labeled as an ad, or in the center of the page in terms of a info(ar)ticle. I would rather pay to hear the bias of the person speaking, than letting a corporation tell that person what he or she can or can't write. There is banding together of like minded people to pool resources together to keep making progress on a cause, much better model than a corporation. Much efficient use of funds, time, energy. The only one to loose is the investor or influence seeker, who would have to do much more digging than just walking into an top floor office with a check in hands.

downrightmike 9y ago

We should just go back to having newsies selling newspapers on the street corner for a nickle. Study has found that there is a direct correlation to musicals about newsies when they are a significant portion of the news ecosystem.

ThomPete 9y ago

Publisher have one and mostly one way to be profitable. Shrink the overhead with 90%. If they cant do that most of them are simply not going to survive. Subscription or no subscription.

chatmasta 9y ago

Called it [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15383058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15383058