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Ask HN: What's the future of journalism without ads or subscriptions?
Given that the internet has made people very hesitant to pay for content, or how it means you're competing with hundreds of free sites offering the same thing?
I've heard individual article payments via sites like Blendle are a possibility, but I'm not sure how many people see the value of the content being high enough to pay for that. Same with subscriptions, which seem to dependent heavily on prestige and a lack of competition to truly be successful.
Patreon type schemes could work I guess, though in that case I fear the idea of a publication might be lost to a bunch of individual authors earning less than minimum wage as 'influencers'.
So what is the solution here? How will journalism become profitable again?
And what will it look like once ad revenues drop even further and the print world finally drops dead for the last time?
- sgillen 9y agoMaybe we’ll see move towards publicly or philanthropically funded news sources. I can see why having a high quality news source would be an attractive recipient of donations for some people. I’ve already seen the New York Times push this a little bit, asking me to donate to pay for student subscriptions. This model has some obvious downsides, since the news source is now beholden to publish views that their donors like, and the donor class is likely going to be more concentrated and more opioniated than a normal subscriber. but it’s still not too different than what we have now.