63 ms·

Subscription Hell

• scarface74 8y ago
  You can't have it both ways. Either you pay for high quality content or you deal with intrusive ads.
  • Semirhage 8y ago
    The irony of saying that on a popular site that does neither of those things should be lost on no one.
    • trimbo 8y ago
      This site has employment ads for YC portfolio companies placed into the feed.
      • seszett 8y ago
        These ads don't feel intrusive to me.
        • crankylinuxuser 8y ago
          Better yet, they don't have JS payloads with 0-days attached to them. Nor does HN engage in js miners. I still hate adverts, but at least here its not a malware-fest. I still hate ads as they are parasitic in one of our most important resources: attention.
      • colmvp 8y ago
        At least that's relevant and subdued. When I go to certain sites like Vox, I see repeated ads for women's clothing (wtf?, I'm a guy) that makeup around 40% of an article AND clickbait to other sites via Taboola.
        • scarface74 8y ago
          And if they did have better targeted ads by following you across the internet, people would be complaining.
      • dang 8y ago
        We also have Launch HNs for YC startups, which are like the job ads in that they get a placement on the front page to begin with. After that they behave like regular threads though.
    • wand3r 8y ago
      To be fair hn does not operate news as a business but as a cost center that feeds recruitment for talent for both investment and hiring.
      • jjeaff 8y ago
        Which is an interesting issue that I have thought about recently. There are tons of services like this. One analog of this phenomenon are loss leader products in retail. Loss leaders in grocery stores (sometimes produce or in the case of Costco, hotdogs and soda for $1.50). Loss leaders have been responsible for putting lots of small businesses out of business. When enormous companies offer products for free, that others charge for, it makes me wonder where it all ends. Many internet companies have been put out of business by free services offered by the bigger guys. A similar issue is the endless supply of people or businesses willing to take a loss on their product, either because they have VC money, some other revenue source, or because they are just ignorant. Google was able to lose money on YouTube for the better part of a decade, for example. I once had a thriving business buying items at US postal auctions for resale. But the get rich quick bloggers eventually found out about the auctions and then, for years, an endless supply of clueless suckers just kept showing up and paying above MSRP for things like MacBooks and other high end electronics. Ya, they would lose their shirts, and never come back, but there were always fresh meat each month to do the same thing. So most of us that were actually making money previously, had to move on to other things. It seems like this phenomenon could become more proliferated as some of these core internet companies get larger and larger.
        • scarface74 8y ago
          Loss leaders have been responsible for putting lots of small businesses out of business. I can't for the life of me understand how the HN success story Dropbox has a long term future. For the same $9.99 a month that you pay for Dropbox's 1TB Of storage, you can get.... - 2TB of storage from Apple for iCloud - 1TB for each of 5 users on One Drive plus access to the entire MS Office Suite for 5 computers and 5 mobile devices - 1 TB per user plus everything else you get from G Suite. -Amazon Drive is 1TB for $60 a year. Yes I know that Apple isn't aimed at businesses, but the rest are.
    • fjsolwmv 8y ago
      HN is has two parts: 1. Free chitchat 2. Links to content. HN isn't much without the external content.
      • wafflebear 8y ago
        To be fair it's the comments that count. HN could randomly generate topics with a markov generator and still retain 80% of the value for me :)
        • kaybe 8y ago
          We could also take turns in inventing titles and then vote on them. Is there any metric for people clicking the external link compared to unique commenters?
    • always_good 8y ago
      I think it's more ironic that your example of a site doing it right is one run by a company with deep pockets that can afford for the site to not print money directly. That's not the future of the internet that I want. In fact, it's terrifying. This misunderstanding is why the internet is gradually becoming more and more centralized. People don't want to pay money and they don't want to see ads. The only sites that can brave that reality are charities, sites that confer other benefits to the organization (like HN), and the few major services that people will pay for (like Netflix). Not much in between, and the sites in between were basically enabled by ads like the collaborative writing forum I grew up on.
    • zerostar07 8y ago
      that wouldn't be the case if YC wasn't paying for it.
  • whatever1 8y ago
    Was Bloomberg making $35 from ads from my 3 visits to their site per month? If not why do they ask me now for $35?
    • mlevental 8y ago
      it's funny that bloomberg is now trying to charge for something that's basically content marketing for its terminals.
    • quakenul 8y ago
      Welcome to the economics of ad free websites (for now, at least). A large percentage of people simply will not pay for website access, no matter how low the price. So you get your money from those who do, who value the service so highly that parting with it would be huge pain point for them, and, so Bloomberg assumes probably after extensive surveys, those who feel that way about their publication, will likely have 35$/month to spare for the privilege.
      • d2p 8y ago
        Just because a large percentage won't pay doesn't mean that putting the price high will maximise income. It's possible that at $10/month they'd get 5x the signups. That said, increasing prices is hard; reducing is easy. If you're trying to figure out sweet spot for max revenue is it probably makes sense to start high and slowly reduce it until you find it. If you're on a rolling monthly payment and decrease everyones prices together, nobody will get upset.
        • scarface74 8y ago
          The biggest hurdle is not price elasticity between getting someone to pay $10 versus $35, it's getting people to pay anything instead of something. Look at the App Store as an example and how hard it is to get people to pay $1. Besides the people who are willing to pay are by definition people who are willing to spend money - the same demographic that advertisers covet the most. Meaning they can't target their best customers for advertising.
  • hinkley 8y ago
    And yet we have print magazines where you pay for the magazine and there are so many ads you can’t find the goddamned table of contents. I’m looking at you, Wired Magazine.
    • scarface74 8y ago
      They don't make enough off of subscriptions to make publishing worthwhile and if they give it away for free, the advertisers don't value the customers as highly. That's why free magazines like MacWeek and PCWeek forced you to take surveys to qualify for a free subscription back in the day.
    • obscura 8y ago
      Ha ha, I've also cursed Wired for all their ads, particularly at the beginning of the magazine. Them and the subscription card, though at least it can function as a bookmark.
  • makecheck 8y ago
    You’re overstating the two options here. The choices might be to pay or see ads, but there is NOTHING requiring them to be “intrusive”. They weren’t intrusive in printed magazines, and publishers survived. Over-engineered attention-stealing data-hungry tracking ads are something invented in the Internet age, and I see absolutely no reason at all to include any of those features in the other option.
    • jaydz 8y ago
      Magazine publishers survived because they had subscriber info which allowed targeted advertising (name, age, address, etc).
• mozumder 8y ago
  Or, stop consuming so much shit. It's OK to not have everything, you know?
  • dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    It's a pity you're being downvoted as what you say really makes a lot of sense and everybody would do well if they followed this advice.
    • d2p 8y ago
      Even if we choose not to have things because they're expensive, it doesn't mean we should not complain about the prices. Companies make changes based on feedback so if there's good evidence that people think something is too expensive, the company may consider changing their prices or have offers. I don't think people don't complain about stuff enough, we get taken for rides by big companies all the time while their CEOs take home massive pay packets. People should fight for better services and lower prices more; it works!
  • grogenaut 8y ago
    In agreement. I keep the site's I read to a minimum. Dose of world news, vc news, some gaming news, tech news. When I run out I browse hackaday. Maybe a total of 45 minutes if I'm really bored. The I have to start creating to entertain myself. I purposely do not add new aggregator sites when bored. In fact my fallback (Fark) is woefully out of date. If I feel the urge to read that I immediately pick a side project and open it up. We have way too many consumers in this world. Not enough producers. Tho I do troll Craigslist for machinery when bored as well but hitting the limits on the amount of tooling my garage can hold.
  • SuperChihuahua 8y ago
    True, I save a lot of time when I can't read an article I clicked on because it's behind a paywall!
• fwdpropaganda 8y ago
  > I’m an emphatic champion of subscription models, particularly in media. > All of these subscriptions are starting to add up. Just thought I'd save everyone the time of reading this article. Not much substance.
  • sgroppino 8y ago
    Don't forget this one: >"Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format."
• calebh 8y ago
  I'd pay money for a Netflix-like service for newspapers. I know it's probably not as good for the newspaper business as the old subscription model, but it's pretty much the only viable model that I can see working.
  • dopeboy 8y ago
    Me and three friends worked on a similar idea at the YC hackathon a couple weeks ago. You'd pay us $10/month and we'd buy a lot of subscriptions to different newspapers. You'd install our chrome extension and when you came across a paywall, we'd autofill credentials that are just valid for one day. We didn't win but it definitely piqued the interest of the crowd and the judges (Sam, Michael, and Adora). We're not pursuing it but hopefully others do.
    • michaeltoth 8y ago
      This is a cool idea, but I imagine this isn't legal, right? Creating an actual business out of this would have to require buy-in from the content creators
      • psherman42 8y ago
        I think it’s funny how everyone is surprised that Silicon Valley hackathon-goers don’t understand or care about copyright. Maybe they’re just “disrupting”!
    • matthewmcg 8y ago
      What did you plan to do when the publishers terminated your accounts for sharing credentials?
      • rocky1138 8y ago
        Probably keep making more until the publishers were forced to negotiate. This method is successful. See: Uber.
      • jstarfish 8y ago
• Legogris 8y ago
  A standard for micropayment for content needs to evolve. Our relationships to publishers have changed substantially. I would be willing to pay per read from sources like The Guardian, New York Times, The Economist, etc, but I am not frequent enough to want to subscribe. For the citizen who wants to get their information from different sources across the globe and political spectrum, it gets unreasonable to expect subscriptions. While something like Netflix/Spotify would be nice from a user/consumer perspective, there is both the difficulty of gathering everyone under one platform and the risks of having a single (or a few) number of brokers of news across the board.
  • overlordalex 8y ago
    We have a local news website that I think has a realistic model. When you view an article with an ad-blocker it shows you a dialog with a variety of options: 1. Whitelist the site 2. "Nah, journalists should go hungry" - this dismisses the popup and lets you read the article with your blocker intact 3. 5c - read the article ad-free 4. 10c - 1 hour of no-ads 5. 30c - 1 day of no-ads I've converted to US cents, but even in local currency think these prices are extremely reasonable, and I'd love to see more sites offer similar rates
    • vageli 8y ago
      Does the service require you to maintain a wallet with them? As in, you deposit money and transactions are drawn from your deposit? Otherwise, I can't see how accepting such a low amount per transaction could be feasible.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • carapace 8y ago
    The fact that "micropayments" weren't even mentioned in this article leads me to dismiss it. There still doesn't seem to be a "Twitter of Micropayments" yet. Gratipay shut down, (RIP) https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981?gi=54bc4ed25327 https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981?gi=54bc4ed25327 Patreon takes a percentage, which, to me, seems unjustifiable.
• whatever1 8y ago
  Maybe a pay per click business model where you get a monthly bill from your IP for your internet activity in websites that require payment is an alternative
  • dvtrn 8y ago
    That seems fraught with peril for abuse, I'm already handing over enough money to those crooks at my ISP..
    • aiCeivi9 8y ago
      It already is abused. I don't know anyone who used "Direct carrier billing" on-purpose, it is only used by scammers.
  • jstarfish 8y ago
    We already tried this with pay-per-SMS, 1-900 lines, roaming charges, data overage charges and premium content on cell phones (ringtones, wallpapers, etc) and it was a nightmare-- before you know it your bill is $1000. Its also a nightmare for those of us who have to keep a close eye on AWS spending. Someone spins up an x1-large you didn't notice? Too bad, now pay us. Its a terrible model for consumers in general. My wallet should not be open by default.
• ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I am not sure why it is so fundamentally difficult for publications to understand what people want. The issue many people, myself included, have with subscriptions are that you pay $x / month whether or not you read that month's product. And whether or not you read every article or just one. So for me, as a consumer, my "price per article" goes from small to literally infinity (pay but read zero articles). Now the pay per article model works so much better. You can charge me to read a single article but I pay nothing if I read nothing. This is the model that blendle.com uses and my experience was that even though their "per article" price was much higher than I originally thought reasonable (9 cents to 50 cents) I was paying basically $50 a month for subscriptions to the publications that I read (WSJ, Economist, NYT, WaPo, etc) and with Blendle I end up putting maybe $15 or $25 per month into my Blendle wallet. So its half as expensive for me and I still get to read, advertising free, any article in those publications. Blendle's money back if its click bait policy is the clincher. When you read a lemon you get your money back. I win (save money) they win (they get paid for their journalism).
  • d2p 8y ago
    This is my issue with most subscriptions too. The price has to be set based on the average use, which makes it really expensive for the infrequent user (and ultimately this means less conversions, yet nobody seems to care about this?!). I've had the same gripe with games for years. I stopped paying for Xbox live and World of Warcraft because they're the same - if I only played for a few hours in a month, I've paid over-the-odds. I can't predict in a given month how likely I am to have how many hours, so I end up paying them £0. They could get more money out of me if they had a better PAYG or tiering option.
    • StudyAnimal 8y ago
      Obviously (in these cases) there are market segments that favor all you can eat subscriptions and those that favor à la carte. It makes sense that for most things the heavy users get the sub and the light users get to pay for what they use. However I thought of a counter example. Spotify. I would normally be a light user of music. I had some CDs in the 90s but lost interest in the whole thing by the time I graduated Uni. However it’s still nice to listen to some music sometimes. However I couldn’t imagine being able to buy all the singles I listen to in a month for less than €9. That’s the secret. Price your subs so it’s a better offer for the lightest of users. Not hard in the music business that was ripe for disruption. And I think that’s the message in the article. Subs themselves are not the problem , but the way they are priced . (Although the fact that he spends so much money on subs kind of negates his argument. It seems like people like him are happy to pay which reinforces the soundness of the business case). Incidentally I subscribe to ms office even though I would never have paid a one off fee for it. I think it’s cheap enough to justify its value. I also subscribe to Netflix but should really cancel. In europe there is not much content there. When I first got it i watched maybe 4 or 5 interesting documentaries now I never see anything there worth watching. I might unsubscribe after my daughter finishes binging gravity falls. (She’s not a big user either we both find YouTube more interesting and relevant than European Netflix)
• dschuetz 8y ago
  It was a matter of time that subscription plans hit the same level of annoyance as online ads. But, subscriptions have a significantly heavier impact than ads. You cannot netflixify journalism. It's different to movies or music. Journalism is not art. The online subscription business model doesn't work for journalism, because alternatives are far more easily accessible than print media. News are not unique works, news articles share the same base - things that happened anywhere in the world. Why should I get multiple subscriptions then?
  • goatherders 8y ago
    You CAN netflixify journalism. It's not different than movies or music. It is art.
  • AlexandrB 8y ago
    > Why should I get multiple subscriptions then? My dad subscribed to both "The Edmonton Journal" and "The Edmonton Sun". Why? Because each had it's own bias and perspective on current events. What you're describing is not only not new, it's literally the dominant business model for print journalism for the last 100 years. Will it translate to the internet? I guess we're about to find out.
• techsupporter 8y ago
  At the time of this writing, all of the comments here are focused on content, but I want to touch on the author's bit about software: > It’s not just Bloomberg and media — it’s software too. I used to write everything in Ulysses, a syncing Markdown editor for OS X and iOS. I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments illustrate, that price is vastly out of proportion from the cost of providing the software (which I might add, is entirely hosted on iCloud infrastructure). I have noticed this as well, that a not-small number of software programs have turned from "give us one money for this version" to "give us slightly smaller amount of one money per month, but do it in perpetuity if you want to keep going with the data you've entered." That, to me, is crap and is incredibly frustrating, especially when the subscription model is coupled with a data lockout threat. A task manager, a word processor, even a drawing program...none of these ought to require a subscription to be able to use. Sure, have a subscription service for something that needs upkeep, like a syncing service (but get out of here if all you do is just lump it into the user's iCloud storage) or a data feed. But it's almost insulting to say "we used to charge you $50 once, now we're charging you $29.95 per month forever (if you want to see those notes in two years, and no, we don't have a data takeout API); it's such a deal!"
  • baxtr 8y ago
    True. A subscription to Office 365 comes down to 99 Euros per years. Of course you’d pay maybe 150 every three years or so for a new version back in the days, but still that’s double. Also, I wonder whether this will lead to a slower development of the software. Before you’d have to create a leap forward to impress people to buy the new version, if the old version was still good enough.
    • techsupporter 8y ago
      I like that you mentioned Office 365 because I see that as "subscription done right." You can still buy perpetual licenses for the components of Office, you can easily store the data you created with those components locally, and if you stop paying for Office-as-a-subscription the same programs still let you view (but not edit) your data. Carrot Weather App is another good one. Pay $5 once to get a really polished weather app with some basic "cloud" functions thrown in, like notifications to a phone device, some fun "achievements," and a pretty good weather data feed. If you want the super-accurate feed or if you want more advanced notifications and mobile device access (e.g. repeatedly on your Apple Watch), pay up for the subscription because it costs the dev more. And, if you stop paying, that $5 you initially paid is still valuable because the underlying app still works.
• cornholio 8y ago
  I disagree with the author that subscriptions are objectively and inherently the superior model for web monetization. An unsung virtue of the ad-driven web it's is inclusiveness and strong worldwide redistribution effects. Everybody sees the ads, however the actual value of a pair of eyeballs is widely variable, by orders of magnitude so. It's therefore profitable to make the content free and distribute it as far as possible, to have the best chance of catching high value visitors that covert to ad action and revenue. The net effect is that large swaths of society and indeed the world get the internet services for free, subsidized by purchases made by richer westerners, purchases and services they themselves could never afford. This model works well with the economic structure of web publishing, where marginal cost of serving an existing page to a new customer is essentially zero - even for the obese, media rich pages the author is referring to. Once you move to a flat fee, this massive redistribution ceases. There is a clearly defined model of customer, say, those living in the middle class of an OECD country, that is targeted to maximize revenue, and a paywall is put in place that excludes 95% of the rest of the world. These are people for which 9$ might represent a tenth of their wage, and who might not even have access to modern banking through which to purchase internet services. The open web was created by hacker ethos, but paid for using ads; a flat tax against widely variable income is strongly inequalitarian and exclusionary.
  • kazinator 8y ago
    > There is a clearly defined model of customer, say, those living in the middle class of an OECD country And, of course, that must be the very individual who wants those "immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format."
  • anarazel 8y ago
    > An unsung virtue of the ad-driven web it's is inclusiveness and strong worldwide redistribution effects. Everybody sees the ads, however the actual value of a pair of eyeballs is widely variable, by orders of magnitude so. It's therefore profitable to make the content free and distribute it as far as possible, to have the best chance of catching high value visitors that covert to ad action and revenue. > Once you move to a flat fee, this massive redistribution ceases I think this largely disregards the effects of targeting. A lot of the things (payday loans as the prime example) advertised to people less well off are reverse redistribution, exploiting the financial situation / needs of viewers.
• alexashka 8y ago
  There was a short period of time when companies competed for monopoly status. That time is now almost over - we have established monopolies. Established monopolies use their power - that's why they fought so hard to become monopolies in the first place. This article is saying 'gee, I liked it when Uber kept giving me really cheap rides, but now it doesn't anymore, such hell!' The only reason you were getting cheaper rides was because it was a mafia deal, I help you now, for free, but when the time comes, you do something for me. That's how it works folks...
• codazoda 8y ago
  I don't mind subscriptions but I do fear the day when my favorite subscriptions start to run ads on top of their monthly fee.
  • euvitudo 8y ago
    Case in point: cable tv.
    • pkaye 8y ago
      Or Hulu.
      • _delirium 8y ago
        Or newspapers, for that matter.
      • millstone 8y ago
        Hulu did the opposite: they initially had ads for everyone, but later introduced an ad-free package at a higher price.
  • Reedx 8y ago
    NY Times already does. I was surprised and annoyed to still see ads when I subscribed.
  • conanbatt 8y ago
    Subscriptions are terrible business models as well. The vast majority of subscriptions work on users that pay but dont use the system. They are not economically efficient at all.
  • cheschire 8y ago
    Or at least covertly collect and sell your usage data for data aggregators to use to advertise to you on other services.
  • mozumder 8y ago
    A lot of good media properties are sold BECAUSE of the ads. Think magazines like Vogue, with 800 pages of ads that people are looking at for the season's trends. Or other shopping magazines. Also, local newspapers provide useful local business advertising. A good media property knows that ads are as useful as other content.
• djhworld 8y ago
  The thing I don't understand about this article is the author makes out like he's been forced into this situation, the "hell" he talks about is entirely of his own making.
  • Shank 8y ago
    I mean, the fact that paywalls are being introduced in front of previously free content does make this something to be dragged into, not necessarily something that's been walked into. If your habits for 5 years involved following links to free content, and that content still exists but is now paid, you're now losing access to things you previously had -- which is tantamount to force.
• lajhsdfkl 8y ago
  People need to understand that the alternative to ads is paying hundreds of dollars a month in subscription fees and then still not having access to all the services you would have had access to in an ad economy world. People in Europe will soon get this wakeup call. Services that were only marginally profitable are already shutting down because of GDPR. I'm confident that the EU government and its citizens have little idea of the consequences that will result from their privacy legislation.
  • rahoulb 8y ago
    Maybe if the service is only marginally profitable without acting unethically it should shut down.
    • lajhsdfkl 8y ago
      Showing ads is unethical now? >Maybe if the service is only marginally profitable without acting unethically it should shut down. Also I love this neo puritan thinking. I'm sure all the users of these services agree with your ideology and you forcing it down their throats is for their own good correct?
      • Sylos 8y ago
        No, tracking is unethical, which most ads rely on. And yes, it is for their own good to not have thousands of databases with their data littered across the internet. I know, this is not a very American way of thinking, but no one can be an expert at everything. Most people are not experts at computers and even less can grasp the outreach and effects of their data being everywhere. These people need help just as much as the average guy needs assistance with doctors. If they knew enough to tell when a doctor is bullshitting them, they could probably become a doctor, too.
        • lajhsdfkl 8y ago
          >And yes, it is for their own good to not have thousands of databases with their data littered across the internet. "With their data". Aka whether or not they liked a group pertaining to motorcycles or whether they searched for fishing rods on google. Yeah, we definitely need to shut off what is the most consumer friendly way of monetizing services in history so that a database of inane shit that is only relevant to marketers isn't tracked.
• merinowool 8y ago
  If people want internet without ads then need to pay for the service with different means. I can see a problem that it is extremely difficult to find a company that would process payments for you if the website you have is for adults only for example. Potentially this could be solved by cryptocurrency, so that you can run your own payment processor, but I have not seen a solution for subscriptions yet.
• natch 8y ago
  I’m dismayed to see this is suggesting bundling, which most consumers hate, as a solution.
• thetruthseeker1 8y ago
  I think the problem is the pricing model. If I watch one Netflix movie a month, it’s not really worth 11$ to me. These subscriptions should have tiers starting from few cents - but it may be less a Netflix problem and more a problem of labels and production companies who may not be willing to see it that way and force higher Subscriptions implicitly.
• jiveturkey 8y ago
  the thesis is wrong, of course compromising the entire article. you/we aren’t getting previously free content, now for a fee. you are getting content previously paid for with ad dollars, dried up thanks to advertisers abuse (leading to adblock).
• mar77i 8y ago
  I don't really see the downside here. You can now literally not buy into another newssite's BS.
  • Barrin92 8y ago
    this is actually what I've been moving towards. Over the years I've become addicted to way too many news sites be it tech or politics and given that I've noticed the same trend as the author I went the other way, just prune my consumption habits. I've cut it down to one physical newspaper subscription, use the BBC or DW or other public news sources only once or twice a day, and that's pretty much it. The most notable thing is that I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything, I was just reading the same stuff obsessively before anyway. It's a little hard these days to escape the event driven newscycle but it's not a bad idea.
    • zerostar07 8y ago
      a visit on reddit is enough reading material for most of the day, and its free.
• lifeformed 8y ago
  I wish I could just pay $x/mo for unlimited access to all media. It would get distributed to content creators proportionally based on my time using websites, music, videos, and games. No ads or subscriptions. I can't imagine how such a system would be implemented though. And I'm sure there would be new unintended consequences with such an incentive structure. But something like that would be nice!
  • smaddock 8y ago
    What you're describing sounds similar to Basic Attention Token [1] which is used by Brave browser [2]. [1] https://basicattentiontoken.org/ https://basicattentiontoken.org/ [2] https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/
    • lucb1e 8y ago
      If the intro video is to be believed, that seems like a terrible idea in so many ways. The video explains it like "you view ads, your browser privately tracks whether you watched them, and awards the website and the user with BATs". So while we now have middlemen in the form of ad networks, with BATs we have an additional one to convert that currency into your local currency. Additionally, the ad network will have to believe the browser that the user actually viewed ads at all (DRM all over again). And what blockchain has to do with this is, as always, unexplained.
      • Aramgutang 8y ago
        Right now, earning BAT by watching ads is not yet implemented. After you use up the free 10 BAT you get on first install, you have to buy more to keep paying the sites you visit (this is reasonably frictionless at the moment, and is likely to get more so). I assume there aren't many people right now that buy BAT to send into the Brave wallet (though I do, and know of others that do), but it's still early days. The part of their proposal I would suggest fixating on is the fact that if you make deposits into your Brave wallet, you get to block ads (right now, ads are blocked regardless), and publishers will be able to turn off their anti-ad-blocking measures if they see you're using Brave, since you'll be providing them with revenue. The hope is that in the future, paywall sites like WSJ may allow you to bypass their paywall if they can verify that you're using Brave. There is a lot of uncertainty right now about how the whole ad system will work, because the team is focusing on making the browser robust enough so it can compete with FF and Chrome. But in the meantime, they're also getting useful information about what real users and publishers are actually keen on. I suspect that the more obvious flaws, like the ones you pointed out, will be accounted for once the system is fleshed out. They have not shied away from moving away from their original proposal to more practical approaches. Regarding the earned BAT by watching ads, I believe that it cannot actually be withdrawn, only used to pay publishers, but again, things may change. And I agree that the blockchain may superflous here, but using it has allowed them to get the funding to get things off the ground and attract users, which counts as a valid use in my book.
• combatentropy 8y ago
  > We didn’t need paywalls on the early web because we focused on plain text from other users. > Plain text is easier to produce So can we go back to plain text? Actually is this even true? Take a newspaper like the Washington Post. Now I've seen All the President's Men, where two reporters spend days and weeks, driving and flying around the country, for just a few articles. I know Watergate was an usual amount of investigation, but I still would think the research and writing is the most expensive part of an article. > Today’s consumers [...] want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, > graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format. I smirked because I have JavaScript turned off. In fact I run my own little script that strips out all the CSS and starts over. Of course a member of Hacker News is unusual, but I know my family members are the same way, always complaining about how complicated websites are. Maybe we're all just old fuddy duddies. But if it's the young who want all this fanciness, those are the same people who aren't going to pay more than 99 cents for a newspaper subscription. I still think pretty websites should not be a huge expense. Hire a graphic designer to give you a framework, some stylesheets. Custom multimedia affairs for each article have always, always, always been annoying to me.
• zenhack 8y ago
  > Take my colleague Connie Loizos’ article from yesterday reporting on a new venture fund. The text itself is about 3.5 kilobytes uncompressed, but the total payload of the page if nothing is cached is more than 10 MB, or more than 3000x the data usage of the actual text itself. This pattern has become so common that it has been called the website obesity crisis. Yet, all of our research shows people want high-definition images with their stories, instant loading of articles on the site, and interactivity. Those features have to be paid somehow, begetting us the advertising and subscription models we see today. It was kindof upsetting to read this after having switched the article into Firefox's reader mode, because the page was completely unusable. If you want to talk about consumers' wallets not existing in a vacuum: if your 3.5 KB article is sending me 10 megs of crap, then your mobile users' carriers are charging them more than the advertizers are paying you. There are some real challenges in figuring out how to fund journalism, but if bandwidth is one of them you're doing something very wrong.
  • ImaCake 8y ago
    I use firefox on mobile for ad-blocking and reader mode. Sometimes I get frustrated when firefox gets unstable and try chrome, but the lack of a proper reader mode and no way to disable ads makes half the internet completely unusable. I find it hard to believe that average chrome using consumers are doing anything more than tolerating the current state of the web.
  • JasonFruit 8y ago
    Mobile users and rural satellite users like me. I was also struck by: > We didn’t need paywalls on the early web because we focused on plain text from other users. Plain text is easier to produce, lowering the friction for people to contribute, and it’s also cheaper to store and transmit, lowering the cost of bandwidth. I still want plain text, and I think there must be others like me — we just want to read what they have to say, which is more immersive than the ten megabytes of dreck they sent me could possibly be.
  • vladdanilov 8y ago
    There are glaring optimization issues. Over 6MB of those 10MB is just one bloated photo [1]. It can be compressed down to 1-2MB. Moreover, if it was a proper responsive image, it would not be larger than 100-200 KB for most readers because a good JPEG compressor can pull 2 bits per pixel [2]. Ironically, image optimization apps don't get that much coverage. [1] https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/vikbajaj2018.jpg https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/vikbajaj20... [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04416.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04416.pdf
• tlrobinson 8y ago
  Not to be that “just add blockchain” guy, but this would be a great usecase for permissionless cryptocurrency micropayments, e.x. Lightning Network. Create an open protocol, build it into browsers, let content sites ask you to pay $0.01 (or whatever) to view an article. Maybe you could set your browser to automatically pay for the first N articles or M dollars per site per day. Or maybe a site could offer an unlimited subscription option through the same system.
  • brockwhittaker 8y ago
    Blockchain isn’t necessary. You can have a debit account system and change cents per article without the high friction cost of making people buy some cryptocurrency.
    • tlrobinson 8y ago
      Of course, but then it's not open, decentralized, and permissionless like the web is. In that respect there's always been an impedance mismatch between the web itself and the payment systems you could use on the web. Cryptocurrency has the potential to change that, which I find interesting.
• rayiner 8y ago
  I like software subscriptions. It’s a way to ensure that the software developer is going to have a predictable revenue stream to continue to improve features and fix bugs in the software. That is valuable to me as a user.
  • andyfleming 8y ago
    I agree. This is an often overlooked or under-appreciated aspect of these models. Especially for smaller teams or individual software developers, it can provide some consistency in income and allow them to budget time to continue to invest in the software. Additionally, pricing models that let you keep your current version of their software when the subscription expires are pretty reasonable as well. I believe the Jetbrains licensing works this way. It gets a little more complicated with bigger companies and software though. For example, how can adobe price Photoshop fairly for a hobby user that uses it once a month and a production designer who uses it 8 hours a day?
  • h1d 8y ago
    Do note that it depends on the subscription model. If they give you a perpetual license when terminating the subscription, it would be good but if they won't let you use it, they just get paid by locking you up with less motivation to keep improving the software.
• chris_wot 8y ago
  The issue is that they are charging too much, not that they are charging. If they consider that people start paying for everything they consider worthwhile, at some point even some of the things they love that is worthwhile will have to get the chop. Now if they charge less, then that person (for instance, me!) can more easily pay for everything they love. They just don't seem to understand that people have a certain amount of money, they cannot pay the prices for everything if they try to gouge too much money. Basically, they will get the more well off folks, but the issue is that there are only so many rich people - there are more ordinary people than there are wealthy people so subscriptions that cost a lot won't be much for the rich, but will be a lot of everyone else.
• zerostar07 8y ago
  Spending for advertising has not changed overall, however it has shifted from newspapers to "online" which includes newspapers and google, but also "everyone else" ( https://www.statista.com/chart/372/quarterly-growth-of-us-online-advertising/ https://www.statista.com/chart/372/quarterly-growth-of-us-on...). The newspapers maybe should pursue the ad revenue from TV, or find a way to cut out google. Relying on subscriptions is not a valid model for every newspaper. "General purpose" newspapers co-evolved with advertising, which made them pursue large audiences. "News" themselves are advertisements, things to be disseminated, unless we 're talking about some specialized report that only experts can understand. The fundamental need of people to "get the news" is easily satisfied with anything, from facebook to reddit, and people are not going to be paying to have things advertised to them en masse. Subscriptions will eventually lead to the content being increasingly less popular and specialized, which means either the nature of the content will have to change or some of them will shut down. It works when 4-5 major newspapers do it, but when every newspaper becomes subscription-based, the model will break down for all of them. Also i find it hard to believe that readers "want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format". If anything those pages are annoying as hell (bloomberg autoplaying the videos on its articles is a culrpit here). In fact this techcrunch article is enjoyable because it almost pure text and it didnt need any fancy fonts.
• Luc 8y ago
  By the way, you can still get Matt Levine's daily newsletter for free by subscribing to the email version. That's all I want from Bloomberg really!
• tmikaeld 8y ago
  Not all subscriptions are equal though, in the case of Setapp, I'd save about 300$ a year on licenses i still need to pay to get updates... Even more considering they are on stacksocial currently.
• goatherders 8y ago
  Maybe I'm wrong or in the minority, but I think if publishers want to make people pay for content then they should. Saying that people dont want to pay for something they used to get for free may be correct, but that doesn't make it right. Things that have value can be given away for free. Or they can be charged for. And that decision should be made by the producer, not the consumer.
  • zerostar07 8y ago
    Content is information which is goods (edit: not a commodity) and nobody has the right to say it is "right" to force others to pay for it. The market decides its price.
    • goatherders 8y ago
      Content is a commodity? Good lord. What color is the sky on your planet? You pay for content already. All of it.
• hackbinary 8y ago
  Honestly, the subscription model is more honest than a one time purchase pyramid scheme. Software changes over time. It has to, new operating systems, libraries and hardware dictate forward maintenance costs, nevermind bugs and security flaws.
  • jmanderley 8y ago
    Selling a product for a set one-time fee is a "pyramid scheme"? Is someone producing and selling apples running a pyramid scheme as well?
• mbesto 8y ago
  > One way we could fix that situation would be to allow subscriptions to combine together more cheaply. “There are two ways to make money in business: You can unbundle, or you can bundle.” — Jim Barksdale.
• nickjj 8y ago
  For a lot of digital businesses a subscription makes sense. Imagine if back in the day Rails Casts was $3 an episode instead of $20 per month for unlimited monthly access. Suddenly if you wanted to learn Rails, you'd end up watching many dozens or hundreds of 5-10 minute videos for $3 a pop. You would constantly feel like you're being nickel and dimed. It's hard enough to get someone to buy from you once, but expecting someone to make dozens or hundreds of small transactions would be madness. It creates a really high pressure scammy feel to it IMO. Don't you feel the same way?
  • philwelch 8y ago
    Or you could pay $40 once for a book: https://smile.amazon.com/Rails-Way-Addison-Wesley-Professional-Ruby/dp/0134657675/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1525658101&sr=8-1&keywords=the+rails+way&dpID=51K8QKlrljL&preST=_SX218_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch https://smile.amazon.com/Rails-Way-Addison-Wesley-Profession... I think the greatest loss of the modern web has been this explicit move away from literacy. It's like the dark days of television are back again.
    • thirdsun 8y ago
      There's a place for both. While RailsCasts didn't aim to replace a detailed book, it undeniably featured a lot of very helpful and valuable content.
    • nickjj 8y ago
      I looked through the table of contents for that 1,088 page book and I didn't see anything that hinted on how to do sorting on table columns. And this is exactly why Rails Casts was great. You would Google "how do I sort table columns in Rails" and find the episode, watch it in about 10 minutes and implement it in your code base. Rails Casts has been dead for years and it still ranks in the top 3 today on Google for that phrase btw. I don't want to flip through 1,000 pages in a book to find 1 specific feature I am struggling with right now. I may never find it.
      • AlexandrB 8y ago
• gkya 8y ago
  > Today’s consumers though have significantly higher standards than the original users of the web. Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format. Citation needed. This comes up quite often, and people like to assume they know what users want all the time. But is there actual, scientific evidence that, given the same content, a plain HTML+CSS web page that's not interactive but well put together is less compelling to users than a JS-heavy, interactive, overengineered, ad-ridden, tracker-infested and bloated one? Moreover, where do we get the backing evidence for the currently-popular aesthetic choices other than the subjective taste of designers themselves?
  • fuball63 8y ago
    This struck me as an interesting statement too. Especially with "thin" versions of site surfacing, for example thin.npr.org, it seems like people are more accepting of the trade of loading gifs and high Def images for speed.
  • Reedx 8y ago
    Well, they say they researched it: "Yet, all of our research shows people want high-definition images with their stories, instant loading of articles on the site, and interactivity." They understand how much more expensive an image and JS heavy site is to develop and host, so they must have good reason to go through the trouble?
    • gkya 8y ago
      Very often institutions decide stupidly, when the decision is made by people that are not domain experts. Also, numbers may lie. If they did not study the same content with interactive and plain presentation, for example. I recall an article on a murder in Iceland on BBC IIRC, it was overtly interactive, every movement on the touch pad causing unpredictable changes to the page, but the content was so interesting that I put up with it.
      • dbuder 8y ago
• lightedman 8y ago
  The only way to stop this is to simply kill SaaS and advertising industries. As a nice side effect, you'll fix about 80% of what is wrong with the internet today as you do so.
• orf 8y ago
  One thing not mentioned in the article is the engineering cost of altering the subscription and payment features of an app, so it's harder to AB test and experiment with new ways of pricing or things like paying for groups of apps together. Maybe Bloomberg has a lot more resources to throw at this but for a smaller company that has a hacked together or otherwise inflexible subscription system is a risky proposition. Breaking it for some portion of users can result in a lot of lost revenue and potentially effect your customers if the app downgrades/restricts them while you fix it. It's also often created early on, and moving to something like stripe which helps with a lot of this still incurs the risks above.
• tdurden 8y ago
  $35 a month for Bloomberg is an insane amount to ask - even if they cut that number by 90%, it is still very debatable if the content is worth the price.
  • gnicholas 8y ago
    I wonder if they set the price point so high so they can capture lots of revenue from businesses, like the WSJ does. Then for consumers they can offer a huge discount.
• sturgill 8y ago
  “You’ve found market price when buyers complain but still pay.” Subscription revenue is great business. And the optimization of price to maximize profits is a set of fun math problems. It sounds to me like the author doesn’t love how much he spends on things but isn’t willing to do without. Also known as optimal pricing...
  • nixpulvis 8y ago
    To me the issues isn't directly about price (though it's often a part of it), but more about the idea of paying for something continuously versus once. Almost a form of out of sight out of mind.
    • sturgill 8y ago
      For me, those two points are inseparable. But I’ve also spent the last several years of my career focusing on maximizing profits within consumer subscribeables... There are only so many ways to make money: ads, once off charges, term payments, and recurring charges. A consumer license to use vs physical ownership is incredibly interesting. Buying a Mario Brothers cartridge for the original Nintendo vs games delivered online. You could see a compelling case for the Nintendo Switch to offer a subscription service giving access to X games every month. I don’t find either right or wrong. They just “are” so to speak.
      • nixpulvis 8y ago
        The best example I have right now is with music... I am ALWAYS going to want to be able to listen to my library, it's not really fair to assume I should have to pay monthly for it for the rest of my life, but for every day I don't buy the album and I listen to it on AM or Spotify, I'm in effect paying for a redundant service. I get the difficulty finding ways to make money, but we are pigeonholing ourselves into a model that is against the best interest of the users.
        • sturgill 8y ago
          I’d disagree in that you can buy an MP3 and listen forever using whatever device. But Spotify isn’t required to sell you MP3s (or guarantee perpetual playback). And, it turns out, that people (in aggregate) really like the Spotify model. One fixed cost to consume all the music you want vs buying entire albums to listen to the 2-3 songs that were decent. There are still two markets in music. That’s not the case with most online services, but I’m comfortable with that.
• lsc 8y ago
  I actually think the root of our 'fake news' problem is that credible sources charge for content, while crank sources don't. And credible news has always spent more on content creation than niche news. The cost of content creation has not fallen, while the cost of distribution has fallen dramatically. So, it's completely natural that the price difference at the consumer side between high and low quality news would have changed dramatically. The problem is that you hit a news story on the major aggregators (google news, at least, gives you a bunch of stories on the same topic from different newspapers) and you have to pay money to the more credible sources, while the completely wacky takes are often free. Personally, I'd really like it if apple (or someone similar with a history of, you know, treating users as customers) would create a news service where I give apple twenty bucks a month, and it lets me read 100 news articles from the major papers, distributing some of that revenue to the papers in question. (they could even have tiers. or an easy way for me to 'buy this article' for two fifty or whatever. Heck, the NYT could setup an easy apple pay 'buy this article for two fifty' button without more apple help than is required to make apple pay work, and I'd probably use it at least once a week.) As is, I periodically subscribe to the NYT on my kindle, but while the reading experience on the kindle is wonderful, the discovery experience is terrible. I usually read it for a while, then I cancel after realizing I haven't been using it (see the discovery complaint)
  • PrunJuice 8y ago
    Check out Blendle https://blendle.com/ https://blendle.com/ They aren't Apple but they do the pay per article thing.
    • lsc 8y ago
      I will check it out, initially, that looks like what I want.
    • Paul-ish 8y ago
      Ive used blendle. I wish there was a browser extension that would detect paywalls and let me use blendle to see the article. Right now I have to open a new tab and search the article on blendles website. That adds friction that causes me to use blendle less than I would.
• makecheck 8y ago
  “Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format.” Oh come on, NO I do not want that! One of the biggest problems with ads, news sites and other stuff is that almost any of these “experiences”, especially with video, are a drain on data plans and implemented terribly. Give me an article. If that article has some simple images and plain text as ads, that would be fine. The issue is that instead, sites take way too many liberties and turn it into a pop-up, slide-out, scripted mess that destroys the whole “experience” of reading an article. And somebody should tell web sites that it used to cost 25 cents for an ENTIRE daily newspaper (that still contained ads), which can’t be more than a few bucks a month. If your subscription is ANY more than a couple of bucks, it will fail.
  • tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    Yes, this made me laugh as the first thing I did when I got to that page was was switch to Reader view.
  • gnicholas 8y ago
    Yeah, not so much what consumers want as what succeeds on social media.
    • twblalock 8y ago
      If people don't want it, why does it succeed on social media, or anywhere at all?
      • noobiemcfoob 8y ago
        Because we count success as someone clicked on the article at all as opposed to how they used it. People talk about the studies and A/B testing done to support the claims of rich media being all the rage, but how easy would it be for any of these studies to miss the forest for a tree?
      • jcelerier 8y ago
        that's like saying roads are successful because many people are driving on them.
• johnchristopher 8y ago
  > Today’s consumers though have significantly higher standards than the original users of the web. Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format. That “quality” costs enormous sums in engineering and design talent, not to mention massively increasing bandwidth and storage costs. Says who ? In other news: stuff costs money.
• gsich 8y ago
  Just charge the same amount a normal ad clicking (or viewing) user would make you in revenue. I doubt it's more then 1€ per month. On Youtube, depending on your source, you get from 1-4$ per 1000 views. It's not the users problem that payment for micro transactions doesn't scale.
• eecc 8y ago
  "Today’s consumers though have significantly higher standards than the original users of the web. Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format. T hat “quality” costs enormous sums in engineering and design talent, not to mention massively increasing bandwidth and storage costs." Really? I thought "consumers" just want another shot of dopamine fueled bullshit, prettily packaged of course but crap nonetheless. The realization that so much "engineering and design talent" goes wasted for this bullshit reminds me of what I said of - when I was 8 years old, 8 years. and people call me a cynical but I softened up loads since then! - the engineers sweating it out to run the Italian national broadcasting infrastructure. All that effort just to run a program the whole Sunday afternoon where a blondie that became famous for showing her thighs would ask people calling in from all over Italy, how many peas there were in a big glass jar: https://youtu.be/tRZ5y9seiLA https://youtu.be/tRZ5y9seiLA Of course they were waiting for the nuclear holocaust any day at that time, some maybe even wishing for it, given the situation...
• TulliusCicero 8y ago
  There's so many things wrong with this article, but I'll focus in on one particular thing: > I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments illustrate, that price is vastly out of proportion from the cost of providing the software (which I might add, is entirely hosted on iCloud infrastructure). ...does this person understand how software works? Yes, the marginal cost of providing software to a particular person is almost always very low, sometimes so low it basically rounds down to zero. But you're not just charging to pay for the costs of delivering the software, but for developing it, too. And, of course, some goes to profit, which is perfectly reasonable in a capitalist word. With businesses who are mainly reselling a thing, looking at it as "cost of thing + X% profit" is a perfectly reasonable way to frame things. There's only so much value a retailer or middleman can add, and generally there are competitors that could offer the same item. But when it comes to software, each individual item costs basically nothing to provide, so that kind of analysis fails and you have to accept that the price is essentially arbitrary.
• make3 8y ago
  Where is the Spotify for news content? Make me pay a flat rate, and distribute between the news outlets proportional to which I used the most? That seems fair
• eliblock 8y ago
  I'd like to throw in my pay-per-minute concept for video content. It's been tried before but I think it's the business model for media monetization that will win in the end. Basically a platform like Youtube could charge users a penny per minute and distribute to content creators after taking a platform percentage fee. Starting something like this would have a huge chicken and egg problem though because no content creators would join a platform without a large existing user base. And I think Youtube and others would have trouble trying out a new business model because they might lose the confidence of their ad customers.
  • bscphil 8y ago
    This really isn't a bad idea. Of course they'd have to have a wallet you deposit into, and disable ads completely for anyone using it for there to be buy-in, but I like the idea of paying the people I watch directly. 1c a minute seems like exactly what I'd be willing to pay, as well. Just for an example, a relatively small livestream I watched last week would have made $1200; there's no way they're making that much on ads. If that's the case, channels would market it as an upgrade too - "join our supporter's club, and get a badge".
• amelius 8y ago
  The reason for this hell is that it's so incredibly important for companies in this winner-takes-all world to be information gatekeepers. The eyeballs have to go through them first, so that people can be controlled into buying more of their content.
• sincerely 8y ago
  >Today’s consumers though have significantly higher standards than the original users of the web. Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format. do they really want these immersive experiences? Do consumers even have a choice?
  • rossdavidh 8y ago
    I strongly disagreed with the same paragraph. "Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format." No, they don't want that, especially not the video, and the rest is just a nice-to-have, not a want-to-have. You WANT consumers to want that, but they don't; it's being forced on them instead. Plain text with the occasional still graphic, on a plain white background, would be just fine.
    • paulific 8y ago
      As a net user since 1995 I preferred it back then. Admittedly this is probably tinged with nostalgia, but I remember people just sharing information without needing to charge you for it. Maybe I just started with low standards, but when people tell me I need to pay for this content, I go "meh, I just won't read it then". I don't feel the loss, but possibly I don't know what I'm missing.
• 2color 8y ago
  I feel like this might be a good thing. Money is a powerful mechanism of transferring the percieved value of goods. If anything, this might cause good quality content to live on. Of course, there's the transition period during which free content has the potential weeding out the "quality" content.
• kemonocode 8y ago
  > Today’s consumers though have significantly higher standards than the original users of the web. Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format. That “quality” costs enormous sums in engineering and design talent, not to mention massively increasing bandwidth and storage costs. Not really. Nowadays, it's truly a strike of luck if a page looks half-readable- hell, perhaps even readable at all if I haven't turned on JavaScript and let it load resources from three dozen different locations. And "immersive experiences"? I'm sure people will have plenty of chances to appreciate them when most sites bring their cellphones or laptops down to their knees, even if they are at most a couple years old. Ravenous subscription fees to replace formerly ad-supported content is not really much of a solution, it's just shifting the problem somewhere else. Sure, it might work for some services in which you effectively have a captive customer base (Thanks to vendor lock-in or a monopoly in your particular niche) or if said fees are kept low enough, but it's bound to end up as saturated as ad-supported content ended up being. Expect a raise in reports of freeloaders, account-sharers and see if the administrative/consumer support overhead is well worth it in the end.
• gwbas1c 8y ago
  I thought cryptocurrency was supposed to magically enable micro-payments for web content? (joke) In all honesty, I'd happily pay for Facebook, or Hacker News, if it included bundled access to major news sources. I'd also happily try out a micropayment service for articles behind a paywall. Most articles I read are hacker news links or Facebook links. I think that's the best way to monetize.
• nteo9843nhtnt 8y ago
  I think this is missing the bigger point. Ads are killing free but shitty web sites due to their (ads) numerous problems (malware, annoying, tracking, etc.). Subscriptions are going to kill mediocre web sites. We'll be left with better for-pay web sites and hopefully better ads on free web sites at the end of it all. That seems like a good thing.
• komali2 8y ago
  >One way we could fix that situation would be to allow subscriptions to combine together more cheaply. We are starting to see this too: Spotify, Hulu, and Scribd appear to be investigating a deal in which consumers can get a joint subscription from these services for a lower rate. Setapp is a set of more than one hundred OS X apps that come bundled for about $10 a month. I understand the attraction to this, but it makes me think of a problem I haven't yet been able to define well, so I've been calling it the "Japan Tourist Problem" in my head while I chew on it. Basically, it's pretty common knowledge for everyone thinking about being a tourist in Japan for a week or two that the JR pass exists and is an unbelievable value. Essentially, it's unlimited rides on the bullet train and Jr lines for a flat fee of ~200usd. Round trip is nearly the same price without the jr pass. It pays for itself. Problem one, outside of the standard jr pass are about 5 or 6 "specialized" passes with very unique usage rules, like "only good for rides within Tokyo metropolitan area" or "only good for northeastern Japan rides" or "good for tourist bus only" I dunno it's impossible to keep track, but that's the idea. And then when you actually get to Japan, you'll discover the full almighty power of the national Japanese tourism board. They got their fingers in everything. If you're ever about to spend money on something, there's probably some way you could save by exercising tourism board initiative 235.b:a, including a full on tax exemption. Little packages for bus + hotel + hot spring pass, with a vending machine voucher and an exclusive packet of stickers which have a QR code on the back you can redeem in the Line app. Endless. I'll try to find specific pamphlets and flyers when I get home but it's just so many packages, deals, all mandated from the tourism board itself (I'm not talking private hotel package type things here). My point is that should this concept of the author's take off, we'll just be in some new decision-lock hell, where you'll never be getting"the best deal" because to do so would require solving the most insane graph reduction problem ever conceived.
  • paulific 8y ago
    Hope you're enjoying it anyway. I think the Japanese look on it more as a salad bar or smorgasbord "So many good deals!" but maybe I've been living here too long. Some of the variants have to do with JR being split up into different regional companies so each of them wants their own initiative on top of the common one.
  • 8y ago
• dgudkov 8y ago
  The level of naivete in this article is frustrating. >I’m frustrated that the web’s promise of instant and free access to the world’s information appears to be dying. Free access won't die as long as there are people who are willing to work for free. It's not that subscriptions and paywalls charge money for something that was made by someone for free. >I’m frustrated that subscription usually means just putting formerly free content behind a paywall. That content was never free. Someone paid for it, typically advertisers. We all know the downsides of cost-per-click based economy. It's time to grow up. Kids eventually realize that food doesn't appear in the fridge magically, but someone pays a price for it and brings it home. The author also should realize that there is always a price to pay.
  • bencompanion 8y ago
    Agreed. > the web’s promise of instant and free access to the world’s information appears to be dying. That wasn't ever a promise, or rather, it wasn't "the web's" promise to make. It might have been the ad-hoc default for a while, but it turns out that it's not sustainable or scalable, no matter how much we'd like it to be.
• mythz 8y ago
  Personally I love Content subscriptions, $11 /month for Netflix gives you access to their $7B in annual content budget. Google Play/YouTube Red (ad-free) is also great value at $7.99 /month (early sub pricing). Likewise I got Amazon Prime for the free shipping but they also provide access to great content in their Prime Video catalog and the 2nd Music Sub is useful for the Wife/kids. I have a number of Software and Cloud Subscriptions which are justified as cost of doing business but they're nowhere near the value offered from Content subscriptions. Personally I'm against subscriptions for Games or News, IMO both are time sucks that are a detrimental the more you spend playing or reading them. I'll look at an Amazon FreeTime subscription when the kids come of age because the iOS Store is a mine field of dark UX patterns designed for kids addiction to suck IAP's from parents.
  • h1d 8y ago
    Content subscription depends. I would rather just rent the few that matters and feel I got a better deal than watching 5 average ones missing out the one that looked the most interesting.
• cbanek 8y ago
  I am so disappointed in bloomberg. I used to watch them fairly religiously, and Emily Chang is just great. That being said, I wonder how much money they will make from subscriptions, and how much they will have to spend trying to protect their IP now. Youtube and other streaming sites have people streaming the cable version of channels from one subscription, and broadcasting it out to everyone. Even a reasonable security team of half a dozen people to police these policies would seem like a million dollar investment, and having a paywall makes it a cat and mouse game of security.
• multibit 8y ago
  I disagree with the premise that users today want all sorts of multimedia content to add icing to the text. Some floated pictures or a carousel might be helpful for a news article, but most other stuff is just fluff pushed by business analysts to increase "engagement".
• davidp 8y ago
  > We didn’t need paywalls on the early web because we focused on plain text from other users. Plain text is easier to produce, lowering the friction for people to contribute, and it’s also cheaper to store and transmit, lowering the cost of bandwidth. This is jarringly bad analysis that says more about TechCrunch's view of "content" than it does about anything else. The cost of the "plain text" produced by the likes of true journalistic organizations like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, WaPo, et al comes from the salaries of the journalists and the resources needed to support them (travel, domestic bureaus, foreign bureaus, fees, etc.). We didn't need paywalls on the early web because... well, maybe we did need them and we failed to build them or invest in alternatives: Look at what's happening to journalism.[0] The author may have a point about there being an opportunity to streamline something, but if it doesn't result in money being directed to people creating the content that really matters (and honestly, people voting with their pocketbooks is the only rational way to choose just which content that is, unless you want someone else deciding for you), then it changes nothing. Personally I'm happy to send subscription money to these organizations, at least, and grateful for the privilege to do so. [0]: lmgtfy https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2016/06/30143308/state-of-the-news-media-report-2016-final.pdf https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2...
• daniel_iversen 8y ago
  Interesting to see how far he pendulum has swung that a lot (well a certain kind) of users aren’t even wanting ads to pay for their consumption anymore! Is it because of the advances in deep and psychological/manipulative targeting we’ve seen recently or just in general?
• haglin 8y ago
  What we need is a cryptocurrency capable of handling microtransactions. Then we need web browser support (a standard) for a cryptocurrency wallet. When you visit a web page, you can pay for the content by clicking Yes in a dialog box. When you don't have money in you wallet, you can fill it up using your credit card, or some bank solution. The price is shown in your currency of choice, but all the transactions happens on the blockchain. People who make web pages can paste in some javascript to charge for content. No third party organization needs to get involved and the seller can't get charge backs. The transaction fee will be low so that you can charge pennies for a news article. This will work without you giving away you credit card number, name, address, e-mail etc. to the seller.
  • profalseidol 8y ago
    Here you go: https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/ https://basicattentiontoken.org/ https://basicattentiontoken.org/
    • squaredpants 8y ago
      Was about to post the same! Brave has some pretty cool upgrades incoming as well!
  • doingmything 8y ago
    This solution seems to be addressing a problem completely different from what the author is discussing. How would using a cryptocurrency solution reduce monthly fees for subscriptions? How would it help reduce the aversion to paying for previously free content? How would it help with bundling?
    • haglin 8y ago
      Someone always have to pay, one way or the other. With microtransactions you only pay for what you want to consume and you don't need 10+ different subscriptions. That is the benefit. If you only want to spend 2 dollar a month, that's fine.
  • 8y ago
• keyle 8y ago
  Yes Adobe did the same thing, from $49 flat fee AUD, to 66 AUD which was $49 USD in AUD, then now it's 72 AUD/month! It's getting really steep if you don't use the software all the time.
• kosei 8y ago
  "To my mind though, the question is not how to get 1% of readers to pay an exorbitant price, but how to get say 20% of your readers to pay you a cheaper price. It’s not about exclusion, but about participation." A noble idea, but one not founded in much reality. The fact is, generally when you price lower, you don't get much more uptake in sales in a model like this.
• phil248 8y ago
  The article seems to focus on the worst offenders (aka outliers) and some recent cost increases (when inflation happens to be going up after a decade of stagnation). I currently have 7 different subscriptions ranging from $5 to $15 per month. They add up to $61/month. That's less than I used to pay for a standard cable package. And combined they provide me so much more of what I actually want, at an overall higher level of quality. As a bonus, I spend less time viewing advertisements now than at any other time in 40 years. I'm living in subscription heaven!
• mindcrime 8y ago
  I can totally relate to this. If I added up the price of all the various subscriptions I'm paying for right now, I'd probably be very sad. Luckily for the vendors, I'm too lazy to do the exercise right now. Sadly for any future vendors who might want my money, I'm vaguely aware of the problem to the point that I'm highly, highly, unlikely to sign up for any new subscription based service now, unless it REALLY offers massive value. And even then it's iffy. That said, I will still take this ala-carte world over Cable TV style bundling. But if some vendors of Internet content can work out some revenue sharing / cross-subscription mechanisms, I would be willing to give that a look if it mapped to my interests cleanly enough.
• mancerayder 8y ago
  It's fine that this thread turned into a software subscription debate, but there's one thing troubling, very troubling, around the news subscription model: These paywalls are blocking information about current events and one can argue that a society has an interest in keeping its population up to date on local and world events. Now, if all the reliable media will appeal mostly to people with means, what exactly are we expecting to happen?
  • frizkie 8y ago
    This does highlight the fact that before the internet, you paid for your news. TV or Newspaper.
• gesman 8y ago
  But it's a free market. If you think price is too expensive for offering - you don't pay. Vote with your wallet. Many subscription-based products or services are working non stop to update their product or service. Whether it's to generate and curate content or update/fix/improve software. Not like it's a totally new, shocking concept.
• dvcrn 8y ago
  The subscription craze for utility apps as mentioned in the post is especially frustrating. I'm not talking about apps that need to maintain a infrastructure, but just normal apps that really should not be subscription based. I get it, monthly subscription is a constant flow of money which makes things more predictable (and more profitable), but these things add up for the user. Here are some apps on my phone that changed to a subscription model - Timepage: Really nice calendar from Moleskine - Day One: A journaling app - Ulysses: Mentioned in the article - Spendee: Budgeting app Some other subscription apps: - Moleskine actions: A todo list from Moleskine - Carrot weather: Really cool weather app that already costs a steep $5 (for a weather app), but still has a in-app subscription for extra stuff (arguably not needed but still) - CamScanner: Usable on free tier, but watermarks scanned PDFs. Why does this need a monthly subscription? Bought ScanBot for $5 instead. - Bear: Note taking app There is absolutely no reason why a calendar or a journaling app should have a monthly subscription. I am glad that I went in early on apps like Day One and Timepage and got a lifetime subscription out of it, but if it wasn't for this, these apps would have been off my phone already. It's odd that I am starting to get happy when a new major version of an app (like OmniFocus) gets announced and it's just a one time price instead of a subscription.
• jonnycomputer 8y ago
  At one time we complained about the fact that we couldn't pick and choose our subscriptions on cable tv. You got all the channels you didn't need, just so you could watch Cubs baseball. Now, that's not true. You can just subscribe to mlb tv (a pretty crappy product btw, despite my continued subscription to it). the author just has trouble saying "no"
  • heartbreak 8y ago
    What world are you living in where the premiere live sports streaming service, the one that provides services for the likes of HBO Now and PS Vue is: > a pretty crappy product btw
    • jonnycomputer 8y ago
      MLB.tv/radio are crap services; their web apps and android apps are buggy memory hogs that frequently behave unpredictably, drop streams, or wig out; the service is also over-priced, blocks in-market games, and the package doesn't include the (what is it now, month-long) post-season, whle the post-season package is a bad joke (raw static camera feeds). I could go on. IF it is the premier live sports streaming service (I wouldn't know, since I only follow baseball), then that speaks more to sad state of live sports streams.
• ixacto 8y ago
  Subscriptions for everything. Ugh. What if we want all of our money to be disposable for what we want to spend it on, not what it is earmarked for by some large tech company...
• peterburkimsher 8y ago
  I'm surprised that nobody mentioned foreigners or children. As an immigrant, it's not possible for me to get a credit card, only a debit card. When I was under 18, it was also very difficult to do online shopping (I just made Christmas & birthday lists and asked my parents to eBay things for me then). Every time I change country, which has happened 13 times and counting, I lose access to whatever services I had enjoyed. Subscriptions have really messed me up. For example, my bank accounts at UBS and the Swiss Post Office started charging me monthly fees after age 21. I didn't know, until my parents got nasty letters to their address telling me I was overdrawn. I hadn't used the accounts for 3 years, and when I left, they were free, so I didn't think to close the accounts. I had to pay to bring the account above zero just so I could close it. Not to mention phone subscriptions, Internet bills, rent, etc. The lack of a stable home means I can't subscribe to Spotify. This pushes me towards the few pre-paid models that are left. I have MP3s that work offline with no need for cellular data. When I finally do get a chance to pay (e.g. a band I like is playing a show on the other side of the country), I make a huge effort to go there, buy their CDs, t-shirts, and everything else so I can support them - because that might be the only chance I get to pay them. Having been to over 300 concerts, I actually think I'm a bigger fan than most passive consumers, even though I'm excluded from the business model that record companies like. I feel like artists make more money from touring than ads/subscriptions, but I have no data to support that feeling. If there were a way to support journalists/programmers like touring bands, I think that could provide an alternative source of revenue.
  • falsedan 8y ago
    You can get pre-paid/secured credit cards in a lot of countries (especially if Capital One operate there). Unless you're moving every 6 months, you should have enough credit history to land one CC with a tiny limit: then you set up automatic payments and let it mature. May I suggest setting up a project board when you move with stuff like 'update address for <SERVICE X>' & clone all the issues when you move? Helps to avoid accounts getting closed for missed payments at least.
• scalablenotions 8y ago
  I'd be interested in an 'aggregator' service where I can subscribe to sections that interest me from a number of agencies.
• chiefalchemist 8y ago
  Um. I think it's worth mentioning that these aren't subscriptions (in the traditional sense). They're memberships. If I subscribe to a print mag, once it's delivered I have access to that content until I decide to throw it out. If I bought Photoshop, I get to use that version (sans major OS up grades of my hardware) as long as I want. Membership is binary, or has levels.
• madeel 8y ago
  subscription is like selling "sliced oranges in a transparent box" these days
• announcerman 8y ago
  I dread the day when Microsoft will start forcing me to pay a subscription for my OneNote data. Maybe moving to .txt files and using grep for search would be better in the long run.
• mud_dauber 8y ago
  This sounds like what happens to the pay TV business once there’s no aggregator (a la DishTV) in place. Am I wrong?
• mannykannot 8y ago
  In which the author, a proponent of subscription schemes, concludes that they are doing it wrong, because he is spending a noticeable amount on subscriptions.
• TimJYoung 8y ago
  This is good. We need to get back to letting prices do their thing and provide the proper signals to the publisher/producer and the reader/customer. Pricing helps producers clarify who they want to their customers to be, and it helps customers clarify exactly what they do or don't actually want. Someone already mentioned software subscriptions and Adobe Photoshop, in the context of professionals vs hobbyists. If Photoshop is too expensive, then someone will create an alternative that is cheaper. That's basically what happened with shareware in the 80s and 90s. When proper price signals are in place, the market will adjust and new opportunities will be created for entry-level players that want to address gaps in the product offerings. Finally, in terms of accessibility: remember that there are insitutions called libraries that are the great equalizers when it comes to accessing paid content. For many years now one can go in and read any magazine or newspaper that one could want, without paying a dime. If you find yourself complaining about content subscriptions, you might be better served by making sure that your local library is fully-funded.
  • intrasight 8y ago
    Libraries can only help with printed paid content. Electronic content can be licensed to only be viewable by one individual.
    • TimJYoung 8y ago
      It doesn't need to be, though. I'm sure that libraries can work out a licensing deal that works fine with client-side certificates or some other "proof" that it is the library's machines that are being used to access the content.
  • samlevine 8y ago
    Ad-supported websites are about as pure of an example of revealed preference as you can get. Advertisers target eyeballs that spend money, and the sites that capture the attention of said eyeballs get ad revenue. The golden age of journalism, pre-web, was based on price signals being divorced from content because of classifieds propping up everything else. We have been given the web that we want. It has been found wanting, because we ourselves are wanting.
• penguat 8y ago
  One of the awkward things about people is the more they spend on something the more they value it and the better behaved they are to the creators of it.* This may be why subscriptions are so expensive - because part of the cost of the subscription is customer support, and the less expensive it is the more customer support costs. *alternate, complementary theory: the less it costs the more poor people have it where they have to do more financial juggling and get into weirder situations. Thoughts, HN?
• chrisseldo 8y ago
  This is cousin to what's happening to a large portion of the video game industry: loot crates & pay-to-win.
• linsomniac 8y ago
  I think very carefully about adding subscriptions because, honestly, I feel like the burden of a subscription it pretty high. Having to set it up, remember what card it is on, update it when the card expires, remember to cancel it before it auto-renews if I'm not using it... I wish there was some way I could pay in a central place to support good journalism, across multiple sites, but there just isn't one. For entertainment I use Patreon, which seems to be doing a good job with the Youtube channels I like, particularly the ones that seem to get demonitized. One place and I can choose where my money goes. Though they did freak everyone out a few months ago with a change to their policies, they rolled that back after the outrage. I wonder if Steem will help with this. I haven't tried that Steem-powered decentralized Youtube competitor yet, but it sounds fascinating.
• TheKarateKid 8y ago
  I'm okay with subscriptions. Software and quality media (such as Bloomberg) are things that provide excellent value, and people have gotten used to thinking they should be free or dirt-cheap - even within our own community, which is saddening (I used to have this mentality years ago, too). Yet, most people don't bat an eyelash when paying $100-200/month JUST for cell phone service, then $100/month for cable, etc. How about car payments and insurance? If you use these services daily, then a subscription model makes sense. They're providing value to you every day.
  • jhall1468 8y ago
    The argument is that the subscription price is prohibitive. Bloomberg is charging $35/month which is considerably more than the advertising they are replacing. I don't have Cable, I can watch news free OTA and my cell phone bill is $170/month for 4 lines. Problem is I don't use most of these services daily. Had Bloomberg decided $10-$15/month was the right range, I'd pay it happily. You can't charge $35/month for something that was previously free with zero value add and expect people to pay it.
    • chadash 8y ago
      I think that Bloomberg is making a smart move here. While they have general news too, their primary focus is on high quality reporting on the financial and business markets. Many people within those industries will happily pay $35/month for this news if they find it useful, and I'd venture that many will just charge it to their employer, who won't bat an eye. They could charge $10-15/month and try to appeal to a broad audience, but the vast majority of people wouldn't pay that anyway. Given the choice, I'd prefer a smaller number of higher paying consumers within a niche anyway, since I can make a more targeted product and still bring in revenue. If anything, this lets them be laser focused on their niche.
  • dpcan 8y ago
    I keep hearing people say that other people think things should be free. Yet, I can't think of a single time I've ever heard someone actually say that, or read something that said "this should be free." Rarely does anyone think something should be free. What people are actually thinking is: this thing is free and I'll use it while it is, but if there's a paywall, I'm done. This is very different than "should be free" because we are really saying it's value to me is $0. And, everyone is batting an eye at the rising prices of cable, cell phone service, insurance, etc. In fact, it's so blinding we can't even open our eyes to look at anymore.
• ungzd 8y ago
  > Advertising is one such model, with massive privacy violations required to optimize it Why they took as granted that web ads must be behavior-targeted? It does not even work. Ads were much better targeted in 2005 with context-based targeting than now. Now I see ads about things that I'm not interested in at all and that I hate almost everywhere.
• pascalxus 8y ago
  Strictly speaking as a consumer, I would rather pay per article (say 10c-20c per article), rather than a monthly subscription. The way I look at it, I'm giving to the media outlet partly as an act of charity, to help out for better journalism. I don't want another subscription, that's for sure. As for cable, i pay 0$, because I don't need it, at all. Cell phone bill is 23$/month for 2 people, using USmobile.com You get 100minutes and 100 MB of Data and 100 text messages per month. I don't need all those data hungry apps anyway. Car insurance: metromile.com lets you pay roughly 2c - 3c per mile plus about 15$/mo base. That's much better than 100$ per month. Who the heck wants all this? "all of our research shows people want high-definition images with their stories, instant loading of articles on the site, and interactivity. ", " Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format." Is this really what the majority of people want? I'd gladly have a simple page with simple graphics with a nice readable layout. that last thing i want is some stupid video playing in the middle of the page, slowing things down.
  • Woofles 8y ago
    Maybe I'm alone here, but I feel like pay per article is going to discourage readership. It now takes the one time decision (aka signing up for the subscription) and makes it into a decision that happens every time you open the site. There's also a breakeven point with metromile (Google Fi, etc) and a standard subscription. If I recall correctly, they are targeting people who don't drive very frequently, which isn't what I'd imagine publications would want to do.
• kup0 8y ago
  I'm torn when it comes to subscriptions. Things that come to mind: - For some products with high upfront costs, it makes them more accessible for learning, etc. ($10/mo for Photoshop vs. hundreds). Though, I've moved to one-time-fee Affinity suite of software now. However, for students and others with low-income that want/need to learn software like Photoshop, this opens up some options without having to go the piracy route - At some point I think it gets expensive fast, where we're shelling out a lot per month for just a few services. This is good and bad. When there's a lot of useful things out there, it can feel like it's just adding up to too much. I think it may prohibit being able to use a wider variety of paid products (especially when you paid once for something that now wants a subscription). However, maybe this will help us use more discretion in the subscriptions we choose, instead of subscribing to crap or things we never use anyway. Not sure how much of "subscription fatigue" is a problem or just a unfound worry - All this said, I'm still somewhat of a "I need to own X, not rent it" old-man-yells-at-cloud kind of person. I prefer to own music instead of using streaming services and so forth. It mostly comes down to personal and philosophical preference. I don't always like ceding control to the entity I am paying, when I could "own" the product instead. I tried streaming music for a while, but then here and there, artists/albums/labels would no longer be accessible due to a contract issue with Spotify/etc. I don't want to cede that level of control. When I own music I can download the MP3s, put them on a usb drive and listen in my car, etc. instead of hoping Spotify's DRM isn't going to screw my library. - When it comes to online publishers, I just do not get enough value from them to subscribe, and I only view an occasional article, when linked from a site like HN. But because of security, privacy, and performance, I block ads. Not sure what the golden "fix" is for this industry, or at least what my part in it would be.
• sprague 8y ago
  Amazon Prime is the right idea long-term. Get people to sign on for one anchor subscription (free shipping) and then add other ancillary subscriptions over time. I assume somebody at AMZN right now is looking into adding all-you-can-eat access to newspapers, magazines, software, etc. as part of the Prime subscription.
• gnostr 8y ago
  After reading such many comments, feel the problem is not about Subscription this model; instead, it's about pricing.
  • gnostr 8y ago
    And the Subscription model can't be a replacement for one-time paid in software. It should be better to be combined with freemium.
• fuscy 8y ago
  Prices should be based on the 5Ws and the current models that are now used seem similar to what was in the 2000s at the age of "we didn't know better". What is being sold? If it's news, is it sold by category? Is the news sold or is it the critical analysis that actually matters? Maybe news should be free, the analysis paid. When is it sold? Is today's news sold or all the news since the beginning of time? Maybe today is paid but yesterday is free and then paid again? Where is it sold? USA has a GDP, Hungary has another. Maybe Hungary should be cheaper, tier the country, tier the price. Why is it sold? Is it to make money or to improve quality? Slapping a price on a product without making the proper changes hurts long term success. Who is the seller and who is the buyer? Is the seller a B2B company, then buyers should be businesses. Are intended buyers, investors, then target them. How are you selling? Subscription is tried and tested. Perhaps using micro-payments could also be a solution. Without applying these questions, the future is segregating services between those who can afford to pay and those who can't but need/want it. It can lead to a virtuous cycle for the wealthy and a vicious cycle for the poor.
• Grandison 8y ago
  Has anyone tried Agate micropayments? You can see it on http://popbitch.com/stories/ http://popbitch.com/stories/, click on a story to see it working...