8 ms·

I tend to agree with you. But do you have an alternative model ready? And if not, how much of the news media are you willing to let die off completely before yo

by Bud 8y ago

I tend to agree with you. But do you have an alternative model ready? And if not, how much of the news media are you willing to let die off completely before you would relent?

mcbits 8y ago
100% of it. I am, however, willing to view ads for an 80% share of the revenue.
sadtruth 8y ago
How about Jeff Bezos pays out of pocket?
- lostlogin 8y ago
  Workers of his just received a rise of $1-2 per hour, there are limits to what a trillion dollar company can do. https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-goods/2018/10/11/17963778/amazon-pay-increase-bonuses-stock-options https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-...
- CamperBob2 8y ago
  Why, at that rate, he might have to shut the Post down in another 2 million years.
- komali2 8y ago
  Why?
  - michaelt 8y ago
    It's traditional for the super-rich to buy newspapers and run them at a loss to advance their pet political causes; give favourable coverage to their friends and business interests; and flatter them by including them in celebrity coverage. This tradition is literally older than America.
    - komali2 8y ago
      Given that Trump regularly accuses, without evidence, bezos of doing this, and given the generally high respect paid to wapo among non-conservatives, I guess my question is now - despite Appeal to Tradition, why would bezos sacrifice the respectability of wapo to turn it into a favorable rag? Basically, I don't think he could get away with stirring his fingers around in wapo (which it's reported he currently doesn't do) without far more negative consequences than positive.
akira2501 8y ago
> But do you have an alternative model ready? All I want them to do is to stop using third-party companies to serve ads from unknown sources. If they're willing to traffic their own advertisements from their own servers, then I'm much less able or likely to block their advertisements. I'm not mad at their model, I'm mad that the web is so absurdly vulnerable.
abdullahkhalids 8y ago
I will wait till we get a micro-transaction system built directly into the browser (same system for every browser) that allows me to pay 1 cent per news article - maybe 5 cent for a super duper long essay. I am poor but I am willing to pay as much as 5 dollars a month. My personal information is not for sale or distribution and I refuse to allow any computations on my computer that enable someone to gather it.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I am poor but I am willing to pay as much as 5 dollars a month. So subscribe to your local newspaper. One of my subscriptions is $25/6 months of Sunday delivery and you get free unlimited online access. That's $4.16/month — below your stated budget. If more people put their money where their mouths are, then we could break the media of their third-party ad serving addiction.
  - abdullahkhalids 8y ago
    I do get one print newspaper at home. But I want to consume a wide variety of news sources, and a wide variety of news sources want me to consume their news, so I don't think there is anything wrong with demanding that I pay per article from any source.
    - chappi42 8y ago
      Exactly! A subscription would enforce me to one provider only. With micropayment it's my choice when and where I read.
    - a_f 8y ago
      I wonder if you could create a service like Netflix or Spotify for Newspaper articles? Where the newspaper/journal get a fee for publishing through the service and the users get ad free access to the articles. This would only be successful if you could get almost all publications in though.
- dagw 8y ago
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Personally, all of it. Honestly, it's not our job to find a business model that works. It's literally the job of a company trying to make money. Find a way that works. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for cooperating and working together to solve things. But the ad industry is so out of control that there's no cooperating with that. If they find a way to serve ads that are not privacy-invading, do not expose users to malware risk, and do not consume exorbitant amount of resources on the user end, we'll talk about shutting off ad-blockers.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  The problem is that the management at traditional media outlets have been conned into believing that they need tracking in order to serve their advertisers. Advertising worked fine before internet tracking was a thing. Everything from Coca-Cola and the New York Times down to Fred's Corner Dry Cleaner and The Podunk Tribune survived and thrived on the old, low-tracking model. It's companies like Google and the other internet ad-serving companies that turned the ad industry into a data arms race, and the media outlets got caught up in it. There's a cliché about "the internet killed newspapers." No, internet ad companies killed newspapers by falsely convincing them that an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper, so they have to make up the difference by harvesting everyone's data.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > There's a cliché about "the internet killed newspapers." No, internet ad companies killed newspapers by falsely convincing them that an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper, so they have to make up the difference by harvesting everyone's data. I think it's a little bit of both. Internet commoditized newspapers and unbundled them, allowing us to peruse individual articles without the regard for whole. But you're right that instead of figuring out a proper way to deal with this, papers just got convinced by adtech companies and doubled-down on ads on-line. (Then again, were they wrong? The model works. Much like for a factory that dumps all its toxic waste into the nearby river, the model works. Doesn't mean it deserves to, and that it will work forever.)
gaius 8y ago
But do you have an alternative model ready? I was a subscriber to the NYT until recently, had been for over a decade. They don’t track subscribers any less, or show fewer ads. So I tried the alternative but they were too greedy. Also you can’t cancel a sub online you have to phone them! Or just cancel it on the credit card side...
- lucasverra 8y ago
  Same with lemonde.fr last year. They wanted ME to send an analog letter to their unsub service. I wanted to kill somebody but What i did: 1)switched the payment method to a virtual credit card (revolut) 2)that i made instantly disappear once it was on their server. They are dumb enought not to have a register of my previous payment method 3) LOL at their email "We cannot charge you"
simion314 8y ago
Letting trackers track you gives them a lot of information including what pages you visited, some sites can put your email in the url like site.com?email=myemail ... so this trackers will know exactly who you are and what websites you visited. If they fingerprint your browser then they can de-anonymise your private session and will know what you visited in private mode too (this works only for pages that include the respective trackers obviously) So here is an alternative, browsers will save your private history too, then you go to the website and they will ask for your history, you will have a big button named "Pay with my history and identity", after that you can visit the website without extra JS tracking, in this model all is transparent to the user, you also gain no tracking but you lose the ability to clear your browser history and private mode won't be private. I personally prefer to block tracking and fingerprinting. When I get the GDPR popup I will close the tab, I don't even try to work around it.
flukus 8y ago
Nearly all of it. My country and many others have a national tax funded news organisation that does a far better job of informing than any of the commercial operators. This is a much better funding model that doesn't rely on sensationalism or pandering to a particular audience to drive eyeballs.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  doesn't rely on sensationalism or pandering to a particular audience to drive eyeballs. In theory, it should. But anyone who follows the internal drama of the BBC, for example, knows this isn't the case.
xab9 8y ago
All of it. Let it burn. It's time for a culling anyway, the videos, the stupid clickbaits, the malware infested ad servers, the hysteria around adblockers, the secretly sponsored articles, the popup layers, the sluggish megabyte spas, the cpu eater animations, the parallax scroller full hd uncompressed images... let them whither away.
Kalium 8y ago
I already pay for my news in annual subscriptions. And I'm willing to let the vast majority of it burn down. I refuse to accept that something so critical to a democratic society as the press can only exist by removing from us any semblance of privacy.
lobotryas 8y ago
You're edging in on a fallacy. A person can critique something without needing to have an alternative or a solution available. I am ready to let all news media die if it truly is unable to evolve beyond the ad/classifieds model. I don't believe the news we receive now are high quality as it is, so I don't see much loss.
air7 8y ago
Good point. News is not like other business sectors in that it (ideally) plays a critical role in maintaining the balance in a democracy so it's in everyone's best interest to have a strong honest and free press. If the news sector dies, or becomes 100% government sponsored we'd be much much worse off compared to the current issue of privacy invading ads.
wastedhours 8y ago
I think one of the saddest parts of the ad-model now is the lack of money making brands essentially ship off their sales departments to the programmatic companies - if they went back to a genuine, intent based, direct sales approach for advertising it wouldn't be as much of a shit show. With newspapers, the news is backed up by the ad opportunities on the lifestyle content. After I'm done browsing the headlines, I can then go to the holiday section, and I'm getting holiday ads (which actually might be helpful), if I'm browsing the food section, I'm getting supermarket offers (which might also be helpful). Browsing a modern news site, I might be reading an article on the latest terrorist massacre, but be being served ads for hats. It's this requirement to break someone's focus that's turned ads into such an interruptive medium. Tracking can be helpful, but without knowing the context the ad is being served in, the incentive is to be as invasive as possible. It's why content marketing seemingly works - the "ad" (subscribe, join now CTAs within the articles) feels natural because it's complimentary to the content you're reading, not trying to fight it. I'm not sure if it'll be them, but organisations like Buzzfeed or if NYT integrates Wirecutter more, might be on to the right model. Lifestyle content with intent based ads around them (with a higher CPM due to, assuming, a higher conversion rate), that supports the hard news side.
DCoder 8y ago
> There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to the public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute not common law. Neither individuals not corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back. R. A. Heinlein, Life-Line (1939)
KozmoNau7 8y ago
Let it burn. I have zealously blocked all ads since the first adblockers became available (even before blocklists), I've used Privoxy and PiHole and various other tools to block as much advertising as I possibly can. I go out of my way to avoid prominent logos on clothing, although I do make an exception for band shirts for bands I personally like. I show up ~10 minutes "late" for movies, in order to avoid most of the pointless ads. In general, I try to avoid advertising as much as I possibly can, because it's poisoning our decision making processes and influencing our behavior more than we realize. So let the ad-supported leeches die. We did just fine before they invaded our internet. Even if hypothetically a new "ethical" ad-serving standard arose, I would still block all of it.
- dullroar 8y ago
  Yup, PiHole for the win! :)
hiliev 8y ago
Most of the ad-supported media is trashy anyway, churning at the highest rate possible low quality content with click-bait titles. Because SEO and clicks. Even the well-respected media outlets have started jumping on the click-bait wagon. The alternative is something like Medium - you pay a monthly fee and the money gets distributed between the authors based on your likes. Medium has a growing partnership with big media outlets that republish articles there. I tend to read there most of the time. Not only is the reading experience better and uniform but I directly vote with my wallet. Is it that hard to have a privacy-respecting service whose only purpose is to collect a monthly fee and to allow me to distribute it to participating media sites via some kind of "Support" or "Like" button? The problem is that most Internet users do not value their privacy and hence do not care that a shady 3rd party is tracking them and filling their screen with obnoxious ads, just as long as they keep getting "content" for free. It will take a tremendous amount of effort for the privacy revolution to happen.

by Bud 8y ago

I tend to agree with you. But do you have an alternative model ready? And if not, how much of the news media are you willing to let die off completely before you would relent?

mcbits 8y ago

100% of it. I am, however, willing to view ads for an 80% share of the revenue.

sadtruth 8y ago

How about Jeff Bezos pays out of pocket?

lostlogin 8y ago
Workers of his just received a rise of $1-2 per hour, there are limits to what a trillion dollar company can do. https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-goods/2018/10/11/17963778/amazon-pay-increase-bonuses-stock-options https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-...
CamperBob2 8y ago
Why, at that rate, he might have to shut the Post down in another 2 million years.
komali2 8y ago
Why?
- michaelt 8y ago
  It's traditional for the super-rich to buy newspapers and run them at a loss to advance their pet political causes; give favourable coverage to their friends and business interests; and flatter them by including them in celebrity coverage. This tradition is literally older than America.
  - komali2 8y ago
    Given that Trump regularly accuses, without evidence, bezos of doing this, and given the generally high respect paid to wapo among non-conservatives, I guess my question is now - despite Appeal to Tradition, why would bezos sacrifice the respectability of wapo to turn it into a favorable rag? Basically, I don't think he could get away with stirring his fingers around in wapo (which it's reported he currently doesn't do) without far more negative consequences than positive.

akira2501 8y ago

> But do you have an alternative model ready? All I want them to do is to stop using third-party companies to serve ads from unknown sources. If they're willing to traffic their own advertisements from their own servers, then I'm much less able or likely to block their advertisements. I'm not mad at their model, I'm mad that the web is so absurdly vulnerable.

abdullahkhalids 8y ago

I will wait till we get a micro-transaction system built directly into the browser (same system for every browser) that allows me to pay 1 cent per news article - maybe 5 cent for a super duper long essay. I am poor but I am willing to pay as much as 5 dollars a month. My personal information is not for sale or distribution and I refuse to allow any computations on my computer that enable someone to gather it.

reaperducer 8y ago
I am poor but I am willing to pay as much as 5 dollars a month. So subscribe to your local newspaper. One of my subscriptions is $25/6 months of Sunday delivery and you get free unlimited online access. That's $4.16/month — below your stated budget. If more people put their money where their mouths are, then we could break the media of their third-party ad serving addiction.
- abdullahkhalids 8y ago
  I do get one print newspaper at home. But I want to consume a wide variety of news sources, and a wide variety of news sources want me to consume their news, so I don't think there is anything wrong with demanding that I pay per article from any source.
  - chappi42 8y ago
    Exactly! A subscription would enforce me to one provider only. With micropayment it's my choice when and where I read.
  - a_f 8y ago
    I wonder if you could create a service like Netflix or Spotify for Newspaper articles? Where the newspaper/journal get a fee for publishing through the service and the users get ad free access to the articles. This would only be successful if you could get almost all publications in though.
dagw 8y ago

TeMPOraL 8y ago

Personally, all of it. Honestly, it's not our job to find a business model that works. It's literally the job of a company trying to make money. Find a way that works. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for cooperating and working together to solve things. But the ad industry is so out of control that there's no cooperating with that. If they find a way to serve ads that are not privacy-invading, do not expose users to malware risk, and do not consume exorbitant amount of resources on the user end, we'll talk about shutting off ad-blockers.

reaperducer 8y ago
The problem is that the management at traditional media outlets have been conned into believing that they need tracking in order to serve their advertisers. Advertising worked fine before internet tracking was a thing. Everything from Coca-Cola and the New York Times down to Fred's Corner Dry Cleaner and The Podunk Tribune survived and thrived on the old, low-tracking model. It's companies like Google and the other internet ad-serving companies that turned the ad industry into a data arms race, and the media outlets got caught up in it. There's a cliché about "the internet killed newspapers." No, internet ad companies killed newspapers by falsely convincing them that an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper, so they have to make up the difference by harvesting everyone's data.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > There's a cliché about "the internet killed newspapers." No, internet ad companies killed newspapers by falsely convincing them that an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper, so they have to make up the difference by harvesting everyone's data. I think it's a little bit of both. Internet commoditized newspapers and unbundled them, allowing us to peruse individual articles without the regard for whole. But you're right that instead of figuring out a proper way to deal with this, papers just got convinced by adtech companies and doubled-down on ads on-line. (Then again, were they wrong? The model works. Much like for a factory that dumps all its toxic waste into the nearby river, the model works. Doesn't mean it deserves to, and that it will work forever.)

gaius 8y ago

But do you have an alternative model ready? I was a subscriber to the NYT until recently, had been for over a decade. They don’t track subscribers any less, or show fewer ads. So I tried the alternative but they were too greedy. Also you can’t cancel a sub online you have to phone them! Or just cancel it on the credit card side...

lucasverra 8y ago
Same with lemonde.fr last year. They wanted ME to send an analog letter to their unsub service. I wanted to kill somebody but What i did: 1)switched the payment method to a virtual credit card (revolut) 2)that i made instantly disappear once it was on their server. They are dumb enought not to have a register of my previous payment method 3) LOL at their email "We cannot charge you"

simion314 8y ago

Letting trackers track you gives them a lot of information including what pages you visited, some sites can put your email in the url like site.com?email=myemail ... so this trackers will know exactly who you are and what websites you visited. If they fingerprint your browser then they can de-anonymise your private session and will know what you visited in private mode too (this works only for pages that include the respective trackers obviously) So here is an alternative, browsers will save your private history too, then you go to the website and they will ask for your history, you will have a big button named "Pay with my history and identity", after that you can visit the website without extra JS tracking, in this model all is transparent to the user, you also gain no tracking but you lose the ability to clear your browser history and private mode won't be private. I personally prefer to block tracking and fingerprinting. When I get the GDPR popup I will close the tab, I don't even try to work around it.

flukus 8y ago

Nearly all of it. My country and many others have a national tax funded news organisation that does a far better job of informing than any of the commercial operators. This is a much better funding model that doesn't rely on sensationalism or pandering to a particular audience to drive eyeballs.

reaperducer 8y ago
doesn't rely on sensationalism or pandering to a particular audience to drive eyeballs. In theory, it should. But anyone who follows the internal drama of the BBC, for example, knows this isn't the case.

xab9 8y ago

All of it. Let it burn. It's time for a culling anyway, the videos, the stupid clickbaits, the malware infested ad servers, the hysteria around adblockers, the secretly sponsored articles, the popup layers, the sluggish megabyte spas, the cpu eater animations, the parallax scroller full hd uncompressed images... let them whither away.

Kalium 8y ago

I already pay for my news in annual subscriptions. And I'm willing to let the vast majority of it burn down. I refuse to accept that something so critical to a democratic society as the press can only exist by removing from us any semblance of privacy.

lobotryas 8y ago

You're edging in on a fallacy. A person can critique something without needing to have an alternative or a solution available. I am ready to let all news media die if it truly is unable to evolve beyond the ad/classifieds model. I don't believe the news we receive now are high quality as it is, so I don't see much loss.

air7 8y ago

Good point. News is not like other business sectors in that it (ideally) plays a critical role in maintaining the balance in a democracy so it's in everyone's best interest to have a strong honest and free press. If the news sector dies, or becomes 100% government sponsored we'd be much much worse off compared to the current issue of privacy invading ads.

wastedhours 8y ago

I think one of the saddest parts of the ad-model now is the lack of money making brands essentially ship off their sales departments to the programmatic companies - if they went back to a genuine, intent based, direct sales approach for advertising it wouldn't be as much of a shit show. With newspapers, the news is backed up by the ad opportunities on the lifestyle content. After I'm done browsing the headlines, I can then go to the holiday section, and I'm getting holiday ads (which actually might be helpful), if I'm browsing the food section, I'm getting supermarket offers (which might also be helpful). Browsing a modern news site, I might be reading an article on the latest terrorist massacre, but be being served ads for hats. It's this requirement to break someone's focus that's turned ads into such an interruptive medium. Tracking can be helpful, but without knowing the context the ad is being served in, the incentive is to be as invasive as possible. It's why content marketing seemingly works - the "ad" (subscribe, join now CTAs within the articles) feels natural because it's complimentary to the content you're reading, not trying to fight it. I'm not sure if it'll be them, but organisations like Buzzfeed or if NYT integrates Wirecutter more, might be on to the right model. Lifestyle content with intent based ads around them (with a higher CPM due to, assuming, a higher conversion rate), that supports the hard news side.

DCoder 8y ago

> There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to the public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute not common law. Neither individuals not corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back. R. A. Heinlein, Life-Line (1939)

KozmoNau7 8y ago

Let it burn. I have zealously blocked all ads since the first adblockers became available (even before blocklists), I've used Privoxy and PiHole and various other tools to block as much advertising as I possibly can. I go out of my way to avoid prominent logos on clothing, although I do make an exception for band shirts for bands I personally like. I show up ~10 minutes "late" for movies, in order to avoid most of the pointless ads. In general, I try to avoid advertising as much as I possibly can, because it's poisoning our decision making processes and influencing our behavior more than we realize. So let the ad-supported leeches die. We did just fine before they invaded our internet. Even if hypothetically a new "ethical" ad-serving standard arose, I would still block all of it.

dullroar 8y ago
Yup, PiHole for the win! :)

hiliev 8y ago

Most of the ad-supported media is trashy anyway, churning at the highest rate possible low quality content with click-bait titles. Because SEO and clicks. Even the well-respected media outlets have started jumping on the click-bait wagon. The alternative is something like Medium - you pay a monthly fee and the money gets distributed between the authors based on your likes. Medium has a growing partnership with big media outlets that republish articles there. I tend to read there most of the time. Not only is the reading experience better and uniform but I directly vote with my wallet. Is it that hard to have a privacy-respecting service whose only purpose is to collect a monthly fee and to allow me to distribute it to participating media sites via some kind of "Support" or "Like" button? The problem is that most Internet users do not value their privacy and hence do not care that a shady 3rd party is tracking them and filling their screen with obnoxious ads, just as long as they keep getting "content" for free. It will take a tremendous amount of effort for the privacy revolution to happen.