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The economics and game theory of this suggests that newspapers should be forced to cooperate with each other. Cartelize on-line journalism. Make the 4th estat

The economics and game theory of this suggests that newspapers should be forced to cooperate with each other. Cartelize on-line journalism. Make the 4th estate official. Create a pseudo-governmental entity like the US post office, Fannie Mae, or the Fed. If you have an Internet connection, you have the option, through your ISP, to pay $X towards journalism on the web. Your ISP will then cryptographically vouch for any request that goes from a paying subscriber to a cartel member site, such that the member doesn't know exactly who the subscriber is. If you're on a foreign network provider that doesn't participate, you'd have to get crypto keys and a standalone program (or browser add-on) directly from the cartel (that could make you identifiable), or go through a VPN that participates. If a request comes in with valid crypto, the response is the requested article, with no tracking, and a cartel-fixed standard for ad content. If it does not, it is up to the publisher as to what to do with the response. Deny. Inject intrusive ads. Infect with tracking malware. If you didn't pay, you get what you get. Cartel members are paid from the common fund via analysis of the server logs, targeting X% of the total amount paid out as potentially lost to fraud (so as to not overspend on analysis and fraud detection). Baseline income is determined by quantity of eyeballs. The cartel can then dole out bonuses for quality--if one of your writers wins the Pulitzer, your paper gets extra money. And it's no big deal if bots are visiting sites, because each bot has to pay in order for its requests to count towards the circulation-based distributions. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there willing to pay $10 a month or more for online journalism, but they don't want that whole budget to get sucked up by one newspaper, only to get locked out by all the others. And there are plenty of sites out there that can't seem to manage online subscriptions or micro-transactions very well.

yason 8y ago
That sounds like you could just paraphrase it as "Spotify for newspapers".
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  If you insist on reducing a perfectly readable story to just a three-word sentence, journalism is already doomed.
  - codezero 8y ago
    Journalism is already doomed.
- webXL 8y ago
  Or "Pravda"
jacques_chester 8y ago
It so happens I designed a scheme a lot like this: clients send an opaque payload which the service provider wraps and forwards to an authenticator. The authenticator simply replies with a yes/no statement of whether the user is a legitimate participant in the scheme. The payloads are compared offline to validate that the versions of events given by the user and service provider are the same. There's a lot more needed to make it trustworthy, though. It took me most of 5 years to obtain a patent on it: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9853964B2 https://patents.google.com/patent/US9853964B2 To me the primary advantage would be to open up an untapped segment. There are readers who will never pay, they see ads. There are readers who love a source so much they will pull out their credit card and deal with the hassle of having yet another subscription. In the middle is a large, untapped group who would pay if the transaction costs (pulling out the card, hassle of multiple subscriptions, worrying about how much they're spending etc) were approximately nil.

yason 8y ago

That sounds like you could just paraphrase it as "Spotify for newspapers".

logfromblammo 8y ago
If you insist on reducing a perfectly readable story to just a three-word sentence, journalism is already doomed.
- codezero 8y ago
  Journalism is already doomed.
webXL 8y ago
Or "Pravda"

jacques_chester 8y ago

It so happens I designed a scheme a lot like this: clients send an opaque payload which the service provider wraps and forwards to an authenticator. The authenticator simply replies with a yes/no statement of whether the user is a legitimate participant in the scheme. The payloads are compared offline to validate that the versions of events given by the user and service provider are the same. There's a lot more needed to make it trustworthy, though. It took me most of 5 years to obtain a patent on it: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9853964B2 https://patents.google.com/patent/US9853964B2 To me the primary advantage would be to open up an untapped segment. There are readers who will never pay, they see ads. There are readers who love a source so much they will pull out their credit card and deal with the hassle of having yet another subscription. In the middle is a large, untapped group who would pay if the transaction costs (pulling out the card, hassle of multiple subscriptions, worrying about how much they're spending etc) were approximately nil.