22 ms·
News websites are failing every day. Even Buzzfeed had big layoffs a few months ago. If your revenue model relies on making your website increasingly less user-
by jnty 7y ago
News websites are failing every day. Even Buzzfeed had big layoffs a few months ago. If your revenue model relies on making your website increasingly less user-friendly, it might have kept your head above water for longer than some competitors, but it can't be sustainable.
- JumpCrisscross 7y agoThe successful newspapers appear to enforce strict paywalls. I pay for the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times because their content and analysis is good and original. (They also have decent events from time to time.) The free-news model almost requires aggressive tracking, which I agree is unsustainable.
- return1 7y agoThe real reason they are failing is not user-unfriendliness or tracking though. It's the intense competition and the broadening of the publisher base by 1000x with the advent of the internet, and the natural supply-demand adjustment to very low rates of return from advertising. This leads them to increase the advertising load in order to make ends meet, hence using more trackers.