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Won’t Subscribe
- kenshi 6y agoMaybe you just aren't going to be able to afford everything and will just have to make a choice about what you consume.
- ajkjk 6y agoIt's not really a question of what you can afford; it's a question of who deserves your business.
- gwbas1c 6y agoI think if people pay for Netflix and Spotify, there's a market for a subscription to bypass paywalls.
- notatoad 6y agothere's definitely a market, but probably not at the revenue targets that newspapers have. I pay $12/mo for netflix, and $10/mo for spotify. i'd be happy to pay another ~$10/mo for a news service that gave me access to a similarly broad offering of newspaper articles. but the way newspaper web-access subscriptions are priced, to get the same broad bundle of content as what i get from spotify or netflix i'd be paying thousands of dollars a month, which i'm absolutely not willing to do.
- Waterfall 6y agoHow would you feel about paying for pirated content? If someone just had publication subscriptions they could simply charge a small fee and show all the content on the sites. I could see small groups even do this and every time someone joins the monthly fee goes down.
- notatoad 6y agopaying for pirated stuff is a messy minefield, but it's actually a pretty interesting thought - piracy is what spurred the music industry to shift to new models that allowed more consumer-friendly businesses like spotify to exist. i've never even considered pirating a news website before, but it seems like the sort of thing that should be possible.
- greenyoda 6y ago> “Hold on,” he says, “I’ve got an excellent publication, full of great journalism and delicious writing. I should be able to compete with those other things and maybe displace them!” That seems pretty easy: If you're trying to sell a subscription to someone, give them a free one-month trial subscription with no strings attached (no credit card required). If they like it, they might switch to your publication.
- tom_mellior 6y agoWithout them requiring something like a credit card, it would be fairly easy for somewhat determined "attackers" to get an arbitrary number of free trials. At some point the Guardian (IIRC; may have been some other paper I read from time to time) had some sort of hilarious "we'll use cookies to enforce N free article views per month" policy. Of course this doesn't work well against people who know that they can delete cookies.
- autarch 6y agoThere are still sites doing this. Bloomberg is one I can think of, since I've deleted my cookies (and other local storage) for that site more than once, with success.
- ziml77 6y agoI highly doubt Bloomberg cares enough. They make their money selling terminal subscriptions and data feeds for obscene amounts.
- samsquire 6y agoIt's so difficult to make money when everyone wants things to be free. I pay for Medium and that's all right now. I would much like to see the micropayment future - it has to be part of the browser. I would like to pay in lieu of time. If I could see page statistics of how much time it took for a page to be put together and costs of hosting - I could make a contribution based on this information. I've given random £100 to artists I love for the same reason.
- dijit 6y agoI agree about the micropayments future. The thing holding it back is some kind of central authority that can process micropayments with significantly less friction and overheads. Even better if people can accrue credit in some way that isn’t just paying fiat currency in, because we live as a privileged class to have disposable income that is essentially in escrow.
- ketamine__ 6y agoBrave browser is doing exactly what you described.
- dijit 6y agoCan I take payments from other browsers? I think what’s missing is a service, not a browser.
- michaelbrooks 6y agoI think Brave and Coil will hopefully lead the way to decentralised micropayments. They just need to become more popular to the every day reader.
- Beldin 6y agoWe have de facto micro payments: ads. There is very little overhead for users. There are a lot of downsides to ads, but it is the most successful micro payment mechanism we have. It is also the most successful online business model we have. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.
- rexreed 6y agoI think paywalls for journalism are retrograde. The exact people who can benefit from good journalism (the uninformed) are the exact people who won't subscribe. The people who are already in the demographic for the publication and informed are the ones subscribing. This is the inverse of what you'd think you'd want as a journalist. This is part of the overall news and social media echo-chamber, confirmation-bias inducing content in which the circle of group-think gets tighter and communities begin to think alike. I understand that advertising models are collapsing and journalism is expensive. I know that subscription models and paywalls might seem to make sense since those who consume content benefit from it. But I fear that all this will lead to the uninformed staying uninformed, those in group-think still group-thinking, and those that want to hear what they already want to hear continuing to hear those things as the subscriber model caters to the paying community who will vote with their feet if they don't keep hearing what they want to hear.
- simonw 6y agoI think many people in the news industry agree with you. The problem is that good journalism costs a lot of money, and the advertising business model has collapsed. It needs to be paid for somehow. This is also why non-profit news organizations are growing in influence. https://members.inn.org/directory https://members.inn.org/directory is a good list of those. They tend to be supported by donations or wealthy benefactors, which is itself a risk because it's important for them to stay editorially independent from their donors.
- coffeefirst 6y agoIt’s also a little ahistorical. Roll back the clock to the 1990’s, and NYT + your local paper + any magazines weren’t exactly cheap. In those times, the “free” options were the same as they are today: broadcast news, NPR or the BBC. It’s definitely a problem that the less engaged audience moved from their local news anchor to Facebook, but I can’t make that about paywalls.
- toyg 6y ago> In those times, the “free” options were the same as they are today It was easier to circulate some of that paper though. In Europe, cafes will typically buy a bunch of newspapers for their members and leave them free to read on their premises; political parties would do the same or even staple them to bulletin-boards on the street. Same for libraries. I expect the US had some equivalent to that model. The digital divide makes it increasingly harder to circulate content in that manner.
- gombosg 6y agoHow would you pay for individual articles? Up-front? (If not, that's called donation.) If so, then what happens if you happen not to enjoy the content? Will you (users) feel like playing lottery every time you purchase an article? Feel disappointed for the purchase you just made? Or just quit paying on a certain site, for a certain author etc. after reading too many 'bad' (subjectively) articles? From this standpoint, I understand that subscriptions are for sites - they have editors, policies and a reputation to maintain and you buy into that with a single purchase. Or rather not, as the article argues... and I argue that per-article micropayments may not be the way out.
- dheera 6y agoMine bitcoin in the browser as the user is reading the article?
- dwohnitmok 6y agoFor the problem of reader regret with upfront payments (which would be the number one problem with clickbait) I could imagine a time-limited "payment loss." That is within, say, a day of having paid for an article, the reader can decide that the author/publication should not be paid for the article. This is not a refund; the reader does not get the money back. But the author doesn't get the money either. The money goes into a "black hole." There are several ways of implementing a black hole such as a central fund that is evenly distributed back to all publications participating in the payment system in proportion to their current payout levels, but the important point is that neither the article creator nor the reader nor the payment handler sees that money. That way readers don't get free articles via spurious refunds, but get the psychological satisfaction they're not rewarding clickbait, article creators are disincentivized from putting out clickbait, and the payment handler isn't incentivized to facilitate clickbait.
- toyg 6y agoIt's a nice idea but 90% of the audience would simply not get it. "What do you mean I can't have my money back ?!?" A quick survey of the comments-section of newspapers will show you very quickly how unsophisticated the general public is.
- hnhnsomething12 6y agoWhat exactly are the news publishers even providing these days? They aren't a trust authority and they aren't a distribution platform. The internet undermined the first and replaced the latter. The future could be readers having a direct relationship with authors, and necessary infrastructure "unbundled" as it were. Author pays a non-partisan fact check service to accredit what they say. With proper accreditation they can appear on the distribution platforms with functioning micropayment models (think app stores). The only reason this problem is unsolved is because the outdated publishers want to stay relevant and are using their existing momentum to die slow. They're the single point of failure in the three-party equation. Articles will always need writers and they will always need readers. Everything else is up in the air.
- alexmingoia 6y agoI would go as far as to say the only thing that made newspapers relevant was distribution. The readers have a direct relationship with authors now. They follow them on Twitter, YouTube, blogs, etc. Authors of news are no longer full-time journalists, but everyone online. Everything is news and everyone is an author. Why pay the NYT to tell you what people will tell you on Twitter? Why pay a local paper to tell you about a fire or protest the next day, when people will post a video online as it happens? The post-Internet generations don’t even watch TV or read newspapers at all.
- cgriswald 6y agoA video of an event isn’t news. It’s data. News is the information that can be extracted from the video and other sources and put in context. The Twitter user doesn’t ask questions or if he does they are the wrong questions of the wrong people. And why should he bother asking any questions? He’s not getting paid and his viewers aren’t generally seeking news. That’s not to say Twitter couldn’t work this way, with Joe Random posting about things on his block. It just doesn’t work that way now because the incentives are just not there. My Nextdoor feed is full of news about my neighborhood, but it’s wrong as often as not. Having a setup like the GP suggests is basically necessary to develop trust between readers, authors, and sources, regardless of how the author delivers their content.
- solatic 6y agoThe subscription math is flunky for another reason - many subscriptions are shared within the same household, and doing so seems tacitly permitted by most subscription providers. But under a micropayments model, it is much more likely for multiple members of the same household to purchase multiple copies of the article. So the question often enough isn't about comparing a dollar for an article versus hundreds of dollars for a subscription, but about multiple dollars per article versus the cost of a subscription.
- mikelward 6y ago> “But wait,” says Mr Manager, “you already subscribe to five publications, so you’ve proved you have a propensity to subscribe! You’re exactly my target market!” Wrong. It’s exactly because I’ve done some subscribing that I’m just not gonna do any more. Exactly. Same thing is happening with cable unbundling. Few people want to subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, ESPN+, Disney+, Peacock, and YouTube TV/Sling/Fubo/Philo/whoever to get all the content they're interested in.
- Wistar 6y agoStarting about a year ago I began to see ever more articles in entertainment media about subscription fatigue and the coming "great re-bundling," especially in streaming services.
- tuatoru 6y agoWell, I hope so. My reaction to choice fatigue is to say "forget it". I'll do something else instead.
- mlthoughts2018 6y agoI for one would be happy to subscribe to 20+ distinct apps for TV & sports, if only it meant I could truly cancel cable and only consume internet service from the cable company. But of course many apps require over the top extra cable-based subscriptions to channels to access content. So it’s not unbundling, it’s just regular cable bundling plus a ton of extra apps tacked on, the worst of both worlds.
- kbenson 6y agoThis all really started with a-la carte subscriptions, which were a good thing, even if it only partially solved the problem and was implemented without much granularity by the cable providers (there used to be so many channels that most people just never cared about). Then with the internet, there started to be less need for a provider to bundle everything, so services started popping up everywhere. Really, this is one of those areas that it would be wonderful if there was some standard by which content providers could expose their content and the metadata for it, and if you had an account with access it would be added to some aggregator for you. Sort of like what you get with Apple and Roku, with search ability through apps/channels, but in a more normalized fashion. Being able to add a discovery URL and access credentials and have a system automatically add content would be wonderful as a consumer, but the incentive just isn't there with the providers because there's always some big exclusive access deal, or a deal across multiple providers, so I'm inefficiently paying for the same movie on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu. I want a world where I can add Netflix and Amazon Prime credentials to Hulu, and access all the content through Hulu, or Hulu and Amazon Prime credentials and watch everything in Netflix, or just add them all to Roku and have it add all the content to an interface there for me to use. Amazon is actually getting closest to this in functionality, if not in spirit, by allowing you to subscribe to lots of other services through it and they show up there. Of course, you have to pay Amazon for them, and you are stuck using Amazon to view them, so it's not really equivalent at all.
- thewebcount 6y agoI wonder if it could work with some sort of in-between model? Like pay $1.00 to access 10 articles in the next month (or whatever). This reduces the problem of no payment processor wanting to process $0.10 payments, and no reader wanting to pay $15-50 per month to read 1-3 articles from your newspaper.
- smichel17 6y agoI think what you're proposing is essentially a retainer?
- jimnotgym 6y agoMore thoughts. I dabble with publications 1) I subscribe to the Guardian atm even though it is free to read 2) I tried to restart subscriptions with the Financial Times and Economist recently and gave up on both due to shitty behaviour, shitty terms, shitty UI. It is not all about price
- intrasight 6y agoI've subscribed to The Economist for 25 years. Has been interesting to see it's transformations. Not only the transition to digital but also the topics they choose to cover - or not. I currently consume on my iPhone. Mostly I listen to it but do occasionally read. Before that I used Android. Certainly some usability issues that are annoying but most apps are worse.
- querez 6y agoAs someone who's only subscribed since recently: could you talk more about this? What observations have you made?
- intrasight 6y agoFor one, there was no China section. Now it's a manor section. Another thing that old time readers would remember is the risque photos they used to have. It's a British journalism thing - or used to be.
- notimetorelax 6y agoI could never justify FT subscription price. It’s nice when employers provide it, though.
- jimnotgym 6y agoIt was pretty galling to find you can't cancel without using chat, and then be offered a huge discount to stay...
- sce 6y agoAn alternative subscription model that I've always liked is Linux Weekly News (lwn.net) which publishes all premium content openly after a week behind paywall. (In my mind I like to call it "Freshwall", ie. paying for fresh content.) News quickly gets old after all.
- Waterfall 6y agoHow successful is it as a model for cash flow compared to the others? I can wait a week to see the kernel benchmarks or whatever so I don't see why anyone would subscribe if not to suppose it rather than need it. I never used the site I'm just assuming it's like phoronix.
- sce 6y agoI unfortunately don't know any details other than it seems to be working. The content they have is highly in depth, and the comments section is excellent. My experience was that I started reading the articles as a non subscriber. Because I enjoyed it I began visiting the site more and more. After some time it started to annoy me that I had to wait to read the latest content, and that's when I started subscribing. These days I read it less frequently, but I still subscribe to support the site.
- boplicity 6y agoAs a long-time publisher, there is only one primary metric that matters to me: loyal readers. I don't publish for the occasional visitor. I publish for the loyal readers that I have worked hard to cultivate, engage, and enrichen. The primary work is one of building a relationship with a loyal readership, based on consistency and quality. Our websites, as they're designed, are probably a little annoying to people who are not our loyal readership. That's by design; you're either part of our core audience, or we're filtering for whether you could be part of our core audience. Everyone else is secondary to the success of the business, as well as secondary to our core job, which is to serve our loyal readers, and, again, NOT our occasional readers, and certainly not the people who are likely to visit us just once and then never again. The article suggests adding an additonal – and complex – revenue source: selling articles individually. This idea, of course, is not feasible, because it is such a huge distraction from the core business, and is potentially a distraction that has the potential to cause real harm to the core business. Successful publishing is extremely difficult. To actually be sustainable, you really can't let yourself be distracted from what matters.
- wdrw 6y agoBut how do you get new loyal readers, if not by repeatedly proving your value to new occasional readers?
- nabla9 6y ago5 fee articles per month or something similar (storing the IP, for example).
- MattieTK 6y agoSomething the New York Times have talked about recently is how they repositioned their subscription offers in the opposite direction to Tim's suggestion recently to great success. The whole idea is to offer long trials at reduced prices, and I presume push this offer harder and harder to users that keep visiting regularly enough to look like potential subscribers. Once a user hits subscribe, a bunch of other systems kick in to get that users, over the next 12mos or whatever lengthy period the reduction is for, to build enough habit with the product that by the time the renewal comes around it has become essential. No other digital media company has had as much success in the last five years as the New York Times.
- Waterfall 6y agoThis will be the onlyfans to bangbros. The model works as long as they are not popular enough to pirate if it even works at all. The cost of subscription is not high for the WP or many for a trial, so it's more likely someone pays $1 to subscribe with a temporary card than to buy the articles. Think of the news articles similar to the commodity of porn. What would you do? Buy one video, or download the whole catalog every few trials? Text is cheap. It's everywhere. It'a small. You will not be able to guard secret information easily. The disposable nature of news makes it very hard to value by article, I have NEVER once found a news article worth paying for. I wonder if anyone here has a counter to that point, an article that was worth subscribe for.
- toyg 6y agoThere is an issue of correct evaluation of quality though. You might not think an article was worth paying for as you read it, but then it will give you an edge in some conversation later on. This accrues the more articles you read - maybe each item is not earth-shattering in itself, but together they paint you a picture that actually informs your actions.
- Waterfall 6y agoWell thats assuming the quality is good. News is so biased I don't feel like paying for it. Usually they tell you what they want me to think. The only publication I like (that has no noticible bias) is al jazeera which is free. The WP sucks and it's the only one off the top of my head that asked me to pay.
- tuatoru 6y agoPlug for Presspatron [1]. Quote: "PressPatron makes it easy to fund the future of journalism, via crowdfunding, membership payments and donations. In a few simple steps, our platform allows supporters to make recurring and one-off contributions to their favourite media sites." Easier cancellation, I believe, than many sites directly. Edit: it's relevant to the question of "how does one ethically access news sites without submitting to all the Dark Patterns they use to force you to subscribe?" Also, no relationahip at all between me and them, apart from me being an occasional user. 1. https://www.presspatron.com/ https://www.presspatron.com/
- _wldu 6y ago"It dawns at me that if I were still at AWS, I might propose offering Digital Content Volume Sales as a Service. “Simple Article Sales Service”, SASS. Maybe I should write a PR/FAQ." Would that be legal? Buy a subscription and then sell access to individual articles (micro payments) to third-parties? Or does he mean something else?
- rdiddly 6y agoWhat a great phrase - "administratively incompetent." Gonna steal that. Just the idea of administrative competence in general.
- fxtentacle 6y agoThere already are services that allow one to read multiple newspapers through a single contract, similar to what most doctors' offices have set up for their waiting rooms. I've used https://www.pressreader.com/ https://www.pressreader.com/ in the past and I'm sure there are others. The contract that I believe my company had with them was that for a fixed monthly fee we could print out a fixed number of pages. But we could mix and match different publications as we wanted. So that's effectively like selling individual articles, but with a minimum order quantity.
- bachmeier 6y agoI found David Perell's podcast interview with Robert Cottrell a fascinating discussion of the economics of journalism: https://www.perell.com/podcast/robert-cottrell https://www.perell.com/podcast/robert-cottrell On a different topic, why don't I subscribe? Lots of reasons, I suppose, including other priorities for my income combined with a horrible value/dollar ratio. But that's not really it. Before I'd even consider paying for journalism, I'd need to trust that I'm learning things that are true. A couple of recent examples of sloppiness that make it not worth subscribing, from my area of expertise (chosen to avoid anything controversial). There was an article in the NY Times about problems in the economics profession, focused on academic economists and similar non-academics like Fed economists. To make their point, the authors tossed in a comment by Larry Kudlow that was widely viewed as horrible. Why is that sloppy? Because Larry Kudlow is not an economist and has no connection to the economics profession. He got an undergrad degree in history, worked on Wall Street, worked in politics, and got a job as a TV commentator. Less than a minute of research would have found this. What are you paying for if they don't even do the easy fact checking? A second example occurred in the aftermath of the first labor market report after the pandemic hit in the US. Economists were trying to resolve the numbers on the unemployment report with the unemployment claims data. A prominent individual from CNN was quick to question the integrity of the economics profession. "You have to trust the numbers even if you don't like them!" he scolded the economists. What a reasonable position. Who could argue with that? Well if he had actually read the report he would have seen that two paragraphs of the report itself talked about problems with the data. No retraction of the tweet either. Again, what exactly are you paying for if you're talking about someone that's going to tweet something like that without even reading the labor report? I can write a platitude generator in a couple hours that would be just as useful.
- toyg 6y agoIt's a vicious circle: * the world is getting more and more complex with every day * people are getting more and more "informed" through the internet, everyone can basically fact-check anything you write, almost in realtime * news orgs are under economic pressure, so they cut specialized roles and force journalists to be even more generalist than they were before and work even faster than before, with an inevitable fall in quality * people notice the fall in quality and stop reading, increasing economic pressures. Goto 1.
- zdw 6y agoCan anyone comment on whether Apple News: https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ Is a good option as a single-subscription aggregator of multiple magazines and newspapers?
- MattieTK 6y agoGenerally they have a lot of media at a low cost. But if you want to support the production of this media, Apple currently take 50% of your monthly subscription as the cost of providing the service. That's even more than the app tax!
- hackerfromthefu 6y agoApple are extracting 100%, or equivalent, revenue to the news providers .. but pay a fraction of the costs incurred to create it, probably 1% of revenue or less for the digital distribution. If the costs of the news creators to create and administer those news networks was 50% of the revenue, then Apple is taking all of the profit. Apple is simply a vampire, a troll shaking down the weak
- MattieTK 6y agoFrom working in media, another problem with micropayments is deciding on that dollar cost. Without coming up with some administration of value to each article (which I'm not saying isn't worthwhile, it's just not something that's typically done) -- and perhaps even then -- it's very challenging to come up with a value that readers might understand. If everything is $1, but long investigations or in-depth reporting costs more than that, how do you stop losing potential subscribers (who would contribute more ARR) to these payments. And equally on the (admittedly large) percentage of stories that might not have such value, how do you price them? This is why subscriptions tend to work. Slowly you can weed out material that isn't working for either acquisition or retention. But you are always going to have articles that are good retainers but poor acquirers. To a micropayment reader the value of that article is low, but to subscriptions it may be higher. You might never do that article if you marked everything by its CAC value, but if you didn't you may lose $5000 ARR. How on earth do you price it fairly? It's complicated. I'd be in more favour of more expensive 24hr passes that show the value of the subscription to regular readers. Say $3 for 24hrs, and $30 for a month. I think in terms of small payments that's as close are you're going to get.
- comex 6y ago> So, says Mr Manager, “Why on earth would I invest in selling individual articles when a click on the “Subscribe” button gets me a hundred times the revenue?” > Why they’re wrong: Their arithmetic didn’t consider their chance of getting me to click on “Subscribe.” Didn’t it? Sure, maybe Tim Bray would have been willing to buy an article for $1 even though he wasn’t willing to subscribe. Maybe a lot of people would have. But if, out of every 100 people who buy the article for $1, a single one of them would have otherwise become a subscriber (if the micropayment option weren’t available), then the paper lost money on net. To be fair, audience size isn’t constant between the two options. People who read for $1 might forward the article to others; it might end up going viral. But any amount of payment is a huge psychological barrier. I suspect that even in a world with a commonly-used micropayments system, it would be near-impossible for an article to go viral if every person passing it along had to choose to pay $1 first. And 100 times the revenue is just a staggering factor to overcome. I think a multi-site fixed-price subscription model would have a much better chance of succeeding, even if it was priced to pay news sites, on average, that same $1 per article – simply because it would remove the psychological barrier. (Other comments have mentioned some subscriptions like this that already exist.) But I won’t get into that further, since it’s not what Tim Bray is proposing.
- onion2k 6y agoBut if, out of every 100 people who buy the article for $1, a single one of them would have otherwise become a subscriber (if the micropayment option weren’t available), then the paper lost money on net. I don't think Tim Bray is suggesting removing the subscription option. The point is that there could be a price for an individual article as well as the subscription option. If that 1 person would subscribe anyway then the lack of an individual article price is just leaving the other 99 payments on the table.
- richardwhiuk 6y agoNo, it might be undercutting the subscription as well. If nobody ever subscribes any more, and they just choose the articles which interest them and pay, the newspaper may decrease the amount of revenue it gets.
- erik_seaberg 6y agoNewspaper delivery is notorious for making it as hard as possible to unsubscribe, does this happen online or does the threat of a chargeback keep them in line?
- Swenrekcah 6y agoI had a subscription to one of the papers listed in the article. I could sign up online, but there was no way to unsubscribe. I explored all corners of their website, including links that promised unsubscription options but never led to any. They did offer me to sign up for another subscription if I wanted to give one as a gift. They did provide an email address. I sent an email and was told to call a specific number in another country. I said I could not do that and they were surely able to let me unsubscribe via email. After that I only got automated replys. I gathered all of this history and made a sucessful chargeback request. A year later I heard that the paper now offers working unsubscription online.
- sokoloff 6y agoFor more than a year, I googled Blue Apron (or Plated or Hello Fresh), carefully clicked on Blue Apron’s paid ad, went to the site and cancelled my next few orders because they didn’t offer an online subscription cancellation. (They had a page that would do it, but it wasn’t linked in the nav.) Once they linked it in the nav, I happily cancelled properly.
- epalm 6y ago> So I think the only way forward is to figure out how to sell articles. If you thought clickbait article titles were bad now...
- _pmf_ 6y agoThese are obscene amounts of money for a person with a median salary.
- boulos 6y agoEzra Klein’s interview with Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post (formerly of the Buffalo news) included a lot of discussion on the economics of media and news [1]. Her conclusion is that historically the local newspaper(s) had a monopoly on advertising. That advertising shifted to national ad campaigns on television, national papers (so her transition from Buffalo is highly relevant), and finally online advertising. In particular though, the “cover everything for our readers” model has broken down pretty massively. The rise of focused journalism and partnerships between papers is apparently giving rise to some innovation here (the basic form is that you get articles from associated press for most things and then supplement with local stories, but the Texas Tribune is mentioned as having a fairly different donation based model plus collaboration with Politico). So more than anything, I read this as “people will only subscribe and budget for so much media; what will they keep vs drop?”. The default answer has become “only the major international sources”. tbray’s list is incredibly “and also some local” by contrast! But not everyone is going to do that, and the conclusion has been the accelerated decline of local journalism. The thesis of her book and the discussion is that’s a huge loss, and we likely need different funding models for this public good. [1] https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-ezra-klein-show/the-crisis-in-the-news-pYi-EQuo6ZH/ https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-ezra-klein-show/the...
- 082349872349872 6y agoIf a public good is technically difficult for the private sector to produce, that still leaves the option of the public sector, or of individual households?
- boulos 6y agoI’d actually recommend the discussion during the interview (kind of towards the end, IIRC). There’s a decent back and forth about the risk of political influence in journalism if the money were controlled by a government, the relative pros and cons of the philanthropy model (“tend to prefer ‘serious’ journalism, not local small news” in addition to needing to avoid angering the benefactor), and the various donation / crowdfunding / micro transaction possibilities. I think there was also a little detour into “why ads at all?”.
- jmnicolas 6y agoIn France the state is funding massively the mainstream press since it's not economically viable. As you can imagine it has done wonders for plurality of opinions and journalists feeling free to criticize the government ...
- scrollaway 6y agoI'm french, I've lived in France, the UK, Greece, Sweden and Belgium. Of all those countries by far France has the most self-criticizing, cynical and sarcastic press of all. We're really good at making fun of ourselves and especially criticizing our own government. What on earth makes you write your comment?
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- jmnicolas 6y agoIt's a long time since I saw any meaningful criticism of the government (emphasis on meaningful). They all cheered the supposed victory of Macron getting funds from the EU. None of them told us that it would cost us more than what we would receive (since we're a net contributor to the EU budget). Did you see any real criticism of the COVID crisis management in the press? Edit: you want some real, French style, nasty criticism go read a few articles from this blog: http://h16free.com/ http://h16free.com/ The guy knows how to write and isn't holding his punches. That's what I would expect from free journalists.
- yxhuvud 6y agoIn Sweden, we also have very large press grants. At the same time, the biggest and most profitable newspaper (Dagens Nyheter, DN) doesn't take those grants. A large part of their profitability is that they have actually managed to make people pay for their online subscription and they are more profitable now than they have ever been.
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- bbarn 6y agoMedia is one of the most complicated problems we face in this age. We have on one side a desire for information to be free, and on the other side a desire to profit for one's labor. The middle ground between that is to attract people to give you some of their money for your labor, which changes the nature of the published works. Now your published works must not only be informative, but exciting, and more so than any competition that exists. This, left unchecked, turns into shock-journalism, or journalism sponsored by entities that may want to sway your opinion on other topics, all the while requiring more advanced modes of convincing you to subscribe - either with your attention or your money. It's not just a problem of the mechanics of how to pay for something, it's an existential problem of news in general.
- jdc 6y agoWhere does advertising fit into this viewpoint?
- foxrider 6y agoIt used to be an ideal choice, but as article correctly mentions - we killed it. First some websites got way too greedy with annoying and harmful ads, then the adblockers cut all ad revenue to maybe 1/3 of what it was and then Google and Facebook took over.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoNot the ideal choice - who provides the money becomes the customer, and keeping the customer happy is important. I used to run a newspaper, and you definitely get calls from advertisers saying "I don't like this article, change it or I stop advertising with you". Tough calls.
- toyg 6y ago> we killed it No, "we" didn't. Adblockers are a red herring, the masses don't use them. The real problem is that the metrics and incentives of internet advertising are such that newspaper articles are simply not attractive enough to justify their (high) costs of production. You read a given newspaper article once a day. You check Facebook or Google multiple times per hour. The newspaper barely knows your name and age, maybe where you live; Facebook and Google know everything about you and your tastes. And of course, it costs almost nothing for FB or G to "produce" a page of content (in fact, they get it free from others!), whereas a newspaper has to pay a highly-educated worker. Where will advertisers spend their money, where will they get more bang for their buck?
- marcus_holmes 6y agoI don't see a solution to the subscription vs micropayment problem, but I wonder if we can solve three problems with one solution. We have a problem where "who is a journalist?" is not defined. We have another problem that the advertising model of paying for journalism isn't going to work (as TFA points out), and readers need to start paying for their news. We have another problem that bad actors in our society are paying for misinformation to be spread in order to warp people's political perceptions. So... can we: Define a journalist as someone who makes their entire living from selling articles that they write to their readers (also applies to videos/podcasts/radio/etc). And by extension, a "news organisation" is one that sells news articles to its readers (and pays journalists to write them). Define a difference between "news" - articles that readers pay for, and "fake news" - articles that are paid for by a sponsor organisation. Organisations that don't charge their readers are still able to publish whatever they like. But they're not considered "news" organisations. The credibility that goes with printing actual paper moves to selling the stories, not the adverts. Citing or quoting an article that isn't paid for results in a "but that's not news, it's promotional bullshit" - if someone is paying to have this published, then clearly they have a reason for that, and that reason is probably not because it's the truth (otherwise they wouldn't need to pay to publish it). Forcing news organisations to make their readers and not their advertisers or owners their primary customer would definitely improve the quality of news.
- pjc50 6y ago> We have another problem that bad actors in our society are paying for misinformation to be spread in order to warp people's political perceptions. > Define a journalist as someone who makes their entire living from selling articles Where does https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/oct/03/daily-telegraph-rehires-boris-johnson-on-275000-salary https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/oct/03/daily-teleg... fit into this model?
- marcus_holmes 6y agoGood question :) I guess he's writing an opinion column though? I don't read the Torygraph so I haven't read his column. Opinion columns, as always, are not journalism.
- ecmascript 6y agoThe main problem with media today is that I don't want to subscribe, I want to pay for maybe a specific piece. But all media outlets require one to subscribe so I won't even consider it.
- ramanathanrv 6y agoThis is indeed a huge problem. In the current form, it quickly become unsustainable (in terms of both time and money) for customers to work with so many subscriptions. Maybe the end state is Netflix/Prime like platform for digital news wherein the platform can share the subscription revenue across all the participating media companies depending on the usage. The argument against that is - these platforms now control what is produced, their price and distribution. Such an arrangement will eventually subvert democracy. Our team is working on creating a micro payments platform called ana.money. We don't see this as micropayments vs subscriptions. But micropayments & subscriptions. Media outlets (text/audio/video) will benefit from offering both these forms of payments to let customers access their content. Our goal is to build an infrastructure that supports this worldview. We will make it incredibly easy for publishers to sell both individual articles and subscriptions: taking care of user identity, invoicing, taxation, cross border/multi-currency, etc..
- teraku 6y agoI think what would be much better is a redefinition of the publisher role: Most (big) news outlets already run a lot of their own infrastructure. Web servers, this whole paywall mess, etc etc. What if they could just provide their articles through an API (which is also consumed by their own website) and aggregators can route these articles to their users. Aggregators would become publishers of sort. Let me flesh it out a bit. Scenario 1) I am a subscriber of news-site1.com. I have an account with their system. I can read all their articles on their website. At the same time I browse this news-aggregator1.com. They collect lots of links, and with the power of SSO/OAuth I can already read all news-site1.com articles directly on news-aggregator1.com (since they are consuming the API with my account). Additionally I have an account with news-aggregator1.com and pay them a fee, which allows me to read N articles from any outlet they have connected with. Scenario 2) news-aggregator2.com does not offer a subscription base, but is connected to all the APIs of the news outlets. Their users can buy on an per-article bases from all connected news outlets and the articles are saved into the user's account. Just two scenarios how this _could_ look like. The reasons I think this is not done is 1) you lose ad traffic, which is somewhat predictable, 2) you lose predictability/control in general 3) nobody has done something like that and made it work, so there is little confidence 4) they might just be right and it only appeals to a small audience
- sam_lowry_ 6y agoWhen I contribute to an article or help a journalist in the investigation, I usually receive the full text from that same journalist around publication time. It's a sign of gratitude, pretty much like a final Thank you in an email.
- ricardobeat 6y agoBring back traditional advertising. No user profiling, no retargeting, no data collection. Pay for exposure and not clicks. Problem solved. Micropayments is a red herring. Print newspapers use to cost what, 50c a piece? And that included an absolutely massive printing, sales and distribution infrastructure. It is preposterous that digital publishing would cost more.
- mcherm 6y agoThat cost also was supported by significant advertising revenues, including things like a "classified ads section" and "want ads", whole categories that now support separate industries.
- kevsim 6y agoI think if the world switched back to traditional advertising (which on the web for me means contextual targeting) and we stopped allowing third party ads to run a bunch of JS, I'd be willing to switch off my ad blockers. Until then, I'm afraid these publications won't be get paid for my eyes/clicks.
- Nextgrid 6y agoAnother problem with online ads vs traditional media is the lack of human review. I know I can trust ads that are shown on public transport or in a major printed magazine/newspaper to not be a fly-by-night scam, malware or bullshit dropshipping operation. On the web, I know I can not trust anything because none of it is reviewed, the ads change depending on the time of day and who looks at them (targeting) and stuff like Taboola/Outbrain are running their entire business on churning out obnoxious content.
- chrisdinn 6y agoUnderrated idea but very complex in practice. Contextual is coming back regardless as third-party cookies go away. But, I think “traditional” in this sense means brand advertising with broad reach, not micro-targeted messages for narrow audience. Like, why don’t you see nearly as many Coke ads online as you do IRL? Hypothetically, this kind of advertiser wants “brand safe” context (high-quality, inoffensive, not-too-weird) but is otherwise mostly looking to reach as many people as possible in its core demographics. Figuring out if something is brand safe at the margin is pretty tough and you actually can’t trust ad exchanges for this signal, so that’s what at least some of that JS from advertisers is for. Also, “the margins” on the internet are huge, likely most of the page. Internet has not done well here, traditionally. These advertisers traditionally loved primetime TV and glossy magazines, with high production values and usually safe content. A surprising amount of this brand money is still in traditional linear TV advertising, despite the fact that most key demos have already given up on linear TV.
- jeremiahlee 6y agoI think the Web Monetization API currently incubating as a proposed W3C standard would provide the experience you are desiring. Consumers establish a wallet provider and install a browser extension (for now, until the standard is formally adopted). When a Web Monetization HTML tag is encountered, the browser starts streaming micropayments every second while you are engaging with the content. Content creators can then do things like grant access/remove the paywall, not load/remove ads, or offer bonus features. Today, GQ, Wired, and ~1,000 other sites are experimenting with the Web Monetization API. The only wallet provider right now is Coil, but the protocol is well defined and ready for other players. References: - https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/ - https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/ - https://mobile.twitter.com/WebMotized https://mobile.twitter.com/WebMotized
- ako 6y agoIt solves the problem only partially: newspapers can't live from small payments on popular articles only, they need bundling to generate enough volume. Same thing can be seen with music industry: spotify doesn't pay enough per play, so artists are now told to use spotify as marketing, and make money from performances. Not sure what a newspaper performance would look like.
- bigiain 6y ago> Not sure what a newspaper performance would look like. An election? /s
- jeegsy 6y agoThat is excellent
- Nextgrid 6y ago> newspapers can't live from small payments on popular articles only Printed newspapers were surviving just fine despite selling for a few bucks despite it being a physical piece of paper that needed to be printed & delivered on very tight schedules. The same model should be applied for the web - the price point is already proven to be affordable enough for the majority of the market, and the lack of logistics would generate higher profits.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoI think aside from pay per article and subscription (give me everything you have for the year) there could be a discounted give me 5 for 3 type offer for the people who think they will want to have a certain number of articles from X over the year but that is all, I would never pay $221 a year for the NY Times because I probably only want 2 articles a month but if you offered me an article for 2 dollars I might think - no, if I pay for this article 2 dollars then (2 * 12) * 2 is nearly 50 dollars a year, I want a deal to make me think it is worth it.
- locallost 6y agoThis is the second time in recent time that I've seen this issue talked about. I'm glad because it's been bothering me for a long time now. A couple years ago I discussed it with some people from a newspaper I worked for, and the bottom line was that they don't see another way at the moment. I don't know for sure if they view any model other than a subscription as crazy because they don't understand it, or they think they'll make less money, but the basic idea at the moment seems to be to have a certain (not huge) number of loyal subscribers, people that basically open your page first thing in the morning. Bray thinks they are wrong because he will never subscribe to everything, but I'm not so sure he is right either. Can a smaller newspaper really compete with the New York Times? If I can pick between a micropayment for a NYT article and a smaller regional paper, who will get my money? Subscriptions let the publishers keep their head above water, which is best they have for now. The more I think about, the more I think the model of a newspaper in general is stuck in an era where you had to buy a physical good to read news. You buy a newspaper, you like it, you subscribe. It gets delivered to you to your house. This is no longer the case and I can read whatever I want from anywhere on the globe (and I do). Most likely we will need to lose what we have before we realize there is value in having a local newspaper. If there is.
- notRobot 6y ago> This is the second time in recent time that I've seen this issue talked about. If you have it handy, could you please link to the other discussion?
- Yizahi 6y agoWe really need some intermediate solution for newspapers. And preferably it should have regional pricing, like videogames or music. I can't justify paying multiple instances of 200-300$/year, maybe one such sub at most. And even then I would like a clear online only way to subscribe/unsubscribe, and don't want to send a courier to Economist HQ with a papyrus scroll written in a blood of 13 young bulls killed under full moon on equinox declaring that I wish to unsubscribe. Videogames solved this years ago and I don't get why newspapers are so slow. It is because of different generations? Game produces invented so many ways for monetization - e.g. papers could not only sell single articles but also bundle multiple articles on a single topic together and sell it discounted (e.g. I want to read about Armenia/Azerbaijan this week, maybe next week, but not whole year), they can bundle subs with some 3rd party content video/podcasts/games etc., pay as you want for bundle of articles or limited time sub but with tiered rewards for paying certain amounts, subscribers only discussion forum (real forum, not a godforsaken unmoderated board on the unusable engine). And so on, they don't even need to invent a lot, just copy existing practices.
- akerro 6y agoIf there was something like Basic Attention Token where users could donate to their most often visited websites.
- mnky9800n 6y agoWhat's strange is it used to be you would pick up a newspaper at a stand for the day, pay a dollar or whatever, and then have quite a lot of articles to read for that day. But now, it is impossible, the only way is to lock-in. And that may be for the rest of your life if the complaints about the labirynth you may navigate to unsubscribe the nytimes is to be believed. If there was some sort of daily access pass that didn't bother you, require any subscription, perhaps not even ask you to sign up for an email, that would be quite nice.
- Santosh83 6y agoHere in India the printed newspaper is still the dominant mode. Very few people I know subscribe to digital news.
- aero-glide 6y agoI wish my monthly print subscription of "The Hindu" also gave me access to online version
- grumple 6y agoThese prices are just crazy compared to their old model. Do these papers really think they are providing as much value as Netflix (or more)? Even ignoring journalistic quality...
- apetresc 6y agoUh, I'm almost certain they see themselves as providing more value than Netflix.
- antepodius 6y agoThe highest-brow 'orange man bad'.
- podgib 6y agoI get a lot more value out of my Economist subscription than my Netflix one.
- davidhyde 6y agoIf a newspaper is already subjective then they could make money by charging companies to write articles on topics that would influence public opinion to their benefit. That is not a serious suggestion btw ;)
- sokoloff 6y agoDo you think this is not happening already? http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- mixedbit 6y agoHow about the Kickstarter model: you don't pay to access an already written article, but fund a campaign for a newspaper to investigate a particular topic. The newspaper would create a list of topics they could investigate along with required budgets. This would promote investigative journalism, which can be very expensive.
- rfrey 6y agoThat would provide a tremendous incentive for newspapers to Find Something, and Find Something Big.
- codegladiator 6y agoThat can go ugly as well. What happens if nobody is putting in money for real issues (some accident somewhere) and everyone is putting in money for vain news (celeb news?).
- IgorPartola 6y agoBut the manager is right. There is no way to sell a single article 300 times a year to the same person. A lot easier to sell a subscription to 1/300th of people. The other problem: if you just want to know what is happening, go to any news discussion site or board and click on the discussion. Comments will often contain long quotes and/or summaries of the articles. Plus major news networks all summarize articles: “CNN says Reuters says the NYT reported XYZ”. Selling a single article is a race to the bottom. I can see going back to the original model though: for $5-10 you can buy an edition: today’s bundle of articles. Much better value for the buyer, easier than $1 micropayments. This of course requires some kind of clever balance between live updating breaking news and having a well defined set of articles to include in the edition.
- helsinkiandrew 6y agoI've always thought micropayments or paying per article was the way forward - and for a lot of users it probably is. But I guess that for many publishers, they've done the math and realized that a few people paying a few hundred dollars is more lucrative than lots paying a few cents or dollars. When a user subscribes to a cheap introduction offer, they are likely to read more articles and continue to pay the full rate. The long tail are picked up by apple news, scroll.com and similar subscription services.
- auggierose 6y agoIn the end, a subscription is not something you need to "manage". People moaning over having to manage too many subscriptions? This stuff is automatically booked from your account, so I am not sure what people are complaining about. It's zero work for you. Now, you think that service is not worth $5 a month? That's a whole different matter, don't subscribe then.
- geuis 6y agoThis is a prime dictionary worthy example of not getting the point.
- auggierose 6y agoIt's hard to get a point that doesn't exist in the first place. It's entitled folks moaning about having too much choice. So what, you would want it to be bundled again, so that you pay for stuff you don't need? Big facepalm.
- mongol 6y agoI don't want to pay for sports, culture, opinions, entertainment, godsip, reviews etc coverage. I want to read the news. One week of newspaper issues contains something for everyone, from cartoons, to cookie recipes to car coverage etc. Not interested. I want the news, only the news. The rest I can get elsewhere.
- Kosirich 6y agoSimilarly as the author suggest, I would also like to have a button to donate money to an article I really liked. Perhaps most of the times it would be 0.5, maybe 0.2 dollars. For my mental arithmetic, I use the "beer equivalents" as in "would I buy this man (author) a beer if I met him now in the street and if yes, how many". Perhaps someone can make a chrome add-on, with which you can donate an equivalent of a beer's worth of bitcoin that would be called "Give this man a beer".
- Kosirich 6y agoWhat the author didn't mention explicitly is the obvious sludge techniques used in media subscription models. (https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/resources/mini-encyclopedia-of-be/sludge/ https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/resources/mini-encyclope...) In case of The Economist, to which I'm subscribed, you have to call them...on a phone...like it's the 80s The worst offender of the type is scribed.com that has a fake "we're sorry to see you leave" page before you actually hit the final "yes I confirm that I want to unsubscribe" button. This resulted in at least 30 dollars extra that they got from me.
- kyrers 6y agoThe calling to unsubscribe always gets me. How does this still happen in 2020?
- paranoidrobot 6y agoBecause someone figured out that hiring one person on minimum wage to handle a phone queue results in them retaining more people than providing a nice and easy unsubscribe option.
- kyrers 6y agoYeah, I understand that. I just think we as consumers should not accept that.
- bialpio 6y agoIt's not like this is being advertised when you are subscribing to some service. "Subscribe now and if you ever want to cancel, we'll make you pay! PS. We know where you live." What could the consumer do apart from relying on word of mouth to avoid such services?
- kyrers 6y ago> It's not like this is being advertised when you are subscribing to some service. "Subscribe now and if you ever want to cancel, we'll make you pay! PS. We know where you live." They could at least ask. But I understand your point. > What could the consumer do apart from relying on word of mouth to avoid such services? I'm not sure I understand you. Are you implying you can't follow the news without using these services? Only through word of mouth? If that's what you mean, there are ways to follow the news while avoiding paywalls. I do.
- aronpye 6y agoThis problem has already been solved, centuries ago, by something called the printing press. You go out, buy a single newspaper, which you get to keep, forever. It doesn't track you either.
- lebaux 6y agoIn Slovakia, bunch of journalist split from mainstream print and started daily news, using WordPress. No ads, but everything behind paywall. Not exactly cheap, but not expensive either. They now have 43k subscribers (Keep in mind Slovakia is 5m people). The key was combination of factors, too many to dissect it in comment. Basically it boils down to: - Only news - Slovak language - High Quality, no clickbait - No ads, snappy websites - Little tracking (at least in comparison with typical news website) It worked and I extremely happy for them. Keep in mind this is Slovakia, not exactly ultra rich country and people here were never too keen on paying for news. https://dennikn.sk/1741628/list-predplatitelom-rok-2019-bol-pre-dennik-n-rekordny/ https://dennikn.sk/1741628/list-predplatitelom-rok-2019-bol-... Translated: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fdennikn.sk%2F1741628%2Flist-predplatitelom-rok-2019-bol-pre-dennik-n-rekordny%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
- PaulHoule 6y agoThe "New York Times" probably thinks it is good enough that you'll subscribe to them and not subscribe to the others. Other publications might kid themselves about that, but few of them will be able to kid anyone else.
- SloopJon 6y agoIt's not the point of the article, but where did he find the Wall Street Journal for $120 / year? I'm seeing an introductory rate of $20 / month for a year, and $40 / month thereafter.
- fbelzile 6y agoWhy don't publishers create a system where I can "load" my account with 20 articles for $10? I strongly dislike subscribing to things I don't feel like I can commit to. Especially, with the way companies make it a hassle to cancel. A pay-as-you-go system would give the consumer the confidence they need to pay something (which isn't recurring) but saves the overhead of micropayments. They could even have it where if you start paying more than the annual subscription, the rest of the year is on the house.
- dathos 6y agoThere was an aggregator of sorts that did this in the Netherlands [1]. But it seems they never were able to make it profitable, I assume if the publishers themselves did it the case would be a lot different. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
- jerrygoyal 6y agotrue, not all businesses are suited for SaaS based monetization models.
- rmtech 6y agoThis article is self-refuting. People are creatures of habit, and as long as the banks allow you to "subscribe" in a way that makes it really, really hard to "unsubscribe", the subscription model will continue winning. The very idea of a subscription needs to die in order for content to be sold piecemeal. Having said that, I am about to start a substack to get my own crowd of subscribers. BECAUSE IT MAKES ECONOMIC SENSE TO DO SO - I don't want to have to keep re-selling myself if I can possibly avoid it.
- vorpalhex 6y ago> as long as the banks allow you to "subscribe" in a way that makes it really, really hard to "unsubscribe" I am very quick to subscribe to patreon and through Google Play because I know I can unsubscribe through those platforms. I won't touch newspapers unless they're through another subscription provider. > I don't want to have to keep re-selling myself if I can possibly avoid it. It's time efficient to switch to basically rent seeking. Sometimes that makes sense - I have content creators who I consume so regularly I have no issue giving them a few dollars on the month with the caveat that they are active. On the other hand, for someone who is new to content creation they are never going to get a subscription from me because it's too risky that they decide to stop quietly and I'm out my entertainment budget money. Subscriptions only work when I trust you both as a payment processor (so that excludes newspapers) and if you're already established as a trustable content creator.
- rmtech 6y ago> Subscriptions only work when I trust you both as a payment processor (so that excludes newspapers) and if you're already established as a trustable content creator. Sure, but once you have made a name for yourself you want subscribers, which is why Patreon/Substack/etc allow people to subscribe rather than allowing them to either buy/not buy each piece of content. Every seller wants the consumer to default to paying them forever, rather than paying once and then having to make an active decision to pay again. (And before you have made a name for yourself, you don't sell your content at all, you give it away for free) Control over the "default" behavior is just incredibly powerful. Creators are not going to give it up.
- UweSchmidt 6y agoSubscription can work if the content is high quality and unique, the experience as a reader is great (namely a clean and distraction free web design) and the entire process is BS free. I signed up for The Athletic again and it's just that; when I cancelled during the NFL offseason I remember that to be fast and simple.
- CivBase 6y agoI wonder if there's any opportunity for a "YouTube Red" of journalism where users are charged a monthly subscription for access to many content networks and the revenue from their subscription is distributed to the networks based on which ones the users engaged with most. I'm not sure how you could measure that engagement, though.
- mojo982 6y agoKinda like this? https://scroll.com/ https://scroll.com/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- twodayslate 6y agoApple News+[0] already exists. [0]: https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/
- srg0 6y agoI can get that publishers may not see profitable selling access to individual articles. I can get they don't want to sell an individual issue like they used to sell paper copies. I can understand they have annual RPU target so short-term subscriptions are off the table. But not offering an option of a limited time subscription without auto-renewal is a scam. Auto-renewal should be an opt-in. Unsubscribing should not require a phone call. Then we may talk loyal subscribers and how publishers are actually the good guys. Recently I avoid any CC subscriptions and subscribe exclusively through PayPal. And as the first payment goes through, I cancel automatic payments.
- dspillett 6y ago> Unsubscribing should not require a phone call This is my bug-bare. It shouldn't be permitted for unsubscribing to be more difficult than subscribing. There are many examples where you can sign-up to spend instantly 24/7 but have to call, only M-F, 0900-1700, on a number that probably costs, and sit in a queue for a while, to unsubscribe. Even seemingly reputable periodicals do this (New Scientist: not sure if they have an online unsubscribe option, but they certainly didn't a not-long while ago).
- rcarmo 6y agoHere's a suggestion: "Paid Reader Mode" in which you can preview a third or so of the article in Reader Mode (without any clutter) and then choose whether or not you want to pay a pre-determined amount (capped by your browser settings) to obtain a _complete_, _unfettered_ version of the article as self-contained HTML, EPUB (or PDF) that you can save on your computer (or add to a site-independent library, something like a cross between Pocket and iBooks on the Mac).
- jedimastert 6y ago> Part of the calculation includes the fact that most of us are lazy and administratively incompetent and just won’t get around to unsubscribing, even if we want to. I think the author's giving too much leeway to the fact that many publications (and services in general) intentionally make unsubscribing far more difficult that it needs to be
- Fnoord 6y agoWell said. The [rest of the] streaming business (audio such as Spotify, and video such as Netflix) suffers from the same problem.
- cassepipe 6y agoI thought Mozilla had a plan for a global license. Did they give up on that too?
- pronik 6y agoThe one thing I find really bizzare about this whole web thing is that while we all pretend to be global, we are in reality even more local than ever. Facebook recommends me people I've never seen in my life just because someone I've went to school with moved to another part of the world and has friends there. Alexa (and probably Siri) doesn't understand my request for russian or japanese songs on Spotify even though they are available. And just like this, every publisher on this planet thinks that there is any value to me, a German resident, to shell out a significant amount of money for a monthly paywall subscription to Adelaide Times, just because someone sent me a link to an interesting article. I also will not subscribe to your newsletter, I have no interest in getting push notifications, I just want the article in question, I'm not local to your main information funnel. It's a whole another question whether I'm ready to jump hoops to pay for just this article, but your publication entity doesn't interest me one bit as it is. As soon as publishers stop thinking locally, the world might become a better place for information. But somehow, I seriously doubt it.
- boplicity 6y agoIt's clear that there is one problem that the article is trying to solve. The irony, of course, is that it is not a problem for newspapers, it's a problem for the author of the article. The author wants to read articles they don't have access to, and they don't want to pay what publishers are charging. That's the problem. Newspapers regularly create things worth reading. People want to read those things. They don't want to pay what the newspapers are charging. So, they suggest a solution: "Give it to me for cheap!" Sorry, but suggesting difficult and complex business models (with very low prices) does not help newspapers.
- runxel 6y ago> Sorry, but suggesting difficult and complex business models does not help newspapers. And neither do their current digital business models. (Ok, maybe it's different in the US, but it for sure doesn't work over here in Europe)
- s_m 6y agoLately I've enjoyed bypassing the NYT paywall using the `Lynx` CLI browser.
- jpm_sd 6y agoGood old micropayments. Now's our chance to make a hojillion dollars! https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/06/22 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/06/22 (2001, parody of http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/ http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/)
- patrickaljord 6y agoHe says he's subscribed to: - Business Insider - Washington Post - Wall Street Journal - New York Times - Guardian - Globe & Mail - Telegraph - Bloomberg - Times of London That's like reading the same opinions 10 times a day (edit: minus Telegraph which is still very centrist). Am I the only one reading from diverse perspectives? I often read NYT, BI, Guardian but also the Dailymail, RT, Fox etc. I would hate to always be reading articles from people of the same political side if only because certain issues tend to be completely ignored by each political sides when it goes against their narrative so I make sure to read from both to avoid missing much.
- jstanley 6y agoI don't think the Telegraph and the Guardian are the same political side.
- not2b 6y agoWell, apparently one side is "we have strong opinions, maybe left wing, maybe right wing, but also have journalistic ethics and try to get the facts right" vs "the purpose of our publication is propaganda" (RT, Fox).
- patrickaljord 6y agoYou think NYT and WaPo are not mostly anti-Trump propaganda? As for RT, it's the only outlet that openly and strongly criticize US foreign policy of never ending wars, no mainstream leftist or right-wing outlets go this far. For obvious reasons.
- not2b 6y agoThe WSJ is hardly on the same side as the Guardian; their editorial pages are hugely opposed.
- grok22 6y agoCame across PressReader and Scroll in the comment section of TFA. Anyone use PressReader? It seems funky in that it seems like it has actual images of the physical newspaper or magazine (so the layout of everything is like the actual physical paper or magazine). Do you find that difficult to use? On the samples I had to zoom and scroll to read anything, but it kind of felt nice too. Is it worth the 29.99 monthly subscription?
- kmeisthax 6y agoI have the opposite problem: I don't want to buy a single article, I want a subscription that works on every news site. Individual article purchases suck for the same reason that individual source subscriptions suck. We learned a decade and change ago that microtransactions are a bad idea and very difficult to account for. Mental and payment network transaction costs dominate if you actually ask for tiny amounts of money all the time. Functional microtransaction schemes work by separating the point of payment from the point at which costs are accrued. This is ostensibly to batch transactions together, but also has the effect of making it far harder to consider how much you've actually spent. Users either agonize about spending a penny to read another article, or they get sticker shock from how many articles they read per month. No one likes being nickeled and dimed, so subscriptions offer an escape valve for all of this. Instead of charging the user some accrued cost that they can't really budget for, you just charge them a fixed amount per month for unlimited access to a given resource. If we can't expect the customer to spend money when everything is a transaction cost, then we shouldn't bother tracking those accrued costs. Just figure an average amount of what it should cost and bill them at the end of each month. This works great if the subscription service is largely all-inclusive for the service that you are purchasing. The way most news paywalls work is sort of like "quartering and dollaring". You see, most people don't go straight to a single news site to get all of their news. They go to aggregators, find the story they're looking for, and then go to that particular site. So the paywall on those sites is fundamentally indistinguishable from a microtransaction popup, except instead of wanting 10 cents to read one article, they want $10/mo to read all their articles. It's not like actually subscribing to any of these will actually fix the problem, since there's tens to hundreds of different paywalled sources out there. I don't want to subscribe to one news source - I want a variety. For the record, the only service I know of that aggregates news and has a subscription option is Apple News+. As someone who daily-drives an Android phone and a Windows desktop, this service is mostly useless to me. Don't get me wrong, I do have access to iOS and macOS devices, I'm just not interested in a news service that only works on two of the six or so different computing devices I have access to. "Oh, this article is paywalled, I guess I need to pull out my iPod" is not materially different from "Oh, this article is paywalled, I guess I need to pull out a browser I don't normally use". (Alternatively, Google could revert the changes to their ad system they made that moved advertising revenue away from third-party publishers, and we could go back to publisher advertising being able to pay for this content.)
- paulcarroty 6y ago> As a family we already subscribe to the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Vancouver Sun, the Economist, Talking Points Memo, Heated, and The Tyee. Ohhh, it's actually the group addiction. News can be addictive more than heroin. Instead of doing/creating something you're sitting on coach and waiting for hot feelings. Know it very well 'cause my own family experience.
- LadyCailin 6y agoNo one seems to have mentioned Blendle. Or maybe it’s only available in some regions? Anyways, a solution such as he describes already exists, and it’s great.
- wishysgb 6y agoI have tried to contact multiple newspapers and did a survey that had an okay response I really want to start an organization that unites subscription to all newspapers and it just tunnels money directly from reader to newspapers.