21 ms·

As 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 loya

As 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 ago
But how do you get new loyal readers, if not by repeatedly proving your value to new occasional readers?
- nabla9 6y ago
  5 fee articles per month or something similar (storing the IP, for example).
- MattieTK 6y ago
  Something 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.
  - gpvos 6y ago
    The NYT and Guardian have me in that first stage now, but the chance that I'll upgrade to something more expensive is again, like Tim writes, ultra-close to zero (the Guardian is pay-what-you-want anyway, and it seems to work for them). My main news expense is my local national newspaper, and other papers will always remain secondary news resources for me unless they develop the same kind of coverage of the Netherlands.
  - silverlake 6y ago
    This worked on me. I did the trial. I called to cancel (they make it difficult) and they offered to continue the trial rate for 6 months. Now I'm hooked and pay the full rate because it's proven very useful for me.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
At least for newspapers this model can’t work. When considered as a civic function to ensure unbiased access to facts and emerging critical stories, your approach is completely at odds with consumers, even loyal customers. The reason is that the market signals emitted by loyal readers don’t have any relationship to objective reality. Loyal readers might disbelieve evolution and only respond to articles that favor creationism. Loyal readers might not cancel their subscription when you omit fair coverage of Julian Assange’s extradition hearing, or make deals with the CIA to delay publishing controversial materials. Thus optimizing for loyal readers is fundamentally antithetical to the basic civic duty premise. At best, if you did this, you would be an entertainment publication, not a fact reporter. That’s totally OK, but it’s important to point out it won’t work, in principle, for news publications.
- gpvos 6y ago
  Being entirely dependent on subscribers is still better than depending only on advertisers. There are quite a large number of people who actually want their newspaper to apply sound journalism whatever it takes. Advertisers just want attention. Of course, a mix of both is probably the best.
  - nobody9999 6y ago
    >Being entirely dependent on subscribers is still better than depending only on advertisers. Except most newspapers rely on a hybrid model. And what's more important to me is not being tracked around the 'net than paying for content/subscriptions. As such, I take steps to minimize (with mitigated success) the tracking that any website, regardless of content, is able to perform on me. And that's the biggest issue here. FB and Google are huge and profitable because of their incessant tracking. Advertisers (like me, the author of the blog post and many others) want their money to be well spent. It's not that the business model for most newspapers and other periodicals have really changed. Their model was always to maintain a loyal base of readers (whether that be via physical print circulation, subscriptions, and these days clicks/visitors on the site) to be used as a draw for advertisers to believe their money is well spent with them and not their competitors. Google and FB have hijacked that model. They are a middle man that sucks advertising revenue that used to go the publishers of actual professional content. Just as Apple/Google take 30% off the top for the "privilege" of being allowed to sell an app to their captive audience. Aggregation of professional content does provide some value. But using that aggregation to pull revenue away from the publishers has consequences. Those consequences are several: 1. Reducing the revenue for publishers of professional content limits the ability of those publishers to pay for and publish more and better professional content; 2. (1) often forces consolidation of these publishers, limiting both the number of publishers, and likely the range of viewpoints presented (think Sinclair Broadcasting) to the consumers of such content; 3. It also forces these publishers to compete for ad sales with the middlemen who use the products from these publishers of professional content. The publishers still need to create such content, as that's their business. The middlemen, on the other hand, use that same content to drive ad sales that otherwise would have gone to the publishers; 3. Subscriptions allow "loyal" customers to directly compensate the publishers of such professional content without contributing to the parasitical middlemen; 4. As has been true for centuries, advertising is the revenue source that has allowed publishers to continue publishing professional content, with physical newspaper sales/circulation and subscriptions being the measure of value to advertisers; 5. Those measures (now including clicks and measures of "engagement") are being exploited and distorted by the middlemen to suck that value away from publishers without providing any real value. High-Frequency Trading[0] is an example from the financial markets which matches this behavior: Get in between sellers and buyers and arbitrage your position to profit from that position. No value is added to the market, but profit is extracted nonetheless. All that said, the publishers of professional content use many different mechanisms to maintain that all-important ad revenue, often by increasing the number of ads and amount of invasive tracking of visitors. To see what I'm talking about, stick the URL of one of these sites into Blacklight[1] (discussed here last week[2]) and see just how much tracking/marketing data is included on their sites. Here's an example. This is the result from a scan of the Wall Street Journal[3]. The parasitical middlemen are driving this race to the bottom that threatens the long-term viability of paid, professional journalism. That doesn't seem to bother them, as they're raking in money hand over fist. But we are the ones who will continue to lose out, both in terms of journalistic diversity and volume. Don't let the parasites suck the value out of newspaper/periodical publishing, leaving a dessicated husk that can't provide us with the information we need to support and maintain a vibrant, free society. [0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/high-frequency-trading.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/high-frequency-trading.... [1] https://themarkup.org/blacklight https://themarkup.org/blacklight [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24553514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24553514 [3] https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=wsj.com https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=wsj.com
notimetorelax 6y ago
If it were printed newspaper I could go and get one for a few bucks. Digital has nothing to offer of that kind. As the other poster wrote, how else would you expand your readership?
- Waterfall 6y ago
  Word of mouth; the best advertising there is.
- boplicity 6y ago
  > As the other poster wrote, how else would you expand your readership? By creating a valuable product, finding potential costumers, and offering the product for sale. Why would it be different than any other business? It would be ridiculous to expect every SaaS business to offer their services for "a few bucks", and yet, for some reason, people think it is egregious that publishers don't do this. Bizarre. Though, I do have the say the newspaper industry caused this; for years, when the internet was still new, most newspapers gave away their best content. That was a huge mistake; it lead people to significantly devalue news.
  - hobofan 6y ago
    How do you expect people to go from "not customer" to "loyal customer" without going to through the intermediate step of "occasional reader"? > By creating a valuable product, finding potential costumers > Our websites, as they're designed, are probably a little annoying to people who are not our loyal readership. That's by design; > again, NOT our occasional readers As I read it, you are expecting a occasional visitor to stick with your bad-UX site and stick with it despite that, until they at some point came to the site so often that they have learned to endure the bad UX?
    - x0x0 6y ago
      I expect via the well-known method of signing up for a trial subscription.
  - corty 6y ago
microcolonel 6y ago
> ...there is only one primary metric that matters to me: loyal readers. I don't publish for the occasional visitor. Okay, good luck with that. I don't know how somebody becomes a “loyal reader” if they can't even read your website to begin with. Especially with how many of these subscription rags play outrageous frame games and use facts to tell lies and half truths, it's insulting enough without half the article disappearing when you scroll, or a modal prompt. I usually just don't open links to sites that I know work like this.
- xorfish 6y ago
  There is an easy solution for this problem. Everyone with the link can access the article. Everyone who subscribes can access the links for the articles and share them.
  - cableshaft 6y ago
    It's an interesting idea, but seems easily gamed. One person subscribes, and posts all the links to other link sites (like Reddit, HackerNews). Maybe there's a /r/xNewspaper that anyone can go to that posts links to every article from that newspaper.
    - golemotron 6y ago
      You need to build the loss into the model (or not even see it as loss). Many streaming services don't seem to mind when you share your username and password with another household. It doesn't happen often enough for them to care. How much money you would make if everyone did the right thing is a number that is not as real as the actual amount of money you make. Seeing things that way seems important.
_wldu 6y ago
This is a good point. It's why I subscribe to some you tube channels but not others. I can find content I am interested in on dozens of channels, but I gravitate to those where I better relate to the channel owner's presentation or personality or problem-solving style.
- gpvos 6y ago
  The huge difference: Youtube subscriptions are free.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Free in money, not free in time. It’s a different kind of micro-payment system.
jagged-chisel 6y ago
How do acquire new, loyal subscribers if your site is “a little annoying to people who are not [your] loyal subscribers?”
- boplicity 6y ago
  Ever heard of sales and marketing?
  - jagged-chisel 6y ago
    Sales and marketing don’t get me past that annoyance that sends me to a competitor.
    - srg0 6y ago
      As long as the competitors are no better, there is little risk.
- xorfish 6y ago
  like lwn.net? A local digital, ad free and independent magazine (republik.ch) has the same model. Everyone with a link can access an article. Everyone with a subscription has access to the links for the articles and can share them.
  - StillBored 6y ago
    I think LWN is more like PBS/NPR/wikipedia/etc in that the content is generally free (although a little less so that the examples). It has "supporters" who pay too keep them running because they value the unique perspective in a niche.
matthewmacleod 6y ago
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. You say this as if it were objectively true, but it rings exceptionally hollow to me. This seems like a minor inconvenience at best, and something which could easily provided by a third-party service with no upfront cost beyond integration.
nabla9 6y ago
There is easy solution for this: syndication/bundling. 1) You subscribe only NYT for $221.00/year 2) You subscribe NYT with digital syndication bundle for $521 and you get unlimited access to NYT and all other papers, including all local papers. The extra $300 is divided between papers according to the articles this subscriber reads from other sources.
- jhayward 6y ago
  It is amazing to me that this concept, syndication of subscribers, is completely unexplored at this late date and after such carnage in the industry. There have been dozens or hundreds of content syndication efforts, all failures, but no one is doing the obvious thing for customer experience and syndicating their subscription. Can anyone in the business (which I used to be in back in the early 2000's) explain this?
ako 6y ago
As a publisher maybe it is time to rethink your primary metric. As a long-time reader, i'm not interesting in being a loyal reader, i'm interested in reading the best news. I don't limit myself to the music of one band, so i really appreciate spotify, and i don't limit myself to the news of one publisher.
- jmkd 6y ago
  This. Many readers enjoy gaining multiple perspectives on the same news story from which to draw their own conclusions. This behaviour is scarcely catered for today.
  - lowdose 6y ago
    Google News app offers multiple perspectives around news events under a button. Fox, WSJ, CNN and Bloomberg coverage on the last Trump rally.
  - johannes1234321 6y ago
    Really? Isn't that only a small number of people? Most have their trusted news source and come by others only when printed out at Facebook (while their most read only headline and comments and don't click the link) Going back to pre Internet: Even then most people got one newspaper and be done. (I myself grew up with in a household with a daily newspaper and two weekly, in addition to subscriptions to physics and computing magazines, but that was an exception, in most of my friend's places there was at most one) And TV channels there was one news program one watched (and still only few people switch between news channels)
    - ako 6y ago
      Consumption of media has completely changed for me. Most of what i read is through links from others: Hackernews, Flipboard, or facebook, Google news. I think most people get very shallow news information from some big names (nu.nl) that are basically reprints from AP news items. Short discription what happened, no background, nor deep diving. Most websites have the same reprinted stories, nothing worth paying for. For background stories, that require real journalism, you can't rely on just one source. You want the best articles from all sources. Most sources have only a few good deep stories a month. But things have really changed compared to pre-internet: it is much easier to share links to specific news items, and all these links are actually within reach, just click on the link and open it.
etripe 6y ago
> 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. If potential customers think you're in a different core business than you think you are, what makes you sure you're right, and what would make you re-evaluate?
inatreecrown2 6y ago
this got to be a parody?
JayWW 6y ago
Look, if you make it difficult for me then I’m either going to just not bother or I’m going to plug your article url into one of the many websites that will give me the content for free, and I won’t feel bad about doing it. If you gave me an option to pay even say $20 for 10 articles, like a punchcard, then at least you’d be getting that money from me.
hosh 6y ago
I have a few individuals that I pay particular attention to, but not necessarily a publication. For a time, The Information was a publication I thought of subscribing to. However, they do a lot more than just publishing. They built a community, and have a number of non-publication, community interactions — member-only Slack, for example. You cannot really have loyalty unless you have a community. Loyalty results from the personal relationship individuals make to each other within the context of a community. “Loyalty”, in the context of a subscription is still largely framed as a transactional exchange of value in the guise of a community. In that frame, without real, personal relationships, the only thing keeping someone there is value and cost-of-cancelling (laziness, inertia). Perhaps this is why substack is gaining more traction. Maybe this is why podcasts had become very popular. Maybe this is also why traditional publishing models are dying.
virgilp 6y ago
Here's the thing: with this model, it's (somewhat) easy to keep loyal readers, but it's maybe hard to get new ones. I think this is the part that you're not disclosing here - how do you get new readers? A lot of times, a business like yours relies on the referrals from the loyal customers in order to expand. If you make it impossible for the "occasional reader" to read you, then by extension you make it extremely difficult for your loyal customers to refer you. Based on your "little annoying" comment, I'm guessing you don't do that. So this means occasional visitors are free to read your content, it's just annoying to do so - and you're relying on that annoyance to convert them to paid customers (should they find themselves coming back again & again). I mean, it's a valid tactic. BUT - I don't think it's the only one. I do think "subscription fatigue" is a real thing - people will not be subscribed to countless services. As the competition for the subscription money sharpens, at least some publishers may find themselves pushed out of this model. I think that's all that Tim Bray was saying - and, I think he's right. There's unexplored potential out there, that you ignore at your own risk.
- psadri 6y ago
  One could allocate each loyal subscriber a limited number of trial passes to share with their friends. The passes would allow them to access one or a few articles for a limited time.
  - cpeterso 6y ago
    Similarly, LWN.net allows subscribers to share links to individual articles with non-subscribers. (I don't know if LWN.net has a limit, but non-subscriber links to articles are often submitted here on HN.)
    - justaguy88 6y ago
      I love the LWN model, in addition to this it lets you read the subscription-only articles after a week, and to also (to an extent) choose what you feel you can pay
gambler 6y ago
>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. Are you one of those publishers who purposefully create a rentable filter bubble and then rage about how people outside of it don't take you seriously? There is nothing wrong with having a well-defined audience. There is plenty of wrong with having audience defined purely by their willingness to read your stuff.
runxel 6y ago
This certain attitude is why the publishers are dying. But hey, keep going! Godspeed and I like to see you burn.
jwr 6y ago
> I don't publish for the occasional visitor. I think that's a perfectly fine approach, and I understand it. Now, could we please have filters in HN that would allow me to hide all the submissions that link to articles that are not published for the occasional visitor? I am very serious — I am in a similar situation to Tim Bray, where I subscribe to a number of publications and have no intention of subscribing to anything else. The links pointing to paywalled articles have zero value for me. I understand they have value for subscribers of these publications, but HN is wider in scope.
csilverman 6y ago
The problem is that all loyal readers start as nonsubscribers stopping by for the first time. When I encounter a site that is intentionally poorly designed and annoying, I don’t even consider subscribing. First impressions matter. If I walked into a store and the salespeople were grubby and obnoxious, I wouldn’t think “hmm, maybe they’ll be less grubby and obnoxious if I buy something.” I’d just leave. You no doubt have numbers that you think justify your decisions here. To that, I would say: We shall see. Users—and browser manufacturers—are getting a lot better at stripping away annoyances. I browse most sites with JavaScript off or read them in reader mode, and I import articles directly into an offline reader app; more and more frequently, I never even visit the site whose content I’m reading. I do this because I’m tired of having annoyances thrown in my face. Makes me wonder if a less hostile attitude towards nonsubscribers might encourage people to stay on your site a little longer, and ultimately subscribe.
- HelloNurse 6y ago
  Subscribing means taking a risk: will future content from this publication be worth the price? In the case of a newspaper, the answer is often "definitely not" even in the absence of signs of nonsubscriber aversion. For example, I sometimes stumble upon local newspapers covering some event of interest (e.g. details of police violence in USA cities I've never heard about, or schedules of concerts etc. wherever I'm on vacation for a few days). Regardless of high quality and low prices, I might only be interested in subscribing to such publications if I expected lots of interesting future news from that place, which is of course absurd; but I could be willing to pay (not too much) for the single article that I know interests me. When there is a chance of subscription, the publication should prioritize convincing readers that content is relevant and high quality, by letting people access it. Instead, there are pearls of marketing like a monthly limit to free articles (e.g. the Washington Post), a surgical strike against the most interested potential subscribers.
verelo 6y ago
I've worked inside of these publication businesses, heard these conversations, listened to the plans. There is no shock to me that for the most part, they're struggling to make ends meet. In my opinion, any business that is designed to ostracize future customers will struggle in one way or another. I don't meant this to say it cannot work, but as someone that would like to read more, but also suffers from subscription fatigue...nothing annoys me more than when i see something i'd like to enjoy, but am told no because i'm not in the club. If i cannot see why i should join the club, why should i join the club?
wishysgb 6y ago
hi, I would like to say that I think you are approaching this with a very old mindset. I have made survey that had a hundred people in it most of which said they don't subscribe to any paid news and most of them said they would subscribe to a service which provides access to multiple newspapers, and they are willing to pay good money for that . Would you be available to talk about this and let me know what I am missing. As I have been wanting to do this for a while but sadly all my attempts to contact papers came to a dead end.

wdrw 6y ago

But how do you get new loyal readers, if not by repeatedly proving your value to new occasional readers?

nabla9 6y ago
5 fee articles per month or something similar (storing the IP, for example).
MattieTK 6y ago
Something 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.
- gpvos 6y ago
  The NYT and Guardian have me in that first stage now, but the chance that I'll upgrade to something more expensive is again, like Tim writes, ultra-close to zero (the Guardian is pay-what-you-want anyway, and it seems to work for them). My main news expense is my local national newspaper, and other papers will always remain secondary news resources for me unless they develop the same kind of coverage of the Netherlands.
- silverlake 6y ago
  This worked on me. I did the trial. I called to cancel (they make it difficult) and they offered to continue the trial rate for 6 months. Now I'm hooked and pay the full rate because it's proven very useful for me.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

At least for newspapers this model can’t work. When considered as a civic function to ensure unbiased access to facts and emerging critical stories, your approach is completely at odds with consumers, even loyal customers. The reason is that the market signals emitted by loyal readers don’t have any relationship to objective reality. Loyal readers might disbelieve evolution and only respond to articles that favor creationism. Loyal readers might not cancel their subscription when you omit fair coverage of Julian Assange’s extradition hearing, or make deals with the CIA to delay publishing controversial materials. Thus optimizing for loyal readers is fundamentally antithetical to the basic civic duty premise. At best, if you did this, you would be an entertainment publication, not a fact reporter. That’s totally OK, but it’s important to point out it won’t work, in principle, for news publications.

gpvos 6y ago
Being entirely dependent on subscribers is still better than depending only on advertisers. There are quite a large number of people who actually want their newspaper to apply sound journalism whatever it takes. Advertisers just want attention. Of course, a mix of both is probably the best.
- nobody9999 6y ago
  >Being entirely dependent on subscribers is still better than depending only on advertisers. Except most newspapers rely on a hybrid model. And what's more important to me is not being tracked around the 'net than paying for content/subscriptions. As such, I take steps to minimize (with mitigated success) the tracking that any website, regardless of content, is able to perform on me. And that's the biggest issue here. FB and Google are huge and profitable because of their incessant tracking. Advertisers (like me, the author of the blog post and many others) want their money to be well spent. It's not that the business model for most newspapers and other periodicals have really changed. Their model was always to maintain a loyal base of readers (whether that be via physical print circulation, subscriptions, and these days clicks/visitors on the site) to be used as a draw for advertisers to believe their money is well spent with them and not their competitors. Google and FB have hijacked that model. They are a middle man that sucks advertising revenue that used to go the publishers of actual professional content. Just as Apple/Google take 30% off the top for the "privilege" of being allowed to sell an app to their captive audience. Aggregation of professional content does provide some value. But using that aggregation to pull revenue away from the publishers has consequences. Those consequences are several: 1. Reducing the revenue for publishers of professional content limits the ability of those publishers to pay for and publish more and better professional content; 2. (1) often forces consolidation of these publishers, limiting both the number of publishers, and likely the range of viewpoints presented (think Sinclair Broadcasting) to the consumers of such content; 3. It also forces these publishers to compete for ad sales with the middlemen who use the products from these publishers of professional content. The publishers still need to create such content, as that's their business. The middlemen, on the other hand, use that same content to drive ad sales that otherwise would have gone to the publishers; 3. Subscriptions allow "loyal" customers to directly compensate the publishers of such professional content without contributing to the parasitical middlemen; 4. As has been true for centuries, advertising is the revenue source that has allowed publishers to continue publishing professional content, with physical newspaper sales/circulation and subscriptions being the measure of value to advertisers; 5. Those measures (now including clicks and measures of "engagement") are being exploited and distorted by the middlemen to suck that value away from publishers without providing any real value. High-Frequency Trading[0] is an example from the financial markets which matches this behavior: Get in between sellers and buyers and arbitrage your position to profit from that position. No value is added to the market, but profit is extracted nonetheless. All that said, the publishers of professional content use many different mechanisms to maintain that all-important ad revenue, often by increasing the number of ads and amount of invasive tracking of visitors. To see what I'm talking about, stick the URL of one of these sites into Blacklight[1] (discussed here last week[2]) and see just how much tracking/marketing data is included on their sites. Here's an example. This is the result from a scan of the Wall Street Journal[3]. The parasitical middlemen are driving this race to the bottom that threatens the long-term viability of paid, professional journalism. That doesn't seem to bother them, as they're raking in money hand over fist. But we are the ones who will continue to lose out, both in terms of journalistic diversity and volume. Don't let the parasites suck the value out of newspaper/periodical publishing, leaving a dessicated husk that can't provide us with the information we need to support and maintain a vibrant, free society. [0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/high-frequency-trading.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/high-frequency-trading.... [1] https://themarkup.org/blacklight https://themarkup.org/blacklight [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24553514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24553514 [3] https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=wsj.com https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=wsj.com

notimetorelax 6y ago

If it were printed newspaper I could go and get one for a few bucks. Digital has nothing to offer of that kind. As the other poster wrote, how else would you expand your readership?

Waterfall 6y ago
Word of mouth; the best advertising there is.
boplicity 6y ago
> As the other poster wrote, how else would you expand your readership? By creating a valuable product, finding potential costumers, and offering the product for sale. Why would it be different than any other business? It would be ridiculous to expect every SaaS business to offer their services for "a few bucks", and yet, for some reason, people think it is egregious that publishers don't do this. Bizarre. Though, I do have the say the newspaper industry caused this; for years, when the internet was still new, most newspapers gave away their best content. That was a huge mistake; it lead people to significantly devalue news.
- hobofan 6y ago
  How do you expect people to go from "not customer" to "loyal customer" without going to through the intermediate step of "occasional reader"? > By creating a valuable product, finding potential costumers > Our websites, as they're designed, are probably a little annoying to people who are not our loyal readership. That's by design; > again, NOT our occasional readers As I read it, you are expecting a occasional visitor to stick with your bad-UX site and stick with it despite that, until they at some point came to the site so often that they have learned to endure the bad UX?
  - x0x0 6y ago
    I expect via the well-known method of signing up for a trial subscription.
- corty 6y ago

microcolonel 6y ago

> ...there is only one primary metric that matters to me: loyal readers. I don't publish for the occasional visitor. Okay, good luck with that. I don't know how somebody becomes a “loyal reader” if they can't even read your website to begin with. Especially with how many of these subscription rags play outrageous frame games and use facts to tell lies and half truths, it's insulting enough without half the article disappearing when you scroll, or a modal prompt. I usually just don't open links to sites that I know work like this.

xorfish 6y ago
There is an easy solution for this problem. Everyone with the link can access the article. Everyone who subscribes can access the links for the articles and share them.
- cableshaft 6y ago
  It's an interesting idea, but seems easily gamed. One person subscribes, and posts all the links to other link sites (like Reddit, HackerNews). Maybe there's a /r/xNewspaper that anyone can go to that posts links to every article from that newspaper.
  - golemotron 6y ago
    You need to build the loss into the model (or not even see it as loss). Many streaming services don't seem to mind when you share your username and password with another household. It doesn't happen often enough for them to care. How much money you would make if everyone did the right thing is a number that is not as real as the actual amount of money you make. Seeing things that way seems important.

_wldu 6y ago

This is a good point. It's why I subscribe to some you tube channels but not others. I can find content I am interested in on dozens of channels, but I gravitate to those where I better relate to the channel owner's presentation or personality or problem-solving style.

gpvos 6y ago
The huge difference: Youtube subscriptions are free.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  Free in money, not free in time. It’s a different kind of micro-payment system.

jagged-chisel 6y ago

How do acquire new, loyal subscribers if your site is “a little annoying to people who are not [your] loyal subscribers?”

boplicity 6y ago
Ever heard of sales and marketing?
- jagged-chisel 6y ago
  Sales and marketing don’t get me past that annoyance that sends me to a competitor.
  - srg0 6y ago
    As long as the competitors are no better, there is little risk.
xorfish 6y ago
like lwn.net? A local digital, ad free and independent magazine (republik.ch) has the same model. Everyone with a link can access an article. Everyone with a subscription has access to the links for the articles and can share them.
- StillBored 6y ago
  I think LWN is more like PBS/NPR/wikipedia/etc in that the content is generally free (although a little less so that the examples). It has "supporters" who pay too keep them running because they value the unique perspective in a niche.

matthewmacleod 6y ago

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. You say this as if it were objectively true, but it rings exceptionally hollow to me. This seems like a minor inconvenience at best, and something which could easily provided by a third-party service with no upfront cost beyond integration.

nabla9 6y ago

There is easy solution for this: syndication/bundling. 1) You subscribe only NYT for $221.00/year 2) You subscribe NYT with digital syndication bundle for $521 and you get unlimited access to NYT and all other papers, including all local papers. The extra $300 is divided between papers according to the articles this subscriber reads from other sources.

jhayward 6y ago
It is amazing to me that this concept, syndication of subscribers, is completely unexplored at this late date and after such carnage in the industry. There have been dozens or hundreds of content syndication efforts, all failures, but no one is doing the obvious thing for customer experience and syndicating their subscription. Can anyone in the business (which I used to be in back in the early 2000's) explain this?

ako 6y ago

As a publisher maybe it is time to rethink your primary metric. As a long-time reader, i'm not interesting in being a loyal reader, i'm interested in reading the best news. I don't limit myself to the music of one band, so i really appreciate spotify, and i don't limit myself to the news of one publisher.

jmkd 6y ago
This. Many readers enjoy gaining multiple perspectives on the same news story from which to draw their own conclusions. This behaviour is scarcely catered for today.
- lowdose 6y ago
  Google News app offers multiple perspectives around news events under a button. Fox, WSJ, CNN and Bloomberg coverage on the last Trump rally.
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  Really? Isn't that only a small number of people? Most have their trusted news source and come by others only when printed out at Facebook (while their most read only headline and comments and don't click the link) Going back to pre Internet: Even then most people got one newspaper and be done. (I myself grew up with in a household with a daily newspaper and two weekly, in addition to subscriptions to physics and computing magazines, but that was an exception, in most of my friend's places there was at most one) And TV channels there was one news program one watched (and still only few people switch between news channels)
  - ako 6y ago
    Consumption of media has completely changed for me. Most of what i read is through links from others: Hackernews, Flipboard, or facebook, Google news. I think most people get very shallow news information from some big names (nu.nl) that are basically reprints from AP news items. Short discription what happened, no background, nor deep diving. Most websites have the same reprinted stories, nothing worth paying for. For background stories, that require real journalism, you can't rely on just one source. You want the best articles from all sources. Most sources have only a few good deep stories a month. But things have really changed compared to pre-internet: it is much easier to share links to specific news items, and all these links are actually within reach, just click on the link and open it.

etripe 6y ago

> 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. If potential customers think you're in a different core business than you think you are, what makes you sure you're right, and what would make you re-evaluate?

inatreecrown2 6y ago

this got to be a parody?

JayWW 6y ago

Look, if you make it difficult for me then I’m either going to just not bother or I’m going to plug your article url into one of the many websites that will give me the content for free, and I won’t feel bad about doing it. If you gave me an option to pay even say $20 for 10 articles, like a punchcard, then at least you’d be getting that money from me.

hosh 6y ago

I have a few individuals that I pay particular attention to, but not necessarily a publication. For a time, The Information was a publication I thought of subscribing to. However, they do a lot more than just publishing. They built a community, and have a number of non-publication, community interactions — member-only Slack, for example. You cannot really have loyalty unless you have a community. Loyalty results from the personal relationship individuals make to each other within the context of a community. “Loyalty”, in the context of a subscription is still largely framed as a transactional exchange of value in the guise of a community. In that frame, without real, personal relationships, the only thing keeping someone there is value and cost-of-cancelling (laziness, inertia). Perhaps this is why substack is gaining more traction. Maybe this is why podcasts had become very popular. Maybe this is also why traditional publishing models are dying.

virgilp 6y ago

Here's the thing: with this model, it's (somewhat) easy to keep loyal readers, but it's maybe hard to get new ones. I think this is the part that you're not disclosing here - how do you get new readers? A lot of times, a business like yours relies on the referrals from the loyal customers in order to expand. If you make it impossible for the "occasional reader" to read you, then by extension you make it extremely difficult for your loyal customers to refer you. Based on your "little annoying" comment, I'm guessing you don't do that. So this means occasional visitors are free to read your content, it's just annoying to do so - and you're relying on that annoyance to convert them to paid customers (should they find themselves coming back again & again). I mean, it's a valid tactic. BUT - I don't think it's the only one. I do think "subscription fatigue" is a real thing - people will not be subscribed to countless services. As the competition for the subscription money sharpens, at least some publishers may find themselves pushed out of this model. I think that's all that Tim Bray was saying - and, I think he's right. There's unexplored potential out there, that you ignore at your own risk.

psadri 6y ago
One could allocate each loyal subscriber a limited number of trial passes to share with their friends. The passes would allow them to access one or a few articles for a limited time.
- cpeterso 6y ago
  Similarly, LWN.net allows subscribers to share links to individual articles with non-subscribers. (I don't know if LWN.net has a limit, but non-subscriber links to articles are often submitted here on HN.)
  - justaguy88 6y ago
    I love the LWN model, in addition to this it lets you read the subscription-only articles after a week, and to also (to an extent) choose what you feel you can pay

gambler 6y ago

>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. Are you one of those publishers who purposefully create a rentable filter bubble and then rage about how people outside of it don't take you seriously? There is nothing wrong with having a well-defined audience. There is plenty of wrong with having audience defined purely by their willingness to read your stuff.

runxel 6y ago

This certain attitude is why the publishers are dying. But hey, keep going! Godspeed and I like to see you burn.

jwr 6y ago

> I don't publish for the occasional visitor. I think that's a perfectly fine approach, and I understand it. Now, could we please have filters in HN that would allow me to hide all the submissions that link to articles that are not published for the occasional visitor? I am very serious — I am in a similar situation to Tim Bray, where I subscribe to a number of publications and have no intention of subscribing to anything else. The links pointing to paywalled articles have zero value for me. I understand they have value for subscribers of these publications, but HN is wider in scope.

csilverman 6y ago

The problem is that all loyal readers start as nonsubscribers stopping by for the first time. When I encounter a site that is intentionally poorly designed and annoying, I don’t even consider subscribing. First impressions matter. If I walked into a store and the salespeople were grubby and obnoxious, I wouldn’t think “hmm, maybe they’ll be less grubby and obnoxious if I buy something.” I’d just leave. You no doubt have numbers that you think justify your decisions here. To that, I would say: We shall see. Users—and browser manufacturers—are getting a lot better at stripping away annoyances. I browse most sites with JavaScript off or read them in reader mode, and I import articles directly into an offline reader app; more and more frequently, I never even visit the site whose content I’m reading. I do this because I’m tired of having annoyances thrown in my face. Makes me wonder if a less hostile attitude towards nonsubscribers might encourage people to stay on your site a little longer, and ultimately subscribe.

HelloNurse 6y ago
Subscribing means taking a risk: will future content from this publication be worth the price? In the case of a newspaper, the answer is often "definitely not" even in the absence of signs of nonsubscriber aversion. For example, I sometimes stumble upon local newspapers covering some event of interest (e.g. details of police violence in USA cities I've never heard about, or schedules of concerts etc. wherever I'm on vacation for a few days). Regardless of high quality and low prices, I might only be interested in subscribing to such publications if I expected lots of interesting future news from that place, which is of course absurd; but I could be willing to pay (not too much) for the single article that I know interests me. When there is a chance of subscription, the publication should prioritize convincing readers that content is relevant and high quality, by letting people access it. Instead, there are pearls of marketing like a monthly limit to free articles (e.g. the Washington Post), a surgical strike against the most interested potential subscribers.

verelo 6y ago

I've worked inside of these publication businesses, heard these conversations, listened to the plans. There is no shock to me that for the most part, they're struggling to make ends meet. In my opinion, any business that is designed to ostracize future customers will struggle in one way or another. I don't meant this to say it cannot work, but as someone that would like to read more, but also suffers from subscription fatigue...nothing annoys me more than when i see something i'd like to enjoy, but am told no because i'm not in the club. If i cannot see why i should join the club, why should i join the club?

wishysgb 6y ago

hi, I would like to say that I think you are approaching this with a very old mindset. I have made survey that had a hundred people in it most of which said they don't subscribe to any paid news and most of them said they would subscribe to a service which provides access to multiple newspapers, and they are willing to pay good money for that . Would you be available to talk about this and let me know what I am missing. As I have been wanting to do this for a while but sadly all my attempts to contact papers came to a dead end.