4 ms·

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 appro

by 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
sjy 6y ago
Doesn’t the existence of “loyal readers” imply that the publication approach is not “at odds with consumers”? If we can’t trust consumers to emit the correct market signals then we should not rely on them to voluntarily fund important civic functions.
- cthalupa 6y ago
  Not really. It doesn't imply much of anything as stated. You could still have loyal customers even if your model is generally anti-consumer. Without knowing any details about the business, it's impossible to determine if he's a successful publisher, or if the publications are generally low overhead so they can stay afloat with a relatively small set of customers, etc.

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

sjy 6y ago

Doesn’t the existence of “loyal readers” imply that the publication approach is not “at odds with consumers”? If we can’t trust consumers to emit the correct market signals then we should not rely on them to voluntarily fund important civic functions.

cthalupa 6y ago
Not really. It doesn't imply much of anything as stated. You could still have loyal customers even if your model is generally anti-consumer. Without knowing any details about the business, it's impossible to determine if he's a successful publisher, or if the publications are generally low overhead so they can stay afloat with a relatively small set of customers, etc.