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> The plan is to be entirely advertising dependent As a potential consumer of said news, I can accept this as long as the advertising scrupulously follows the
by mumblemumble 6y ago
> The plan is to be entirely advertising dependent
As a potential consumer of said news, I can accept this as long as the advertising scrupulously follows the old-school model, with no click-tracking or impression counting.
If advertisers are just paying for placement, and the price of that placement is decided up-front and based on overall readership volume, then everyone's interests are reasonably well-aligned with those of the reader: The news outlet gets sustained readership (i.e., actual subscribers) by offering a high-quality product overall, and advertisers support that sustained readership by making sure the ads are reasonably pleasant, or at least not too obtrusive. Readers, by getting a more stable and less frantic and annoying reading experience, are more incentivized to actually subscribe and become a regular reader, which in turn offers the news outlet and its advertisers a stable base.
If they take a single step down the path of impression or click tracking, though, I would expect that whole house of cards to come tumbling down as quickly as it always does. Even Medium, which doesn't actually have advertising, ended up devolving into one big noisy awful doomscrolly gadfly chum bucket. It was inevitable. Their "pay for reads / pay for likes" model for paying authors creates exactly the same perverse attention economy incentive structures that caused the rest of the internet to collapse into a twitching heap of listicles.
- vladmk 6y agoThe internet didn’t collapse your opinion of it did. As long as the internet is growing then it’s fine.
- Retric 6y agoShort term and long term trends can be very different. I personally have been burned enough by clickbait headlines that I have stopped clicking on them. Which is not the kind of trend that’s obvious in daily analytics, but it’s still critical over time. Companies often look at customers as interchangeable commodities, but after some growth it’s easy to have poisoned the well where most people have already tried your product and disliked it. That’s a death spiral in the making.
- vladmk 6y agoGreat response, though if we look at the long and short growth trends of the intro though it’s phenomenal
- mumblemumble 6y agoIt's also a question of framing. If we're talking about easy-to-measure things like total number of pages, or volume of traffic, or dollars earned, sure, the Internet is growing like gangbusters. If, on the other hand, we're talking about murkier issues like impact on public discourse and its implications for civil society, or impact on individuals' psychological wellbeing, stuff like that, then the picture is arguably quite a bit less rosy.
- vladmk 6y agoI can get into that. You’re now questioning the chicken and the egg problem. Did people always have these thoughts or is it because the internet exists so we have them? I would say the internet just shed light on bullying etc that always existed so if anything it’s better because of that fact. Trying to judge the internet is like trying to judge electricity, it’s a commodity not some idealistic sanctum
- z3ncyberpunk 6y agoNo, it collapsed.