10 ms·

Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy

98 points by uptown 6y ago

bombcar 6y ago
"Reuters.com will remain free for a preview period, but will require users to register after five stories. It is not immediately clear when it will begin charging." Reuters reporting about Reuters in the third person is amusing. "We asked ourselves when we would begin charging but we didn't know."
- caslon 6y ago
  Clever way of demonstrating the separation between reporting and finances, I think.
- torstenvl 6y ago
  Snark toward the suits, taken to an art form. I love it.
- helsinkiandrew 6y ago
  I used to work at Reuters (last century) - in technology, but had occasional contact with the news side. They would treat it as a badge of honour to be the first to publish stories about Reuters - however embarrassing. There was no possibility of interference by management. I don't know if that's the case now or how many other publishers would live by those rules.
  - lucideer 6y ago
    I think Techcrunch is similar w.r.t. Verizon but, given Reuters didn't acquire Reuters, this seems more unusual.
  - MrMetlHed 6y ago
    Still the case! (Journalist at Reuters)
- aero-glide2 6y ago
  A tangent, but I love that the wikipedia article on Humans is in 3rd Person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human Reads like some alien civilization documenting us.
  - helsinkiandrew 6y ago
    > ... and with humans solely on the Moon, two at a time for brief intervals between 1969 and 1972. Their slapdown about our presence on the moon is brutal!
  - wyldfire 6y ago
    A fun one: "They're made out of meat" [1] [1] https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
  - jawns 6y ago
    "Conservation status: Least Concern."
- leephillips 6y ago
  Not at all unusual for [formerly?] serious news organizations. Most of the navel gazing at the NYT is in the third person, for example.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  The answer to 'when' is likely going to be: after we collect data about user views, sign in rates, return rates, etc. Someone highup wants a money grab but they also want to know roughly how much money there is to grab and how much will be lost to see if the strategy is worth pursuing first. I cherish these innovative businesses and all their high-risk taking that leads them there.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  Makes you seem more important https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4FxhUA0SKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4FxhUA0SKM
- JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
  Does anyone pay for these kind of sites? I just can’t imagine doing it. I already have streaming subscriptions I just cannot imagine paying for news. I know that is a problem for the internet and journalism in general but what person will buy a Reuters sub? I can maybe see a NY Times sub or WSJ for some people but it has to be the best of the best. And still I personally wouldn’t do it. I don’t need to know news. It’s likely the news will make me feel worse, as opposed to my streaming subscriptions which will make me feel better.
  - yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
    I'm not sure, but I would have thought it would be the opposite — you should not pay to read (or read at all) biased journals such as the NYT, WSJ, or Fox etc., and instead only pay attention to journals with minimal bias like Reuters and AP.
    - nojito 6y ago
      You can't equate WSJ/NYT with Reuters or AP. They serve completely different purposes. The "biases" of them is hardly relevant unless you are routinely taking their opinion sections as fact.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    I pay for NPR. I mean, I know that's different because their content isn't behind a paywall. My mom pays for the NYT, but I think that's mostly for access to their cooking site. I think these big news companies need to form a federation or something where you buy access at one and get rights to read over multiple different magazines.
    - shaan7 6y ago
      > I think these big news companies need to form a federation or something where you buy access at one and get rights to read over multiple different magazines. Exactly! I tried coil.com for a while and it would be amazing if you could pay a monthly subscription and then it distributes to articles that you end up reading.
- tkinom 6y ago
  They should consider https://www.digitimes.com/index.asp https://www.digitimes.com/index.asp 's model: The news articles are free for a few days. After that, access to older articles require premium subscription. This generates eyeballs and ads revenue for the site especially for hot news. They also generate the premium quarterly industrial reports which are very informative and marketing, product folks of certain industrial love to pay for them.
james-bcn 6y ago
This reduces the number of reliable and reasonably neutral news sources accessible to the majority of people, which is a bad thing.
- sschueller 6y ago
  I would not call Reuters neutral. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuters
  - wyldfire 6y ago
    Gee, I'd always considered Reuters and AP to be as close to neutral press as there is. Who is neutral if not Reuters?
    - seneca 6y ago
      I think they are about as neutral as you will find. The wider environment has just become hyper partisan. It has certainly influenced both organizations (which I read daily), and I would agree they're not as neutral as they were once lauded to be, but I don't know that you'll find a better option. Checking out allsides.com, and their bias ratings, is a good way to see just how bad the other options are.
    - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
      Reuters is quite neutral. Which means the right thinks Reuters is left.
      - krapp 6y ago
        The right thinks every media outlet but Fox News is somewhere to the left of Pravda, and sometimes they have their doubts about Fox.
  - spicymaki 6y ago
    As far as I can tell it is 'reasonably' neutral. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/reuters https://www.allsides.com/news-source/reuters Hopefully the addition of a paywall does not skew things.
310260 6y ago
Already switched to getting most of my news from AP so no big loss I guess.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
freebuju 6y ago
Terrible shame. I read news off it (with nojs). Seems I'll be on the hunt for a replacement when this comes.
seneca 6y ago
I used to read Reuters religiously, but have drifted away from them as I've felt their neutrality falter a bit. They're still one of the better organization, and I'm sad to see them go behind a pay wall as it leaves fewer outrage driven outlets available. At the same time, I understand it is difficult to fund journalism in the current atmosphere.
cableshaft 6y ago
"Its a bold strategy Cotton, let's see if it pays off for em." For some reason I figured Reuters and AP would be the last to go behind a paywall for the retail consumer. I remember those always being the safe neutral sources I could use in debate or extemporaneous speeches back on the debate/speech team in high school. Sucks it'll be harder to get access to now.
tyingq 6y ago
I wonder at what point Google needs to pay attention to this. If a large number of websites are behind registration or paywalls, then the chance that any individual person searching would have a subscription (or registration) to any individual news site is pretty low. People might have some small number of subscriptions, but not for many sites. So, why keep returning search results that the end user can't use without registration or purchase? It's essentially "page cloaking" when the rendered page doesn't match google sees. To me, if you want a paywall, that should come with the consequence that your site isn't included in search results for the general public. Edit: It's also getting irritating here on HN. I might have a subscription or login to one or two sites, but HN regularly shares stuff from Medium, WSJ, NYT, Wired, and so on. I have to imagine that most people following these posted stories hit the reg/pay-wall.
- amelius 6y ago
  Perhaps Google can get info on how many article-views the user has left, so they can take that into account when returning search results.
- littlecranky67 6y ago
  I've been wanting the "Show only free/non-subscription results" checkmark in Google (and other search engines) for a while, but I don't think it will ever happen.
- baby-yoda 6y ago
  could not agree with this more and this has gone on far too long. why does google allow this? as you say it is 100% cloaking to have the entire article indexed but not present it in the subsequent page. Sure, publishers feel they need paywalls for revenue purposes; have at it. That should not absolve them from the "rules" everyone else has to follow. Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected. [0] [0] - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/cloaking https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
tyingq 6y ago
"audiences prepared to pay $34.99 per month for a deeper level of coverage" Holy crap...who is this audience? NYT is $4/month, WAPO is $4-6/month, etc. Edit: Ah, okay, intro pricing that shifts to ~$17/month after a year. Still, though, that's half of this proposed pricing.
- windthrown 6y ago
  Your overall point still stands but the $4 you cite is a sign-up promotion - after that expires, it's $17/month for a digital subscription.
- runako 6y ago
  NYT is $4/4 weeks (not per month) during its trial period. That plan jumps to ~$18/mo after that ($17 per 4 weeks => ~$18/mo). WaPo is similar. The audience appears to be people who subscribe to Bloomberg, which is in the same price bracket.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    I'm surprised they would be competitors. My (perhaps incorrect) assumption is that Bloomberg would have much more in-depth business coverage. And that Reuters would have more breadth, but significantly less depth, and competing more generally with AP than Bloomberg.
  - uptown 6y ago
    NYT is $4/4 weeks as long as you continue to call and pretend to cancel at the end of your trial periods. It's a pain in the ass, but it work every time.
- nicklecompte 6y ago
  Although the comparison to NYT/WaPo makes some superficial sense, there is a big difference between a newspaper and a news agency like Reuters or AP. I don’t know much about the journalism business, but I expect Reuters is catering towards a smaller, premium audience that reads a lot of straight news but doesn’t care so much about criticism, commentary, and so on. In particular: reporters and academics, for whom this will be a business expense.
amelius 6y ago
How long until we get SciHub for news?
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  There is already Archive.is to bypass paywalls. You wait until someone with a subscription archives the site (no more than a few hours for NY Times articles, for instance), and then you can read the archived copy after entering the URL.
rectang 6y ago
Although it's regrettable that Reuters' content will be harder to access, it's a positive trend for the news ecosystem to generate increasing revenue through a subscription-based business model rather than selling ads. The more money that comes from subscriptions, the more that news coverage will reflect the interests of subscribers rather than advertisers.
- zpeti 6y ago
  In my very personal opinion, based on the New York Times this isn't necessarily a good thing. Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit crazy in their coverage. (and Fox is just as bad, but its not an online publication for the sake of my point)
  - nojito 6y ago
    >Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit crazy in their coverage Equating one of the premier news organizations in the world with Fox is quite interesting. NYTimes has been breaking news stories since the Civil War. They are the only organization that routinely breaks news against 'both sides' of the aisle. e.g. Clinton Email server and Trump business ties to name a couple The fact of the matter is that people can not differentiate the opinion pieces from their hard hitting news pieces. Which is a symptom of the low quality "social media news" that currently exists.
    - beervirus 6y ago
      > The fact of the matter is that people can not differentiate the opinion pieces from their hard hitting news pieces. They intentionally blur that line. Almost all of their news pieces the last several years have been full of opinion.
      - nojito 6y ago
        No. There is a distinct Opinion Section with it's own editorial oversight. https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion Just like every other high quality news source.
josefresco 6y ago
This is my new HN hobby: looking up pricing for aggressively paywalled content. Annual digital subscription costs (not promo pricing): Reuters: $420 Bloomberg: $419 Financial Times: $372 The Economist: $189
- alecco 6y ago
  vs Audible $149.50/year 12 books
ghostpepper 6y ago
This makes the decision to kill their RSS feed last year a bit easier to understand.
splithalf 6y ago
A few years ago I might have payed for Reuters news, but they sort of destroyed themselves this past few years perhaps because of financial incentives or mismanagement or simply the journalism zeitgeist. Maybe just another casualty of 2020.
- timbit42 6y ago
  Your comment is useless without proof. Give some examples.
alex_young 6y ago
Thompson Reuters business model at least used to be similar to Bloomberg’s: create first to market reporting and use that data as Alpha to sell financial services. While moving to monetize the news side certainly doesn’t preclude this, I wonder if it will produce more friction than value?
abstractbarista 6y ago
Guess I won't be reading much Reuters any more. Just the way she goes, if it doesn't load easily for me, I back out and move on to something else.
1cvmask 6y ago
They could ask for more money from the UK government to avoid the paywall: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-50637200 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-50637200 https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-02-25/Reuters-BBC-participated-in-UK-FCO-s-project-to-weaken-Russia-report-Ya0X5PBHTq/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-02-25/Reuters-BBC-participat...
ping_pong 6y ago
Paying $6-10/month for every subscription site is untenable. There's going to be something that will replace all this, but I'm not sure what. I would rather just watch ads than have to endure death by a thousand subscriptions.
- throwaway5752 6y ago
  The sad fact is that producing real journalism costs money, and there are too many parasitic content providers that steal journalism for ad eybeballs. The whole system is unsustainable. People used to be accustomed to paying for newspapers and supporting the journalism field, but have gotten used to it for free. Ad prices can no longer sustain all but the largest, and the ad model presents a conflict of interests with juicing click through rates and returns.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    You're omitting numerous alternative compensation mechanisms. Ads and subscriptions aren't the only options. Nor are micropayments or patronage the only novel notions (neither ultimately are effective).
- Arnt 6y ago
  A few decades ago, we chose one or a few print sources and read those regularly. We read some others at the hairdresser.
- fifilura 6y ago
  I believe sooner or later it will be fixed by bundling subscriptions. Just like TV channels are bundled today. My guess is that it has not taken off yet because everyone wants to be the top dog in that kind of business.
deleted 6y ago
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skc 6y ago
If this trend accelerates isn't one unintended consequence that fake news (which will remain free to access) will propagate even faster than it already is?
dredmorbius 6y ago
Four-plus decades of micropayments advocacy have failed to poduce a viable system that works and people will use. People are drowning in accounts (well over 100/person in a 2015 survey[1]) and subscription services. Offerings are fragmented amongst these, and control battles lead to withdrawal of or blocking of materials during inter-corporate wars. OECD per-capita spend on all publishing runs about $100/person, roughly the same as per-capita ads spend within the same countries, itself a tax of sorts. A natural gateway exists --- not a perfect one, but good enough at the level of the ISP provider. Aggregation, not disintegrations, is the general trend in payment systems. Both buyers and sellers benefit from predictable flows, income or revenues. Regionally-pro-rated payments allocate costs according to ability to pay, which for information goods is a net social benefit. Rolling an information access fee into fixed line and mobile internet service, with an indexing of content accessed and a tier-and-bid based reimbursement schedule for publishers, seems to me the most viable path forward to something vaguely resembling a content tax, without actually going through a content tax mechanism. It would ensure universal access to readers and the public, compensation for creators, and the ability for those actually engaged in the process of creating new works to access the materials they need, legally and lawfully, answering in part the "why should I pay for information I don't use" objection: the inforation you do use is itself predicated on information you don't access directly yourself. The other answer to this rather tired objection is that you live in the world created by information access or denial of access, and in general, access to high-quality, relevant, useful information should be a net positive. (Yes, events of the past decade temper my enthusiasm for that belief somewhat, though information rather than propaganda still seems likely a net positive.) The concept could be trialed on a regional basis, rather than globally. It should offer any willing publication within a set of quality and bias tiers (there are third-party rating services, such as Ad Fontes Media, amongst others, which might serve as arbiters). A bidding process in which given tiers are compensated at specific rates, subject to competitive alternatives, should help address the "who gets paid and how much" question --- high-bias low-accuracy clickbait is a cheap-to-produce product, but would also be compensated at a low rate. _______________________________ Notes: 1. Dashlane came up with this number in 2015, archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20150919202348/https://blog.dashlane.com/infographic-online-overload-its-worse-than-you-thought/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150919202348/https://blog.dash... Experian cites a similar number, without source, in a 2019 identity fraud report https://www.experian.com/blogs/news/2019/01/30/global-identity-and-fraud-report/ https://www.experian.com/blogs/news/2019/01/30/global-identi... A NordPass study finds > 100 passwords/person on average https://tech.co/news/average-person-100-passwords https://tech.co/news/average-person-100-passwords HN readers report upwards of 700 accounts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488899 Data quality here are poor, but the general scope is clearly large. Whether its increasing on an annual basis or if 100 accounts/person represents a metastable plateau is unclear.
DarmokJalad1701 6y ago
While I understand the need for revenue, the end result now is that rags that put out conspiracy garbage is widely accessible to anyone with an internet connection - Breitbart, Fox et al. Sources with a relatively objective viewpoints are going behind paywalls.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Can we reflect back for a moment that come the age of mass-media (Gutenberg), literally the first things off the press were: 1. Propaganda. In the word’s original sense, as The Bible. 2. Cheaply-produced, high-cost status indicia / devices for separating fools from their money, a/k/a Papal Indulgences. In the ensuing 568 years, nobody’s come up with an alternative business model, modulo rounding errors.
cannabis_sam 6y ago
Yes, let’s hide one of the most objective news sources.. vested interests will celebrate and put more money towards warping the minds of people (edit, just to be clear, I’m not excluding myself here)
kadomony 6y ago
I wonder if this is signs of troublesome financial forecasts. They’re pushing a huge focus on digital transformation now and have just hired an ex-Amazon guy to be their new head of design.
antpls 6y ago
Since Reuters stopped its RSS feed, I found an interesting alternative : Aljazeera English. Aljazeera English has almost the same content than Reuters (like literally, exact same articles words by words), has RSS feed, and also has interesting news and viewpoint about Africa, Asia and Middle East.

98 points by uptown 6y ago

"Reuters.com will remain free for a preview period, but will require users to register after five stories. It is not immediately clear when it will begin charging." Reuters reporting about Reuters in the third person is amusing. "We asked ourselves when we would begin charging but we didn't know."

caslon 6y ago
Clever way of demonstrating the separation between reporting and finances, I think.
torstenvl 6y ago
Snark toward the suits, taken to an art form. I love it.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
I used to work at Reuters (last century) - in technology, but had occasional contact with the news side. They would treat it as a badge of honour to be the first to publish stories about Reuters - however embarrassing. There was no possibility of interference by management. I don't know if that's the case now or how many other publishers would live by those rules.
- lucideer 6y ago
  I think Techcrunch is similar w.r.t. Verizon but, given Reuters didn't acquire Reuters, this seems more unusual.
- MrMetlHed 6y ago
  Still the case! (Journalist at Reuters)
aero-glide2 6y ago
A tangent, but I love that the wikipedia article on Humans is in 3rd Person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human Reads like some alien civilization documenting us.
- helsinkiandrew 6y ago
  > ... and with humans solely on the Moon, two at a time for brief intervals between 1969 and 1972. Their slapdown about our presence on the moon is brutal!
- wyldfire 6y ago
  A fun one: "They're made out of meat" [1] [1] https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
- jawns 6y ago
  "Conservation status: Least Concern."
leephillips 6y ago
Not at all unusual for [formerly?] serious news organizations. Most of the navel gazing at the NYT is in the third person, for example.
Frost1x 6y ago
The answer to 'when' is likely going to be: after we collect data about user views, sign in rates, return rates, etc. Someone highup wants a money grab but they also want to know roughly how much money there is to grab and how much will be lost to see if the strategy is worth pursuing first. I cherish these innovative businesses and all their high-risk taking that leads them there.
cblconfederate 6y ago
Makes you seem more important https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4FxhUA0SKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4FxhUA0SKM
JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
Does anyone pay for these kind of sites? I just can’t imagine doing it. I already have streaming subscriptions I just cannot imagine paying for news. I know that is a problem for the internet and journalism in general but what person will buy a Reuters sub? I can maybe see a NY Times sub or WSJ for some people but it has to be the best of the best. And still I personally wouldn’t do it. I don’t need to know news. It’s likely the news will make me feel worse, as opposed to my streaming subscriptions which will make me feel better.
- yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
  I'm not sure, but I would have thought it would be the opposite — you should not pay to read (or read at all) biased journals such as the NYT, WSJ, or Fox etc., and instead only pay attention to journals with minimal bias like Reuters and AP.
  - nojito 6y ago
    You can't equate WSJ/NYT with Reuters or AP. They serve completely different purposes. The "biases" of them is hardly relevant unless you are routinely taking their opinion sections as fact.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  I pay for NPR. I mean, I know that's different because their content isn't behind a paywall. My mom pays for the NYT, but I think that's mostly for access to their cooking site. I think these big news companies need to form a federation or something where you buy access at one and get rights to read over multiple different magazines.
  - shaan7 6y ago
    > I think these big news companies need to form a federation or something where you buy access at one and get rights to read over multiple different magazines. Exactly! I tried coil.com for a while and it would be amazing if you could pay a monthly subscription and then it distributes to articles that you end up reading.
tkinom 6y ago
They should consider https://www.digitimes.com/index.asp https://www.digitimes.com/index.asp 's model: The news articles are free for a few days. After that, access to older articles require premium subscription. This generates eyeballs and ads revenue for the site especially for hot news. They also generate the premium quarterly industrial reports which are very informative and marketing, product folks of certain industrial love to pay for them.

james-bcn 6y ago

This reduces the number of reliable and reasonably neutral news sources accessible to the majority of people, which is a bad thing.

sschueller 6y ago
I would not call Reuters neutral. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuters
- wyldfire 6y ago
  Gee, I'd always considered Reuters and AP to be as close to neutral press as there is. Who is neutral if not Reuters?
  - seneca 6y ago
    I think they are about as neutral as you will find. The wider environment has just become hyper partisan. It has certainly influenced both organizations (which I read daily), and I would agree they're not as neutral as they were once lauded to be, but I don't know that you'll find a better option. Checking out allsides.com, and their bias ratings, is a good way to see just how bad the other options are.
  - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
    Reuters is quite neutral. Which means the right thinks Reuters is left.
    - krapp 6y ago
      The right thinks every media outlet but Fox News is somewhere to the left of Pravda, and sometimes they have their doubts about Fox.
- spicymaki 6y ago
  As far as I can tell it is 'reasonably' neutral. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/reuters https://www.allsides.com/news-source/reuters Hopefully the addition of a paywall does not skew things.

310260 6y ago

Already switched to getting most of my news from AP so no big loss I guess.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

freebuju 6y ago

Terrible shame. I read news off it (with nojs). Seems I'll be on the hunt for a replacement when this comes.

seneca 6y ago

I used to read Reuters religiously, but have drifted away from them as I've felt their neutrality falter a bit. They're still one of the better organization, and I'm sad to see them go behind a pay wall as it leaves fewer outrage driven outlets available. At the same time, I understand it is difficult to fund journalism in the current atmosphere.

cableshaft 6y ago

"Its a bold strategy Cotton, let's see if it pays off for em." For some reason I figured Reuters and AP would be the last to go behind a paywall for the retail consumer. I remember those always being the safe neutral sources I could use in debate or extemporaneous speeches back on the debate/speech team in high school. Sucks it'll be harder to get access to now.

tyingq 6y ago

I wonder at what point Google needs to pay attention to this. If a large number of websites are behind registration or paywalls, then the chance that any individual person searching would have a subscription (or registration) to any individual news site is pretty low. People might have some small number of subscriptions, but not for many sites. So, why keep returning search results that the end user can't use without registration or purchase? It's essentially "page cloaking" when the rendered page doesn't match google sees. To me, if you want a paywall, that should come with the consequence that your site isn't included in search results for the general public. Edit: It's also getting irritating here on HN. I might have a subscription or login to one or two sites, but HN regularly shares stuff from Medium, WSJ, NYT, Wired, and so on. I have to imagine that most people following these posted stories hit the reg/pay-wall.

amelius 6y ago
Perhaps Google can get info on how many article-views the user has left, so they can take that into account when returning search results.
littlecranky67 6y ago
I've been wanting the "Show only free/non-subscription results" checkmark in Google (and other search engines) for a while, but I don't think it will ever happen.
baby-yoda 6y ago
could not agree with this more and this has gone on far too long. why does google allow this? as you say it is 100% cloaking to have the entire article indexed but not present it in the subsequent page. Sure, publishers feel they need paywalls for revenue purposes; have at it. That should not absolve them from the "rules" everyone else has to follow. Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected. [0] [0] - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/cloaking https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

tyingq 6y ago

"audiences prepared to pay $34.99 per month for a deeper level of coverage" Holy crap...who is this audience? NYT is $4/month, WAPO is $4-6/month, etc. Edit: Ah, okay, intro pricing that shifts to ~$17/month after a year. Still, though, that's half of this proposed pricing.

windthrown 6y ago
Your overall point still stands but the $4 you cite is a sign-up promotion - after that expires, it's $17/month for a digital subscription.
runako 6y ago
NYT is $4/4 weeks (not per month) during its trial period. That plan jumps to ~$18/mo after that ($17 per 4 weeks => ~$18/mo). WaPo is similar. The audience appears to be people who subscribe to Bloomberg, which is in the same price bracket.
- tyingq 6y ago
  I'm surprised they would be competitors. My (perhaps incorrect) assumption is that Bloomberg would have much more in-depth business coverage. And that Reuters would have more breadth, but significantly less depth, and competing more generally with AP than Bloomberg.
- uptown 6y ago
  NYT is $4/4 weeks as long as you continue to call and pretend to cancel at the end of your trial periods. It's a pain in the ass, but it work every time.
nicklecompte 6y ago
Although the comparison to NYT/WaPo makes some superficial sense, there is a big difference between a newspaper and a news agency like Reuters or AP. I don’t know much about the journalism business, but I expect Reuters is catering towards a smaller, premium audience that reads a lot of straight news but doesn’t care so much about criticism, commentary, and so on. In particular: reporters and academics, for whom this will be a business expense.

amelius 6y ago

How long until we get SciHub for news?

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
There is already Archive.is to bypass paywalls. You wait until someone with a subscription archives the site (no more than a few hours for NY Times articles, for instance), and then you can read the archived copy after entering the URL.

rectang 6y ago

Although it's regrettable that Reuters' content will be harder to access, it's a positive trend for the news ecosystem to generate increasing revenue through a subscription-based business model rather than selling ads. The more money that comes from subscriptions, the more that news coverage will reflect the interests of subscribers rather than advertisers.

zpeti 6y ago
In my very personal opinion, based on the New York Times this isn't necessarily a good thing. Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit crazy in their coverage. (and Fox is just as bad, but its not an online publication for the sake of my point)
- nojito 6y ago
  >Yes they cater to their subscribers but that's made them batshit crazy in their coverage Equating one of the premier news organizations in the world with Fox is quite interesting. NYTimes has been breaking news stories since the Civil War. They are the only organization that routinely breaks news against 'both sides' of the aisle. e.g. Clinton Email server and Trump business ties to name a couple The fact of the matter is that people can not differentiate the opinion pieces from their hard hitting news pieces. Which is a symptom of the low quality "social media news" that currently exists.
  - beervirus 6y ago
    > The fact of the matter is that people can not differentiate the opinion pieces from their hard hitting news pieces. They intentionally blur that line. Almost all of their news pieces the last several years have been full of opinion.
    - nojito 6y ago
      No. There is a distinct Opinion Section with it's own editorial oversight. https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion Just like every other high quality news source.

josefresco 6y ago

This is my new HN hobby: looking up pricing for aggressively paywalled content. Annual digital subscription costs (not promo pricing): Reuters: $420 Bloomberg: $419 Financial Times: $372 The Economist: $189

alecco 6y ago
vs Audible $149.50/year 12 books

ghostpepper 6y ago

This makes the decision to kill their RSS feed last year a bit easier to understand.

splithalf 6y ago

A few years ago I might have payed for Reuters news, but they sort of destroyed themselves this past few years perhaps because of financial incentives or mismanagement or simply the journalism zeitgeist. Maybe just another casualty of 2020.

timbit42 6y ago
Your comment is useless without proof. Give some examples.

alex_young 6y ago

Thompson Reuters business model at least used to be similar to Bloomberg’s: create first to market reporting and use that data as Alpha to sell financial services. While moving to monetize the news side certainly doesn’t preclude this, I wonder if it will produce more friction than value?

abstractbarista 6y ago

Guess I won't be reading much Reuters any more. Just the way she goes, if it doesn't load easily for me, I back out and move on to something else.

1cvmask 6y ago

They could ask for more money from the UK government to avoid the paywall: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-50637200 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-50637200 https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-02-25/Reuters-BBC-participated-in-UK-FCO-s-project-to-weaken-Russia-report-Ya0X5PBHTq/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-02-25/Reuters-BBC-participat...

ping_pong 6y ago

Paying $6-10/month for every subscription site is untenable. There's going to be something that will replace all this, but I'm not sure what. I would rather just watch ads than have to endure death by a thousand subscriptions.

throwaway5752 6y ago
The sad fact is that producing real journalism costs money, and there are too many parasitic content providers that steal journalism for ad eybeballs. The whole system is unsustainable. People used to be accustomed to paying for newspapers and supporting the journalism field, but have gotten used to it for free. Ad prices can no longer sustain all but the largest, and the ad model presents a conflict of interests with juicing click through rates and returns.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  You're omitting numerous alternative compensation mechanisms. Ads and subscriptions aren't the only options. Nor are micropayments or patronage the only novel notions (neither ultimately are effective).
Arnt 6y ago
A few decades ago, we chose one or a few print sources and read those regularly. We read some others at the hairdresser.
fifilura 6y ago
I believe sooner or later it will be fixed by bundling subscriptions. Just like TV channels are bundled today. My guess is that it has not taken off yet because everyone wants to be the top dog in that kind of business.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

skc 6y ago

If this trend accelerates isn't one unintended consequence that fake news (which will remain free to access) will propagate even faster than it already is?

dredmorbius 6y ago

Four-plus decades of micropayments advocacy have failed to poduce a viable system that works and people will use. People are drowning in accounts (well over 100/person in a 2015 survey[1]) and subscription services. Offerings are fragmented amongst these, and control battles lead to withdrawal of or blocking of materials during inter-corporate wars. OECD per-capita spend on all publishing runs about $100/person, roughly the same as per-capita ads spend within the same countries, itself a tax of sorts. A natural gateway exists --- not a perfect one, but good enough at the level of the ISP provider. Aggregation, not disintegrations, is the general trend in payment systems. Both buyers and sellers benefit from predictable flows, income or revenues. Regionally-pro-rated payments allocate costs according to ability to pay, which for information goods is a net social benefit. Rolling an information access fee into fixed line and mobile internet service, with an indexing of content accessed and a tier-and-bid based reimbursement schedule for publishers, seems to me the most viable path forward to something vaguely resembling a content tax, without actually going through a content tax mechanism. It would ensure universal access to readers and the public, compensation for creators, and the ability for those actually engaged in the process of creating new works to access the materials they need, legally and lawfully, answering in part the "why should I pay for information I don't use" objection: the inforation you do use is itself predicated on information you don't access directly yourself. The other answer to this rather tired objection is that you live in the world created by information access or denial of access, and in general, access to high-quality, relevant, useful information should be a net positive. (Yes, events of the past decade temper my enthusiasm for that belief somewhat, though information rather than propaganda still seems likely a net positive.) The concept could be trialed on a regional basis, rather than globally. It should offer any willing publication within a set of quality and bias tiers (there are third-party rating services, such as Ad Fontes Media, amongst others, which might serve as arbiters). A bidding process in which given tiers are compensated at specific rates, subject to competitive alternatives, should help address the "who gets paid and how much" question --- high-bias low-accuracy clickbait is a cheap-to-produce product, but would also be compensated at a low rate. _______________________________ Notes: 1. Dashlane came up with this number in 2015, archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20150919202348/https://blog.dashlane.com/infographic-online-overload-its-worse-than-you-thought/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150919202348/https://blog.dash... Experian cites a similar number, without source, in a 2019 identity fraud report https://www.experian.com/blogs/news/2019/01/30/global-identity-and-fraud-report/ https://www.experian.com/blogs/news/2019/01/30/global-identi... A NordPass study finds > 100 passwords/person on average https://tech.co/news/average-person-100-passwords https://tech.co/news/average-person-100-passwords HN readers report upwards of 700 accounts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488899 Data quality here are poor, but the general scope is clearly large. Whether its increasing on an annual basis or if 100 accounts/person represents a metastable plateau is unclear.

DarmokJalad1701 6y ago

While I understand the need for revenue, the end result now is that rags that put out conspiracy garbage is widely accessible to anyone with an internet connection - Breitbart, Fox et al. Sources with a relatively objective viewpoints are going behind paywalls.

dredmorbius 6y ago

Can we reflect back for a moment that come the age of mass-media (Gutenberg), literally the first things off the press were: 1. Propaganda. In the word’s original sense, as The Bible. 2. Cheaply-produced, high-cost status indicia / devices for separating fools from their money, a/k/a Papal Indulgences. In the ensuing 568 years, nobody’s come up with an alternative business model, modulo rounding errors.

cannabis_sam 6y ago

Yes, let’s hide one of the most objective news sources.. vested interests will celebrate and put more money towards warping the minds of people (edit, just to be clear, I’m not excluding myself here)

kadomony 6y ago

I wonder if this is signs of troublesome financial forecasts. They’re pushing a huge focus on digital transformation now and have just hired an ex-Amazon guy to be their new head of design.

antpls 6y ago

Since Reuters stopped its RSS feed, I found an interesting alternative : Aljazeera English. Aljazeera English has almost the same content than Reuters (like literally, exact same articles words by words), has RSS feed, and also has interesting news and viewpoint about Africa, Asia and Middle East.