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USA Today is getting a paywall. Who’s the audience for it?

112 points by x14km2d 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
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deadalus 5y ago
I HATE clicking on a Google link and discovering that it's paywalled. I don't care about the newspapers "survival" problem, I personally do not derive any benefits from them. I just want my Google/DDG results clean and actually be able to read them. If a link is paywalled, it should be ranked way lower. Google cache trick doesn't work all the time.
- platz 5y ago
  Pay up.
  - syshum 5y ago
    They need to make the price reasonable, and $9.99 month for a single paper is not reasonable IMO. For $9.99 I month I can access to a library of thousands of hours of videos (netflix, prime, discovery+, etc) , thousands of hours of music (spofity, prime music, etc) , or thousands of hours of PC Games (Xbox Game Pass) Sorry but the USA Today is not as valuable as these services... maybe $2.99 but more likely something like $9.99 a YEAR at most $1.99 a mo would be a price point I would consider.
    - CubsFan1060 5y ago
      Those are interesting comparisons. None of your comparisons get you actual, recent news. Do you see this all as simply entertainment?
      - syshum 5y ago
        In many ways yes. News competes for the same time and budget as entertainment. These are both activities that people spend their disposable time / income on. They are not Food, Shelter, etc. Nor will someone refuse to go to their kids ball game because they need to read the USA Today.. No news like a movie or a tv show is something to pass the time when you have nothing else to do. Also keep in mind Trust in news is at a all time low, in part because the news themselves treat it as entertainment by sensationalizing everything, "if if bleeds it leads" and other High Drama "news"
    - memling 5y ago
      > For $9.99 I month I cant access to a library of thousands of hours of videos (netflix, prime, discovery+, etc) , thousands of hours of music (spofity, prime music, etc) , or thousands of hours of PC Games (Xbox Game Pass) Do you think it'd be worth it if you had archival access to the paper? It'd be interesting to be able to read NYT from its inception in 1851, for example. I know there are some papers that have done digital archiving, but I wonder if a research pass would be a way to generate revenue, too...
      - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
        It’s like walmart throwing some expired food after you for free. It could be good for some use cases, but not for the primary one which is getting fresh food for consumption.
        memling 5y ago
        hence the research pass. I could actually see that as valuable for a subset of people if it were searchable. I find the historical value of news generally higher than the current value but of course that's not why people read the paper. I might be inclined to subscribe to the times if I could read contemporaneous perspectives of historical periods I'm interested in. as it is, I sometimes feel like Chesterton, who snarkily opined he would be impressed if the news could get the past right, to say nothing of their guesses about the future. even so I think there's a need for deeply reported careful work...and that takes money. archives might work. I also like the git diff idea in a sibling comment.
      - syshum 5y ago
        It could be, Only if it was a full, complete, uncensored, unedited archive. Which is highly unlikely. Another valuable feature would be to have access to a git style record of all edits... which no newspaper would ever do either
      - tomjen3 5y ago
        It might be interesting to read the newspapers for september 10 2001 or read the stories for the days before a big event, but other than that? It has very little value.
    - ameister14 5y ago
      I'm willing to support honest, well done journalism and thoughtful editorial for $5 bucks a month and expect about 4 articles for that.
- the__alchemist 5y ago
  I built a search engine based on Bing's API. One of the core features is ranking paywalled sites lower, making their text grey (eg Hacker news), and putting a moneybag char in the link. My reasoning is the same as yours - there's nothing wrong with Paywalls, but they're no good in search results, since chances are, a given user doesn't have an account with an arbitrary paywalled site that shows up in search.
- xoa 5y ago
  >I personally do not derive any benefits from them >I want to be able to read them Uh? Being able to read is deriving a benefit. I don't disagree that the current situation is a complete mess, and that subs everywhere is ridiculous. It's perfectly possible to imagine technical/business solutions that would match reasonable budget/month for news to what people read and valued. And it's also easy to see real collective action problems, incentive issues and so on that might make that impossible. All tied together with advertising, privacy, public education issues and so on as well. But claiming you derive no benefit from newspapers at all would be a stretch even if you didn't want to read them, but claiming you don't while one sentence later saying you do want to read them? That doesn't seem quite reasonable.
  - deadalus 5y ago
    >I personally do not derive any benefits from them Any article is plastered all over the internet in hundreds of websites. Same topic, different headline. >I want to be able to read them I want to be able to read ANY of those "free non-paywalled" articles instead of the one that's paywalled. I have no loyalty to NYT, USA Today or The Blaze.
    - CubsFan1060 5y ago
      So you want the news, and you don't want anyone to earn any money from spending the time to produce that news?
      - deadalus 5y ago
        I will prefer reading the same news from a website that does not paywall content. Websites pay-walling content is not the issue here. The issue is Google ranking paywalled sites higher even though the same content is available elsewhere for free. Those non pay-walled websites must also survive.
        JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > issue is Google ranking paywalled sites higher even though the same content is available elsewhere for free It's almost like it's not the same content. Something breaking on the Times and then being summarized elsewhere are not interchangeable, which is why Google ranks its results as it does.
- dejj 5y ago
  HTTP status 402, Payment Required may be the one for you https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
- newsyyswen 5y ago
  One issue is that the newspapers believe that they are providing a service by allowing search engines to link to their page. From the perspective of the search engine (and us readers), it feels like a bait-and-switch to present the full article to a crawler robot in exchange for a better search ranking, only to hide it and demand payment from a human. But over in Australia, old media organizations have successfully lobbied for a "link tax" which allows them to demand payment from search providers who link to them. We've still got a long way to go before we reach a consensus on the independence of search platforms and the idea that human viewers should be served the same content as web spiders.
- ferdowsi 5y ago
  Google actively encourages hard paywalling in lieu of other ways of gating media (like incognito detection) . https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/protecting-private-browsing-chrome/ https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-ini... Also strange that some people would care more about a clean search result than the survival of media being consumed.
- kin 5y ago
  If we want quality content then these news sources need to be incentivized somehow. When it comes to SEO, the content is all there but the paywalls are usually client side so it’s harder for crawlers to dock down paywalls. Overall I agree that paywalls are annoying. But I do want quality publications to survive else we are going to be stuck with content like USA Today
- etc-hosts 5y ago
  Do you deposit your paychecks in the bank or do you send them back to your employer ?
EGreg 5y ago
Journalism had to adapt to the Internet. We talk about paywalls for online content in our whitepaper about how we plan to decentralize the Web economy and help monetize journalism and open source through micropayments instead: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Paywalls https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Paywalls The original Xanadu project had the concept of micropayments, but until now the only way to really achieve it was using lotteries (I think it was Ron Rivest in the 90s who suggested this?) The question is, how to monetize open source or journalism - online content that can be easily copied. Any sort of effective payment system requires a network effect. People could forj the system but they’d have to start from scratch, as no one would accept their payments. Imagine if every app and plugin on wordpress could have its own currency to earn money as people use it on various sites, and still continue to be open source. Imagine if social networks like Facebook were the ones paying for their users to read it, settling balances once in a while. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp fought for something like this in Australia and won. Would welcome feedback and thoughts. Why the massive amount of silent downvotes?
- gnicholas 5y ago
  I didn’t downvote, but I’m guessing others are doing so because this looks like self-promotion. You can mention a personal project on HN, but it’s best to do so only at the end of an otherwise interesting comment, so it’s clear you’re not just shilling.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Micropayments have an absolutely unblemished three decade history of perfectly and precisely failing to work. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudiation_as_the_micropayments_killer_feature/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudia...
    - EGreg 5y ago
      Thanks for that link! Very useful substantive analysis How does it apply in our case, by the way? In our case we take the payment decisions out of the hands of users and into the hands of community administrators.
t0mmyb0y 5y ago
"USA Today’s digital subscription offering seems likely, in its current form at least, to fall between those two stools." Yeah, the 2 stools nobody flushed yet.
bjourne 5y ago
It seems like more right-leaning sites have it easier to remain funded by advertisements while the more left-leaning sites, which I believe includes USA Today, more often than not have to go for subscriptions. And since most people are cheapskates and not willing to pay for news, left-wing voices are heard by fewer and fewer.
- abz10 5y ago
  One of the ironies in banning right wing voices from popular platforms is that you teach their audiences that they have to more proactive in supporting their content.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  USA Today is left-wing? I thought it was a free reading rag for traveling businessmen at the hotel breakfast buffet.
  - AJ007 5y ago
    Is it still written at a grade school reading level? It was kind of like news for dummies but a step above watching it on TV.
  - slumdev 5y ago
    It's like the WSJ, except for people who don't like big words.
  - bjourne 5y ago
    Almost everything is right-wing in the US. The left-wing of the right-wing may be a more appropriate description of USA Today.
    - will4274 5y ago
      > Almost everything is right-wing in the US. Compared to what? Compared to a dozen or so of the most liberal countries in the world, all of which are located in Europe - fair enough. Compared to the world as a whole today, including Asia and Africa? Almost everything in America is left wing, including the republican party and USA today. Compared to virtually any government anywhere prior to 1800? Again, almost everything in America is left wing, including the republican party and USA today.
CubsFan1060 5y ago
I think it's fascinating how many people want: - Current, high quality news sources - For free - With no ads Lots of people say the content isn't worth paying for, but see enough value to want to consume it.
- omega3 5y ago
  The problem right now is that outside of select few publications you're expected to pay for a low quality content.
  - CubsFan1060 5y ago
    I actually agree. But I think the answer then is simply not paying for it, and not consuming it. Which is the interesting part to me. It's low quality, but people still want to read it for free.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      To be fair they usually invest some time, energy and/or money into making sure that you want to read it. I don't want to pay for most news, but often I'm baited by an appealing headline. I'm not above being baited and fear of missing out, and they are exploiting this. If I'm preparing food in my house and people want a part of it, it would be weird to me. But if after preparing my food I use a complex system of fans to blow a delicious odor over my neighbours while having a beautiful table set up visible through my windows, and do this every single day, I can understand that they can't stay indifferent to the situation.
  - shusaku 5y ago
    Or you pay but you still are bombarded by tracking.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    You're missing the other case. Free content is provided not for informational value but for propaganda purposes. https://prospect.org/health/juul-taking-academic-corruption-to-new-level/ https://prospect.org/health/juul-taking-academic-corruption-... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769978) And paid-up services still include ads. (Which have higher advertiser value simply because the audience is known and sufficiently affluent to pay for content.)
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
If yellow jounalism pays so much that Microsoft shoves it down every users throats in the name of being "current" and "updated" Why do we have these paywalls then?
scrooched_moose 5y ago
I doubt it's feasible, but I've always been hoping for some payment service that would allow me to pay by the article across all news sites. My problem with paywalls is I don't want to buy a full NYTimes subscription just to finish reading one article. I want to pay $.10 to finish reading that one article, then $.10 to finish an article on USA today, then $.10 for something on Wall Street Journal.
- Flockster 5y ago
  I think this was the idea of flattr. A little different, you set a fixed amount per month and this was splitt across the articles/media you consumed. It was quite popular in the german podcasting scene, where you then "paid" per show you listened.
- alyandon 5y ago
  I wouldn't mind paying for a "day pass" to online news sites for a nominal price as long as I continue to have access to that day's content just as if I had paid for the print version. That might be more manageable given the current reality of payment systems today than trying to charge on a per-article basis.
  - dunnevens 5y ago
    Amazon will sell you the current issue of a newspaper or magazine in Kindle format. You can get today’s New York Times for a dollar. Not as nice as a day pass to the site, but it’s one option. Kindle books can be updated with the publisher’s changes. Would be interesting if the single NYT issue purchase would be updated throughout the day. That would make it as useful as a day pass.
    - alyandon 5y ago
      Thanks - I wasn't even aware that was an option.
- biddit 5y ago
  This is the model that helped the music industry come out of the Napster era. $1 single-serve songs with minimal friction to purchase was an attractive proposition relative to file sharing.
xGrill 5y ago
Lots of comments here are talking about lowering paywall site search results since you can not view them, however, I would actually consider raising them. Free content in journalism has a race to the bottom mentality when it comes to content quality. Free content often is incredibly bias or does not actually do any research. This gets you a lot of “fake news” that can spread like wildfire. Having papers that are more reputable by having a sustainable business model that allows them to produce better quality content, to me would be worth it over fake news sites.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
astura 5y ago
I could have sworn that USA Today already had a paywall, but looks like it's just the local papers owned by it's parent company (which largely have the same page layout as USA Today) are the ones with the paywall. Seems obvious that they'd extend that to their national publication.
gotorazor 5y ago
Did anyone here commenting actually read a copy of USA Today on paper before? The Nieman Lab article is not about paywalls per se, but paywalls in USA Today. People forget that pre-internet, USA Today was basically a news aggregator that just happened to print other people's stories on newspaper form. Their business model was to bulk sell these papers to chain hotels. Most of their readers had never paid for a copy of USA Today. So, if few reader in its heyday paid direct for it, and Gannet hasn't really changed the structure or content of USA Today in the last 25 years, what makes them think that readers will pay directly for it now in the internet age?
- tyingq 5y ago
  >Did anyone here commenting actually read a copy of USA Today on paper before? Yes, though because it was provided by a hotel for free. I can't imagine paying for one.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Oh, you paid for it. A major USA Today revenue model has been passive consumption through hotel distribution. To the tune of $82 million/year. (Total revenues are estimated at $3.4 billion for the privately-held company.[1]) https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/08/02/how-usa-today-slips-82-million-a-year-onto-your-hotel-bill/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/08/02/how-us... (This Forbes article is in fact linked in the Nielsen piece anchoring this thread.) Edit: Hotel revenue contribution downgraded from "a principle" to "a major" w/ information from Owler.com. ________________________________ Notes: 1. https://www.owler.com/company/usatoday https://www.owler.com/company/usatoday
    - crazygringo 5y ago
      Well, the article says there's basically a 50% chance you paid for it explicitly on your room bill. Which shocks me, I always look at my bill in detail (out of curiosity) and I've never seen that in my life. Is this specific to certain types or brands of hotels, that I somehow rarely/never stay in? For the other half... now it's got me wondering what hotels pay USA Today on average per newspaper? I'd always assumed it was free or at least nearly free, just an ad delivery mechanism. But now you've got me curious.
shusaku 5y ago
> instead, it was bulk purchases by hotels and other places with lobbies that fueled the business. When I was a kid I actually would read the newspaper every morning, though mostly I was just looking at box scores. I do distinctly remember getting USA Today when we went on vacation. If you’ll forgive my ramble, one other thing I remember now was my parents always complaining about the quality of the newspaper. We moved around a lot, and they really missed things like the New York Times, which I suppose was too expensive to get so far from New York. When I was a kid, I couldn’t understand why one news paper would be better than another, I think I thought it was the quality of the writing. But we’re my parents really complaining about the political slant of Midwestern papers? Did people care about that in the 90s? The lack of investigative journalism? I’ll have to ask them next time I call.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  It would be an impossible coincidence if all newspapers were of the same quality, however you define quality. USA Today and the NY Times are news for different purposes: I think USA Today is (or was, last I read it, ~5-10 years ago) underrated. They did some important investigative reporting and good journalism, and while they can lack depth in their short, digestible format (which is their intention, per distant memory), they also can be more succinct, which is a good thing. I thought the lack of depth was a real limitation, but I thought they also suffered from projecting themselves as a simple, easy (my words, maybe imperfect) source of information: People looking for the best information don't associate it with simple and easy. The NY Times addresses serious topics in much greater breadth, depth, and sophistication, and their investigative reporting is unparalleled (and taken for granted - if you step back and look at the stories they've broken, and think of what the world would look like without those stories, it's astounding). Certainly it has its flaws, including IMHO sometimes long-windedness - rarely do I wish an article was longer! You mentioned the NY Times but it has peers, IMHO, in the Financial Times and, to a degree, the Washington Post.
- hedora 5y ago
  The 90s was the beginning of the collapse of journalism in the US. Media ownership laws were relaxed, and some of the bigger players were acquired, leading to layoffs of “redundant” journalists, and their replacement with partisan shills. Soon craigslist popped up and destroyed the market for classified ads (which used to be the primary source of revenue for local papers). Free internet news didn’t help either. Since then, more and more ownership rules and things like the equal time doctrine (if you let one politician on the air, you need to let their opponent on as well) were eliminated.
renewiltord 5y ago
Hmm, interesting article. It does kind of pointless for this newspaper.
clubdorothe 5y ago
Which journal do you think worth paying for?
- t-writescode 5y ago
  The standard $20/mo asking rate of most papers after their trial “$1 per month for 3 months!!1” period? None of them.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  Mediapart, Le Monde Diplomatique, Le Monde, Le Canard Enchaîné, Canard PC and tons of other.
perardi 5y ago
The New York Times: the paper of record. Oh, oh no, I can hear the screams of “bias” already, but: from either the right or the left, you can’t really argue that if a story is in the Times, it becomes A Story. Their investigations, their opinion pieces, they lead the national conversation, for better or for worse, and people pay for that. The Washington Post: the paper of the seat of the power. Similar to the times, it’s…sigh…thought leadership. Big political stories break in the Post, and people pay for that. The Wall Street Journal: the paper of Wall Street. It’s business news. It’s valuable. People pay for it. People have been paying for it for a looooong time, too—they’ve had a paywall for quite a while, and a not particularly porous one. USA Today: the paper of…uh…the door mat at the Hampton Inn I stayed in because that AirBnB ended up being terrible? I have no idea who would pay for USA Today. It isn’t the national voice on politics or business. They do have some solid reporters, but what differentiates them from either the Post or The Times? Why would I pay for USA Today above and beyond any of these other papers?
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  While I agree with your analysis I also reminded myself of USA Today's launch and how the conventional wisdom was no one would be interested in such a newspaper. Fox (the TV network) was met with similar disbelief. Yeah, USA Today and a paywall doesn't make sense, but USA Today doesn't make sense so who knows? I guess we'll find out soon enough.
- analog31 5y ago
  Noam Chomsky described the NYT and WP as "establishment" newspapers, representing the left and right leaning sides of the establishment. WSJ is fine for business news if you don't look at the editorial page, which has been the case for decades. USA Today was "TV that you can wrap fish in."
  - will4274 5y ago
    Honestly, I like Chomsky a lot, but I think this quote reveals more about Chomsky than about newspapers. Or, he was describing a very different WP from the one that exists today.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
I think the major newspapers need to get together and start offering umbrella subscription packages. Preferably via something like Scroll, which worked in any web browser via a simple cookie. Surely the NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc realize that at $10 per month per paper, few people are going to maintain more than one or two subscriptions. Since the incremental cost of online distribution is nearly zero, this means that the news outlets are leaving money on the table. Make everyone's first subscription cost $10, then provide access to additional papers for 50¢ each. Or use some other type of sliding scale—I'm sure there are numbers that would make sense. The alternatives are either that a major tech company comes along and does it for them (as Apple is attempting), or that all the papers ultimately merge into 2-3 huge outlets. I don't like either of those outcomes.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc have to realize that at $10 per month per paper, almost no one is going to pay for more than a single subscription Plenty of people, offices and venues do. What's more likely, and the direction we've been heading for years, is we see a population that consumes paid journalism and the broader market that has ad-supported filler.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    I edited my post while you were replying—I do know some individuals who have a couple of subscriptions, but not more than that unless it's for professional reasons. Businesses are a different story, and they should be charged accordingly.
    - Cyclone_ 5y ago
      Agreed, the only people I know of that subscribe to multiple publications do it for professional reasons. I only subscribe to WSJ and it's more pricey than others but worth it. I get all the major stories.
    - tyre 5y ago
      I subscribe to the NYT, New Yorker, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, and the Atlantic. I don’t know how people think they’ll survive with a tenth of the revenue. Maybe you think three times the number of people will subscribe so then a third of the revenue? So then what? Publications look for alternative means of supplementing income. Which means ads and skewing content towards clickbaiting. Maybe it’s fine not trying to be for everyone when not everyone values them.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
Like everything else in the US, these major newspapers merging in our lifetime seems inevitable. I just cannot believe how dirt cheap the subscriptions are, and yet, I'm not going to subscribe to a single one of them because their content is too varied in quality, let alone a handful. It seems like it would be impossible to start a news business off the ground today without a powerful investor, which means the publication would have some intentional bias.
- errantmind 5y ago
  The entire centralized model is dying and shifting towards individual journalists with a personal brand and a degree of perceived authenticity. We are still in the early stages but I find it likely these big brands will fade away one funeral at a time.
aml702 5y ago
LOL. Imagine paying for USA Today.
errantmind 5y ago
I see the news meta shifting towards individual journalists with a personal brand, like some of those on Substack. I don't think there is anything to be done to save these larger newspaper organizations. I used to consume them but their signal/noise ratio is now so low I wouldn't read them even if they were free. The sacrifices in integrity and quality to satisfy low attention span, lowest common denominator readers signed their death warrant. No longer journalists, they transformed into ideologically reinforcing entertainment.
- Notanothertoo 5y ago
  Yep, also I think a lot of news is a "conversation" as an event unfolds and the one way direction of most media is outdated. With the internet we can now have bidirectional conversation about/with the news. For example much of the political reporting and conversation is being moved to longer form chat online.
throwitaway1235 5y ago
A few weeks ago the Reuters Institute published a study that claimed 29% of Americans "trust media". My question based off of that, are 29% of Americans funding paywalled media?
Trias11 5y ago
The moment I see a paywall or even a flavor of heavy popup nonsense presenting some obstacles to content - I move on. Same with ad-infested sites. I have low tolerance to crap. The more people will do that - the quicker this annoying business model die. Unless your content will help me to make money (courses, tutorials, specific investment analysis) I aint' spending a penny on you. In a controversial note - I'd totally pay monthly subscription to some pirating service that extracts content from behind paywall, strip pages from ads and provide access. This will be valuable service.
- realityking 5y ago
  Why would you prefer to pay pirates instead of the original creator?
  - Trias11 5y ago
    I don't want to have dozens of different accounts with dozens of different subscriptions on dozens different terms that are changing dozens time per year. Ideally I'd prefer to have a single legit service aggregating dozens of good content sites of my choice and pay monthly flat fee to access. But because each of them are fighting with each other and each of them have their version of infestation with ads, paywalls, popups, content restrictions, accounts requirements - I don't envision any legit service to make peace with all that nonsense. Pirate who will equalize all this into clean subscription based content is going to make a killing and I'll totally pay for it. I am willing to invest into clear message that I don't like their current business model. I also want ads-based sponsorship of anything to die. I'm willing to put money where my mouth is. Let them sort it out. I'd be willing to pay more for legit service to do all above - i just don't envision it happening any time soon.
    - brewdad 5y ago
      I would go buy an Apple News+ subscription right now if I could read it on my laptop. I'm not willing to commit to reading all of my news on my phone.
kthejoker2 5y ago
I pay for USA Today, NYT, WSJ, the Houston Chronicle, 2 local community web-only newsletters, and a smattering of newsmagazines. In my strange way of thinking it's just another form of civic duty.
- brewdad 5y ago
  It's the same reason I still contribute monthly to my local PBS station even though we don't watch it nearly as much as we used to as my kid has gotten older. That said, subscription fatigue is real. WaPo, Economist, Atlantic, NYT Food, a few specific interest magazines, and my local online newspaper starts to add up. I'd love to read more from some of the other major metros where I still have family, but I can't justify another $20-30 a month for the handful of articles I would actually read.
anonymouswacker 5y ago
USA Yesterday, soon enough
Notanothertoo 5y ago
It'll be blocked by the pay wall plug in by Friday.
Hippocrates 5y ago
NYT, WSJ, WaPo are worth paying for and have been successful with this model. Forbes, business insider, USA Today are grasping at straws while the plush rug of programmatic advertising and juiced up search promotion is yanked out from under them.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
CryptoPunk 5y ago
I think one area where cryptocurrency can have a significant positive impact is news media. If a browser extension based cryptocurrency wallet, like MetaMask, ever integrates a highly scalable payment system that makes micro-transactions economical, using some combination of the available scalability constructs, whether that's a zk-Rollup, zk-Porter, Optimistic Rollup, a sidechain like Polygon or xDai Chain, or state-channels, and this browser extension becomes ubiquitous, it would allow content providers to charge users on a per page basis, with almost zero friction for the user to make the payment. This would allow content providers to be compensated from a far larger subsection of the population, and correspondingly, allow a far larger subsection of the population to consume paywalled content.
k12sosse 5y ago
I like the old model of making newspapers and selling them based on the quality of their content.

112 points by x14km2d 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

I HATE clicking on a Google link and discovering that it's paywalled. I don't care about the newspapers "survival" problem, I personally do not derive any benefits from them. I just want my Google/DDG results clean and actually be able to read them. If a link is paywalled, it should be ranked way lower. Google cache trick doesn't work all the time.

platz 5y ago
Pay up.
- syshum 5y ago
  They need to make the price reasonable, and $9.99 month for a single paper is not reasonable IMO. For $9.99 I month I can access to a library of thousands of hours of videos (netflix, prime, discovery+, etc) , thousands of hours of music (spofity, prime music, etc) , or thousands of hours of PC Games (Xbox Game Pass) Sorry but the USA Today is not as valuable as these services... maybe $2.99 but more likely something like $9.99 a YEAR at most $1.99 a mo would be a price point I would consider.
  - CubsFan1060 5y ago
    Those are interesting comparisons. None of your comparisons get you actual, recent news. Do you see this all as simply entertainment?
    - syshum 5y ago
      In many ways yes. News competes for the same time and budget as entertainment. These are both activities that people spend their disposable time / income on. They are not Food, Shelter, etc. Nor will someone refuse to go to their kids ball game because they need to read the USA Today.. No news like a movie or a tv show is something to pass the time when you have nothing else to do. Also keep in mind Trust in news is at a all time low, in part because the news themselves treat it as entertainment by sensationalizing everything, "if if bleeds it leads" and other High Drama "news"
  - memling 5y ago
    > For $9.99 I month I cant access to a library of thousands of hours of videos (netflix, prime, discovery+, etc) , thousands of hours of music (spofity, prime music, etc) , or thousands of hours of PC Games (Xbox Game Pass) Do you think it'd be worth it if you had archival access to the paper? It'd be interesting to be able to read NYT from its inception in 1851, for example. I know there are some papers that have done digital archiving, but I wonder if a research pass would be a way to generate revenue, too...
    - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
      It’s like walmart throwing some expired food after you for free. It could be good for some use cases, but not for the primary one which is getting fresh food for consumption.
      - memling 5y ago
        hence the research pass. I could actually see that as valuable for a subset of people if it were searchable. I find the historical value of news generally higher than the current value but of course that's not why people read the paper. I might be inclined to subscribe to the times if I could read contemporaneous perspectives of historical periods I'm interested in. as it is, I sometimes feel like Chesterton, who snarkily opined he would be impressed if the news could get the past right, to say nothing of their guesses about the future. even so I think there's a need for deeply reported careful work...and that takes money. archives might work. I also like the git diff idea in a sibling comment.
    - syshum 5y ago
      It could be, Only if it was a full, complete, uncensored, unedited archive. Which is highly unlikely. Another valuable feature would be to have access to a git style record of all edits... which no newspaper would ever do either
    - tomjen3 5y ago
      It might be interesting to read the newspapers for september 10 2001 or read the stories for the days before a big event, but other than that? It has very little value.
  - ameister14 5y ago
    I'm willing to support honest, well done journalism and thoughtful editorial for $5 bucks a month and expect about 4 articles for that.
the__alchemist 5y ago
I built a search engine based on Bing's API. One of the core features is ranking paywalled sites lower, making their text grey (eg Hacker news), and putting a moneybag char in the link. My reasoning is the same as yours - there's nothing wrong with Paywalls, but they're no good in search results, since chances are, a given user doesn't have an account with an arbitrary paywalled site that shows up in search.
xoa 5y ago
>I personally do not derive any benefits from them >I want to be able to read them Uh? Being able to read is deriving a benefit. I don't disagree that the current situation is a complete mess, and that subs everywhere is ridiculous. It's perfectly possible to imagine technical/business solutions that would match reasonable budget/month for news to what people read and valued. And it's also easy to see real collective action problems, incentive issues and so on that might make that impossible. All tied together with advertising, privacy, public education issues and so on as well. But claiming you derive no benefit from newspapers at all would be a stretch even if you didn't want to read them, but claiming you don't while one sentence later saying you do want to read them? That doesn't seem quite reasonable.
- deadalus 5y ago
  >I personally do not derive any benefits from them Any article is plastered all over the internet in hundreds of websites. Same topic, different headline. >I want to be able to read them I want to be able to read ANY of those "free non-paywalled" articles instead of the one that's paywalled. I have no loyalty to NYT, USA Today or The Blaze.
  - CubsFan1060 5y ago
    So you want the news, and you don't want anyone to earn any money from spending the time to produce that news?
    - deadalus 5y ago
      I will prefer reading the same news from a website that does not paywall content. Websites pay-walling content is not the issue here. The issue is Google ranking paywalled sites higher even though the same content is available elsewhere for free. Those non pay-walled websites must also survive.
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > issue is Google ranking paywalled sites higher even though the same content is available elsewhere for free It's almost like it's not the same content. Something breaking on the Times and then being summarized elsewhere are not interchangeable, which is why Google ranks its results as it does.
dejj 5y ago
HTTP status 402, Payment Required may be the one for you https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
newsyyswen 5y ago
One issue is that the newspapers believe that they are providing a service by allowing search engines to link to their page. From the perspective of the search engine (and us readers), it feels like a bait-and-switch to present the full article to a crawler robot in exchange for a better search ranking, only to hide it and demand payment from a human. But over in Australia, old media organizations have successfully lobbied for a "link tax" which allows them to demand payment from search providers who link to them. We've still got a long way to go before we reach a consensus on the independence of search platforms and the idea that human viewers should be served the same content as web spiders.
ferdowsi 5y ago
Google actively encourages hard paywalling in lieu of other ways of gating media (like incognito detection) . https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/protecting-private-browsing-chrome/ https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-ini... Also strange that some people would care more about a clean search result than the survival of media being consumed.
kin 5y ago
If we want quality content then these news sources need to be incentivized somehow. When it comes to SEO, the content is all there but the paywalls are usually client side so it’s harder for crawlers to dock down paywalls. Overall I agree that paywalls are annoying. But I do want quality publications to survive else we are going to be stuck with content like USA Today
etc-hosts 5y ago
Do you deposit your paychecks in the bank or do you send them back to your employer ?

EGreg 5y ago

Journalism had to adapt to the Internet. We talk about paywalls for online content in our whitepaper about how we plan to decentralize the Web economy and help monetize journalism and open source through micropayments instead: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Paywalls https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Paywalls The original Xanadu project had the concept of micropayments, but until now the only way to really achieve it was using lotteries (I think it was Ron Rivest in the 90s who suggested this?) The question is, how to monetize open source or journalism - online content that can be easily copied. Any sort of effective payment system requires a network effect. People could forj the system but they’d have to start from scratch, as no one would accept their payments. Imagine if every app and plugin on wordpress could have its own currency to earn money as people use it on various sites, and still continue to be open source. Imagine if social networks like Facebook were the ones paying for their users to read it, settling balances once in a while. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp fought for something like this in Australia and won. Would welcome feedback and thoughts. Why the massive amount of silent downvotes?

gnicholas 5y ago
I didn’t downvote, but I’m guessing others are doing so because this looks like self-promotion. You can mention a personal project on HN, but it’s best to do so only at the end of an otherwise interesting comment, so it’s clear you’re not just shilling.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Micropayments have an absolutely unblemished three decade history of perfectly and precisely failing to work. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudiation_as_the_micropayments_killer_feature/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudia...
  - EGreg 5y ago
    Thanks for that link! Very useful substantive analysis How does it apply in our case, by the way? In our case we take the payment decisions out of the hands of users and into the hands of community administrators.

t0mmyb0y 5y ago

"USA Today’s digital subscription offering seems likely, in its current form at least, to fall between those two stools." Yeah, the 2 stools nobody flushed yet.

bjourne 5y ago

It seems like more right-leaning sites have it easier to remain funded by advertisements while the more left-leaning sites, which I believe includes USA Today, more often than not have to go for subscriptions. And since most people are cheapskates and not willing to pay for news, left-wing voices are heard by fewer and fewer.

abz10 5y ago
One of the ironies in banning right wing voices from popular platforms is that you teach their audiences that they have to more proactive in supporting their content.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
USA Today is left-wing? I thought it was a free reading rag for traveling businessmen at the hotel breakfast buffet.
- AJ007 5y ago
  Is it still written at a grade school reading level? It was kind of like news for dummies but a step above watching it on TV.
- slumdev 5y ago
  It's like the WSJ, except for people who don't like big words.
- bjourne 5y ago
  Almost everything is right-wing in the US. The left-wing of the right-wing may be a more appropriate description of USA Today.
  - will4274 5y ago
    > Almost everything is right-wing in the US. Compared to what? Compared to a dozen or so of the most liberal countries in the world, all of which are located in Europe - fair enough. Compared to the world as a whole today, including Asia and Africa? Almost everything in America is left wing, including the republican party and USA today. Compared to virtually any government anywhere prior to 1800? Again, almost everything in America is left wing, including the republican party and USA today.

CubsFan1060 5y ago

I think it's fascinating how many people want: - Current, high quality news sources - For free - With no ads Lots of people say the content isn't worth paying for, but see enough value to want to consume it.

omega3 5y ago
The problem right now is that outside of select few publications you're expected to pay for a low quality content.
- CubsFan1060 5y ago
  I actually agree. But I think the answer then is simply not paying for it, and not consuming it. Which is the interesting part to me. It's low quality, but people still want to read it for free.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    To be fair they usually invest some time, energy and/or money into making sure that you want to read it. I don't want to pay for most news, but often I'm baited by an appealing headline. I'm not above being baited and fear of missing out, and they are exploiting this. If I'm preparing food in my house and people want a part of it, it would be weird to me. But if after preparing my food I use a complex system of fans to blow a delicious odor over my neighbours while having a beautiful table set up visible through my windows, and do this every single day, I can understand that they can't stay indifferent to the situation.
- shusaku 5y ago
  Or you pay but you still are bombarded by tracking.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  You're missing the other case. Free content is provided not for informational value but for propaganda purposes. https://prospect.org/health/juul-taking-academic-corruption-to-new-level/ https://prospect.org/health/juul-taking-academic-corruption-... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769978) And paid-up services still include ads. (Which have higher advertiser value simply because the audience is known and sufficiently affluent to pay for content.)

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

If yellow jounalism pays so much that Microsoft shoves it down every users throats in the name of being "current" and "updated" Why do we have these paywalls then?

scrooched_moose 5y ago

I doubt it's feasible, but I've always been hoping for some payment service that would allow me to pay by the article across all news sites. My problem with paywalls is I don't want to buy a full NYTimes subscription just to finish reading one article. I want to pay $.10 to finish reading that one article, then $.10 to finish an article on USA today, then $.10 for something on Wall Street Journal.

Flockster 5y ago
I think this was the idea of flattr. A little different, you set a fixed amount per month and this was splitt across the articles/media you consumed. It was quite popular in the german podcasting scene, where you then "paid" per show you listened.
alyandon 5y ago
I wouldn't mind paying for a "day pass" to online news sites for a nominal price as long as I continue to have access to that day's content just as if I had paid for the print version. That might be more manageable given the current reality of payment systems today than trying to charge on a per-article basis.
- dunnevens 5y ago
  Amazon will sell you the current issue of a newspaper or magazine in Kindle format. You can get today’s New York Times for a dollar. Not as nice as a day pass to the site, but it’s one option. Kindle books can be updated with the publisher’s changes. Would be interesting if the single NYT issue purchase would be updated throughout the day. That would make it as useful as a day pass.
  - alyandon 5y ago
    Thanks - I wasn't even aware that was an option.
biddit 5y ago
This is the model that helped the music industry come out of the Napster era. $1 single-serve songs with minimal friction to purchase was an attractive proposition relative to file sharing.

xGrill 5y ago

Lots of comments here are talking about lowering paywall site search results since you can not view them, however, I would actually consider raising them. Free content in journalism has a race to the bottom mentality when it comes to content quality. Free content often is incredibly bias or does not actually do any research. This gets you a lot of “fake news” that can spread like wildfire. Having papers that are more reputable by having a sustainable business model that allows them to produce better quality content, to me would be worth it over fake news sites.

deleted 5y ago

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astura 5y ago

I could have sworn that USA Today already had a paywall, but looks like it's just the local papers owned by it's parent company (which largely have the same page layout as USA Today) are the ones with the paywall. Seems obvious that they'd extend that to their national publication.

gotorazor 5y ago

Did anyone here commenting actually read a copy of USA Today on paper before? The Nieman Lab article is not about paywalls per se, but paywalls in USA Today. People forget that pre-internet, USA Today was basically a news aggregator that just happened to print other people's stories on newspaper form. Their business model was to bulk sell these papers to chain hotels. Most of their readers had never paid for a copy of USA Today. So, if few reader in its heyday paid direct for it, and Gannet hasn't really changed the structure or content of USA Today in the last 25 years, what makes them think that readers will pay directly for it now in the internet age?

tyingq 5y ago
>Did anyone here commenting actually read a copy of USA Today on paper before? Yes, though because it was provided by a hotel for free. I can't imagine paying for one.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Oh, you paid for it. A major USA Today revenue model has been passive consumption through hotel distribution. To the tune of $82 million/year. (Total revenues are estimated at $3.4 billion for the privately-held company.[1]) https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/08/02/how-usa-today-slips-82-million-a-year-onto-your-hotel-bill/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/08/02/how-us... (This Forbes article is in fact linked in the Nielsen piece anchoring this thread.) Edit: Hotel revenue contribution downgraded from "a principle" to "a major" w/ information from Owler.com. ________________________________ Notes: 1. https://www.owler.com/company/usatoday https://www.owler.com/company/usatoday
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    Well, the article says there's basically a 50% chance you paid for it explicitly on your room bill. Which shocks me, I always look at my bill in detail (out of curiosity) and I've never seen that in my life. Is this specific to certain types or brands of hotels, that I somehow rarely/never stay in? For the other half... now it's got me wondering what hotels pay USA Today on average per newspaper? I'd always assumed it was free or at least nearly free, just an ad delivery mechanism. But now you've got me curious.

shusaku 5y ago

> instead, it was bulk purchases by hotels and other places with lobbies that fueled the business. When I was a kid I actually would read the newspaper every morning, though mostly I was just looking at box scores. I do distinctly remember getting USA Today when we went on vacation. If you’ll forgive my ramble, one other thing I remember now was my parents always complaining about the quality of the newspaper. We moved around a lot, and they really missed things like the New York Times, which I suppose was too expensive to get so far from New York. When I was a kid, I couldn’t understand why one news paper would be better than another, I think I thought it was the quality of the writing. But we’re my parents really complaining about the political slant of Midwestern papers? Did people care about that in the 90s? The lack of investigative journalism? I’ll have to ask them next time I call.

wolverine876 5y ago
It would be an impossible coincidence if all newspapers were of the same quality, however you define quality. USA Today and the NY Times are news for different purposes: I think USA Today is (or was, last I read it, ~5-10 years ago) underrated. They did some important investigative reporting and good journalism, and while they can lack depth in their short, digestible format (which is their intention, per distant memory), they also can be more succinct, which is a good thing. I thought the lack of depth was a real limitation, but I thought they also suffered from projecting themselves as a simple, easy (my words, maybe imperfect) source of information: People looking for the best information don't associate it with simple and easy. The NY Times addresses serious topics in much greater breadth, depth, and sophistication, and their investigative reporting is unparalleled (and taken for granted - if you step back and look at the stories they've broken, and think of what the world would look like without those stories, it's astounding). Certainly it has its flaws, including IMHO sometimes long-windedness - rarely do I wish an article was longer! You mentioned the NY Times but it has peers, IMHO, in the Financial Times and, to a degree, the Washington Post.
hedora 5y ago
The 90s was the beginning of the collapse of journalism in the US. Media ownership laws were relaxed, and some of the bigger players were acquired, leading to layoffs of “redundant” journalists, and their replacement with partisan shills. Soon craigslist popped up and destroyed the market for classified ads (which used to be the primary source of revenue for local papers). Free internet news didn’t help either. Since then, more and more ownership rules and things like the equal time doctrine (if you let one politician on the air, you need to let their opponent on as well) were eliminated.

renewiltord 5y ago

Hmm, interesting article. It does kind of pointless for this newspaper.

clubdorothe 5y ago

Which journal do you think worth paying for?

t-writescode 5y ago
The standard $20/mo asking rate of most papers after their trial “$1 per month for 3 months!!1” period? None of them.
speedgoose 5y ago
Mediapart, Le Monde Diplomatique, Le Monde, Le Canard Enchaîné, Canard PC and tons of other.

perardi 5y ago

The New York Times: the paper of record. Oh, oh no, I can hear the screams of “bias” already, but: from either the right or the left, you can’t really argue that if a story is in the Times, it becomes A Story. Their investigations, their opinion pieces, they lead the national conversation, for better or for worse, and people pay for that. The Washington Post: the paper of the seat of the power. Similar to the times, it’s…sigh…thought leadership. Big political stories break in the Post, and people pay for that. The Wall Street Journal: the paper of Wall Street. It’s business news. It’s valuable. People pay for it. People have been paying for it for a looooong time, too—they’ve had a paywall for quite a while, and a not particularly porous one. USA Today: the paper of…uh…the door mat at the Hampton Inn I stayed in because that AirBnB ended up being terrible? I have no idea who would pay for USA Today. It isn’t the national voice on politics or business. They do have some solid reporters, but what differentiates them from either the Post or The Times? Why would I pay for USA Today above and beyond any of these other papers?

chiefalchemist 5y ago
While I agree with your analysis I also reminded myself of USA Today's launch and how the conventional wisdom was no one would be interested in such a newspaper. Fox (the TV network) was met with similar disbelief. Yeah, USA Today and a paywall doesn't make sense, but USA Today doesn't make sense so who knows? I guess we'll find out soon enough.
analog31 5y ago
Noam Chomsky described the NYT and WP as "establishment" newspapers, representing the left and right leaning sides of the establishment. WSJ is fine for business news if you don't look at the editorial page, which has been the case for decades. USA Today was "TV that you can wrap fish in."
- will4274 5y ago
  Honestly, I like Chomsky a lot, but I think this quote reveals more about Chomsky than about newspapers. Or, he was describing a very different WP from the one that exists today.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

I think the major newspapers need to get together and start offering umbrella subscription packages. Preferably via something like Scroll, which worked in any web browser via a simple cookie. Surely the NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc realize that at $10 per month per paper, few people are going to maintain more than one or two subscriptions. Since the incremental cost of online distribution is nearly zero, this means that the news outlets are leaving money on the table. Make everyone's first subscription cost $10, then provide access to additional papers for 50¢ each. Or use some other type of sliding scale—I'm sure there are numbers that would make sense. The alternatives are either that a major tech company comes along and does it for them (as Apple is attempting), or that all the papers ultimately merge into 2-3 huge outlets. I don't like either of those outcomes.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> NYT, WSJ, USA Today, etc have to realize that at $10 per month per paper, almost no one is going to pay for more than a single subscription Plenty of people, offices and venues do. What's more likely, and the direction we've been heading for years, is we see a population that consumes paid journalism and the broader market that has ad-supported filler.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  I edited my post while you were replying—I do know some individuals who have a couple of subscriptions, but not more than that unless it's for professional reasons. Businesses are a different story, and they should be charged accordingly.
  - Cyclone_ 5y ago
    Agreed, the only people I know of that subscribe to multiple publications do it for professional reasons. I only subscribe to WSJ and it's more pricey than others but worth it. I get all the major stories.
  - tyre 5y ago
    I subscribe to the NYT, New Yorker, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, and the Atlantic. I don’t know how people think they’ll survive with a tenth of the revenue. Maybe you think three times the number of people will subscribe so then a third of the revenue? So then what? Publications look for alternative means of supplementing income. Which means ads and skewing content towards clickbaiting. Maybe it’s fine not trying to be for everyone when not everyone values them.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

Like everything else in the US, these major newspapers merging in our lifetime seems inevitable. I just cannot believe how dirt cheap the subscriptions are, and yet, I'm not going to subscribe to a single one of them because their content is too varied in quality, let alone a handful. It seems like it would be impossible to start a news business off the ground today without a powerful investor, which means the publication would have some intentional bias.

errantmind 5y ago
The entire centralized model is dying and shifting towards individual journalists with a personal brand and a degree of perceived authenticity. We are still in the early stages but I find it likely these big brands will fade away one funeral at a time.

aml702 5y ago

LOL. Imagine paying for USA Today.

errantmind 5y ago

I see the news meta shifting towards individual journalists with a personal brand, like some of those on Substack. I don't think there is anything to be done to save these larger newspaper organizations. I used to consume them but their signal/noise ratio is now so low I wouldn't read them even if they were free. The sacrifices in integrity and quality to satisfy low attention span, lowest common denominator readers signed their death warrant. No longer journalists, they transformed into ideologically reinforcing entertainment.

Notanothertoo 5y ago
Yep, also I think a lot of news is a "conversation" as an event unfolds and the one way direction of most media is outdated. With the internet we can now have bidirectional conversation about/with the news. For example much of the political reporting and conversation is being moved to longer form chat online.

throwitaway1235 5y ago

A few weeks ago the Reuters Institute published a study that claimed 29% of Americans "trust media". My question based off of that, are 29% of Americans funding paywalled media?

Trias11 5y ago

The moment I see a paywall or even a flavor of heavy popup nonsense presenting some obstacles to content - I move on. Same with ad-infested sites. I have low tolerance to crap. The more people will do that - the quicker this annoying business model die. Unless your content will help me to make money (courses, tutorials, specific investment analysis) I aint' spending a penny on you. In a controversial note - I'd totally pay monthly subscription to some pirating service that extracts content from behind paywall, strip pages from ads and provide access. This will be valuable service.

realityking 5y ago
Why would you prefer to pay pirates instead of the original creator?
- Trias11 5y ago
  I don't want to have dozens of different accounts with dozens of different subscriptions on dozens different terms that are changing dozens time per year. Ideally I'd prefer to have a single legit service aggregating dozens of good content sites of my choice and pay monthly flat fee to access. But because each of them are fighting with each other and each of them have their version of infestation with ads, paywalls, popups, content restrictions, accounts requirements - I don't envision any legit service to make peace with all that nonsense. Pirate who will equalize all this into clean subscription based content is going to make a killing and I'll totally pay for it. I am willing to invest into clear message that I don't like their current business model. I also want ads-based sponsorship of anything to die. I'm willing to put money where my mouth is. Let them sort it out. I'd be willing to pay more for legit service to do all above - i just don't envision it happening any time soon.
  - brewdad 5y ago
    I would go buy an Apple News+ subscription right now if I could read it on my laptop. I'm not willing to commit to reading all of my news on my phone.

kthejoker2 5y ago

I pay for USA Today, NYT, WSJ, the Houston Chronicle, 2 local community web-only newsletters, and a smattering of newsmagazines. In my strange way of thinking it's just another form of civic duty.

brewdad 5y ago
It's the same reason I still contribute monthly to my local PBS station even though we don't watch it nearly as much as we used to as my kid has gotten older. That said, subscription fatigue is real. WaPo, Economist, Atlantic, NYT Food, a few specific interest magazines, and my local online newspaper starts to add up. I'd love to read more from some of the other major metros where I still have family, but I can't justify another $20-30 a month for the handful of articles I would actually read.

anonymouswacker 5y ago

USA Yesterday, soon enough

Notanothertoo 5y ago

It'll be blocked by the pay wall plug in by Friday.

Hippocrates 5y ago

NYT, WSJ, WaPo are worth paying for and have been successful with this model. Forbes, business insider, USA Today are grasping at straws while the plush rug of programmatic advertising and juiced up search promotion is yanked out from under them.

deleted 5y ago
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CryptoPunk 5y ago

I think one area where cryptocurrency can have a significant positive impact is news media. If a browser extension based cryptocurrency wallet, like MetaMask, ever integrates a highly scalable payment system that makes micro-transactions economical, using some combination of the available scalability constructs, whether that's a zk-Rollup, zk-Porter, Optimistic Rollup, a sidechain like Polygon or xDai Chain, or state-channels, and this browser extension becomes ubiquitous, it would allow content providers to charge users on a per page basis, with almost zero friction for the user to make the payment. This would allow content providers to be compensated from a far larger subsection of the population, and correspondingly, allow a far larger subsection of the population to consume paywalled content.

k12sosse 5y ago

I like the old model of making newspapers and selling them based on the quality of their content.