3 ms·
It is a tricky thing. At some point someone needs to be paid for writing the article. I can think of 3 ways to accomplish that at the moment: 1. Government sub
by pacarvalho 4y ago
It is a tricky thing. At some point someone needs to be paid for writing the article. I can think of 3 ways to accomplish that at the moment:
1. Government subsidizes media. No cookies or profiling required. However, unclear if one government should support articles that are mostly read abroad and, of course, there are many issues with this related to equitable distribution of funds and impartiality.
2. They can run ads. However, ads tend have better ROI when well targeted which requires profiling. For instance, if I am reading an article about suits. If they know my age they can make sure to show me people around my age wearing that suit. Which makes me more likely to envision myself wearing it and thus buy it. Cookies (or similar) required.
3. A paywall where the reader pays for it directly. However, we seem to be very resistant to that idea given we were trained to use a "free" (sell your data model) internet. Nonetheless, by seeing your browsing history from your account server-side (no analytics cookies needed) they can place you in cohorts server side. So not that much more private. If anything, less private since they have your real data through your payment method.
Ensuring privacy while still getting access to free things and not bankrupting companies (especially small ones) is a hard problem.
- dqpb 4y agoThere is also the Spotify model, where a subscription gets you access to everything, and publishers get paid for what’s read.
- phailhaus 4y agoSpotify is one of a handful of music streaming products out there, and an absolute juggernaut that gives you access to basically all music and podcasts. By contrast, there are thousands of news sites, and subscribing to one of them only gives you access to their content. There is absolute no way "News Nation" is going to get enough dedicated subscribers to subsidize their reporting.