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Maybe the news companies should figure out how to attract more people to their sites rather than trying to charge rent on other sites? Maybe the news companies

Maybe the news companies should figure out how to attract more people to their sites rather than trying to charge rent on other sites? Maybe the news companies should write articles that are worth reading in full? If Facebook links to an article people might follow the link and read it. If they don't link to an article, nobody will read it. There is nothing but upside for the news companies, and people with business savvy would love to have their site linked on Facebook (that's why people pay them so much money for ads!).

babypuncher 4y ago
I see lots of articles get posted which are worth reading in full, but the comments under them make it clear few if any people actually read them. I don't really see how you change that behavior. People are drawn to the path of least resistance, and that path is often just reading the headline and brief summary before making your comment and moving on to the next thing in your social media feed. The value social media companies add is creating a space where users feel like they get all their news (and other things), and can converse about it either with friends and family or like-minded strangers. I don't see how news outlets themselves can compete with that without essentially seeking to replace Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. I think it's fair to say that social media companies profiting off other people's labor should share that financial liability.
- bdw5204 4y ago
  Facebook can just replace corporate media with alternative media outlets that provide the same news. In fact, the alternative media was doing extremely well on social media until around 2017 or so when they changed the algorithms to favor corporate media content. From the perspective of Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, they can just replace CNN and Fox News with Jacobin and Breitbart and nobody will care that much except people who work for those outlets. In fact, most people will probably be happier to have sources that care less about pretending to be "objective" and just support their party's agenda (such outlets were successfully outcompeting corporate media on the social platforms before the circa 2017 algorithm changes). In other words, the corporate media should be careful what they wish for because they might lose the fantastic gift horse they got from "big tech" 6 years ago. The value of a media outlet is in its influence over public opinion not its profitability and this greed driven proposal is a good way for corporate media to burn down their own influence.
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    I understand people's grievances with "mainstream media", but the fact that Jacobin and Breitbart get propped up as "better" alternatives is kind of terrifying.
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      At least they are more honest about providing a particular editorial lens to the type of news and content they produce. Edit: that said, having them as primary sources for consumption is obviously much worse than actual journalism built on journalistic principals. We simply don't have much of that at all anymore (if we really ever did, which I think an argument could be made it was somewhat better previously).
      - ericmay 4y ago
        Are they honest about it? What do you mean? Like does Breitbart come out and list it in the site “we are far right blah blah blah”? If not I don’t see how you couldn’t also say that CNN, Fox, and Bloomberg aren’t also honest about their slant.
        CydeWeys 4y ago
        Jacobin at least is honest and unapologetic: https://jacobin.com/about https://jacobin.com/about
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > I see lots of articles get posted which are worth reading in full, but the comments under them make it clear few if any people actually read them. This is how people have always read the news. In the old days, there was TV and radio news, which are really just headlines and a brief summary of stories, and newspapers. Most people didn't read the majority of the stories in the newspapers -- they'd skim the headlines, maybe read the first paragraph of a few, and read one or two of the stories that particularly interested them. That's what's hard to monetize online. I have no answers for this problem, but it's certainly a problem.
  - Ntrails 4y ago
    > they'd skim the headlines, maybe read the first paragraph of a few... Yeah, we have newspapers at work. I still read them that way, not needing to read a whole segment unless it is obviously interesting beyond the core story.
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    Yep, and I don't mean to imply that this is necessarily bad, just pointing out how shifting the place where that headline and summary are consumed from radio and TV where the news source makes money to a third party social media site where they don't is a problem. Good journalism follows an inverted pyramid writing structure, where the most important information is at the top (the headline) and the information becomes less critical the further down the article you move. This has conditioned people to think they can rely on the headline and the first few sentences to get a rough but accurate idea of what's going on. Getting them to actually go to the news website after they've gotten the most important bits from Facebook or Twitter is an incredibly tall order.
SQueeeeeL 4y ago
They have simply made this calculus and decided that there is no way to monetize the Facebook posts. It turns out minor attention engagement just doesn't get enough click throughs ever. Simply. The only things that can exist in earnest on social media sites is junk food, similar to infomercial spots at 4 AM on cable
- HardlyCurious 4y ago
  They could embed ads in their cover photos. Just a banner or something. Not sure how the tracking would work, but there would certainly be value in it since sharing headlines can get many millions of views.
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    Do cover photos even get viewed often? When I see a News post it's usually just in my feed. If I click to view comments it expands in my feed. There's no reason to visit the news website's page directly. This also isn't about stories posted by news organizations on Facebook. It's about people posting links to news stories on their own pages.
- timbit42 4y ago
  If people aren't clicking, then their headlines and summaries are either not interesting enough or too revealing. The news media needs to put up strong paywalls and give up on full subscriptions. No one wants to pay $100 per news source to access hundreds of articles they don't want to read. They need to let people pay per article. Paying one article at a time is too expensive due to transaction fees. They need to offer something like 40 articles for $20 and request another payment when the 40 articles run out. The news media needs social media to spread their article links around. Charging social media per click will result in their article links being reduced or blocked because of the cost. News media with lower cost links will be promoted.
908B64B197 4y ago
> Maybe the news companies should figure out how to attract more people to their sites rather than trying to charge rent on other sites? > Maybe the news companies should write articles that are worth reading in full? Why innovate when you can just regulate and rent seek "evil foreign tech giants"?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
marstall 4y ago
maybe Facebook should pay for the products it's using to engage to engage its own users?
- peanuty1 4y ago
  Meta has done the calculus and it's not worth it for them to pay for news sharing.
HDThoreaun 4y ago
Or maybe people just aren't interested in news beyond headlines at all and if society wants news to exist it needs to be subsidized. What better way to subsidize than forcing the people who are profiting off it to pay its creators?
- viscanti 4y ago
  > if society wants news to exist it needs to be subsidized. Does society want to subsidize mostly clickbait journalism and incentivize creators to predominantly write articles that will be shared widely? Or if society wants to subsidize news beyond headlines, might there be other content they would prefer is subsidized?
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    I think giving everyone $10-50 a year or something as a tax rebate to be spent on news organizations is a better way to subsidize news that people actually want, but that seems like a tough political sell.
    - restitutorOrbis 4y ago
      Canada already does this but the way we choose to do it requires jumping through a whole set of hoops for journalists. Take a look at this: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individuals/topics/about-your-tax-return/tax-return/completing-a-tax-return/deductions-credits-expenses/deductions-credits-expenses/digital-news-subscription.html https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individ...
      - squeaky-clean 4y ago
        > The maximum credit will be calculated by: > multiplying the lowest personal income tax rate (15%) by the total of all amounts paid by the individual for qualifying subscription expenses in the year up to $500. Not a Canadian so I've never heard of this before, but does this mean it's just a 15% discount?
bentlegen 4y ago
Re: “news companies should write articles that are worth reading in full”. Tell me: why is the first, highest-upvoted comment to every paywalled article posted on HN, actually just an archive.xx link that defeats that paywall? Coincidence? It strikes me that writing quality content is not actually the challenge; people here certainly read paywalled content, for free, on the regular. Perhaps monetization is actually just really hard.
- nulbyte 4y ago
  For me, the problem is there isn't a lot of high-quality content centralized in one or two services I'd be willing to pay for like that. There's maybe one or two articles worth reading a year in a given pay-for service, and that's just not worth my money. I'm certainly not going to subscribe to every service out there to get a variety of news, because it's cost prohibitive, and yet I'd like a variety, because high-quality content is so spread out. What I want, and what I suspect several others want, either isn't available or isn't easy to discover.
  - loandbehold 4y ago
    If there was a way to pay small fee to read just one article, say $1 article, I would pay. Someone needs to come up with micropayment system that works for news media. Another alternative that may work is a single subscription that gives you access to all major publications, similar to what Spotify did for music. Did anyone try building a startup like that? Would it be possible to get major publications on board for that kind of system?
    - int_19h 4y ago
      Take a look at this. https://blendle.com/ https://blendle.com/
      - LadyCailin 4y ago
        I think Blendle is slowly dying. There are less and less news orgs publishing through them, so it seems like it isn’t a viable model either, which is a shame.
juve1996 4y ago
How can you possibly attract people to your store if you can just go next door and get it for free?
- 31337Logic 4y ago
  In one word: ethics. Consider the following: There's a store giving away "free" coffee, if you agree to have your photo taken and shared publically on social media. And you agree to sign up to their mailing list. And, in the very fine print, you implicitly agree to have your contact info shared with other companies for the purposes of direct marketing. (Of course, you can opt out of the mailing list after you receive your first email... but as for the other companies that now also have your email address, well then it's not so clear. I suppose you'll just have to deal with those, individually, over the course of the weeks/months/years that you receive (and try to opt out of) their marketing barrage.) But hey, free coffee, right? Next to that store is another coffee shop. This store charges $1.75 for a rather plain, unmarked cup of surprisingly adequate coffee. The store has a tip jar on the counter that's clearly labeled as going towards supporting the local kids' hockey team. (Does it actually go there? Who knows. But people report feeling good dropping loose change in there once in a while, and that's sufficient.) The store clerk knows the regular patrons by name, and the staff tend to "source locally" (not just their materials, but even for their part-time and student help during peak seasons). They're small. They're struggling. And thanks to the "free shop" next door, there's even talk of raising their prices to $2/cup for a small. Given that scenario, will people choose the "free" coffee? You bet your ass they will. But know these 2 things: there will still be a sizable portion of folks that, given the above scenario, would STILL choose to pay for a product if they knew the "warm fuzzy benefits" that came along for the ride. In other words: money isn't everything. The 2nd thing to note is that, after a while (perhaps, after being sufficiently educated? Or just being tired of treated like a product themselves?) there will be folks who jump ship from the "free store" in search of a more sustainable and ethical alternative. I suppose it might happen in the other direction as well (people leaving the pay shop in order to get free coffee next door) but I hope by now you can understand WHY someone would want to pay a nominal fee for something that is apparently "free" somewhere else.

babypuncher 4y ago

I see lots of articles get posted which are worth reading in full, but the comments under them make it clear few if any people actually read them. I don't really see how you change that behavior. People are drawn to the path of least resistance, and that path is often just reading the headline and brief summary before making your comment and moving on to the next thing in your social media feed. The value social media companies add is creating a space where users feel like they get all their news (and other things), and can converse about it either with friends and family or like-minded strangers. I don't see how news outlets themselves can compete with that without essentially seeking to replace Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. I think it's fair to say that social media companies profiting off other people's labor should share that financial liability.

bdw5204 4y ago
Facebook can just replace corporate media with alternative media outlets that provide the same news. In fact, the alternative media was doing extremely well on social media until around 2017 or so when they changed the algorithms to favor corporate media content. From the perspective of Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, they can just replace CNN and Fox News with Jacobin and Breitbart and nobody will care that much except people who work for those outlets. In fact, most people will probably be happier to have sources that care less about pretending to be "objective" and just support their party's agenda (such outlets were successfully outcompeting corporate media on the social platforms before the circa 2017 algorithm changes). In other words, the corporate media should be careful what they wish for because they might lose the fantastic gift horse they got from "big tech" 6 years ago. The value of a media outlet is in its influence over public opinion not its profitability and this greed driven proposal is a good way for corporate media to burn down their own influence.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  I understand people's grievances with "mainstream media", but the fact that Jacobin and Breitbart get propped up as "better" alternatives is kind of terrifying.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    At least they are more honest about providing a particular editorial lens to the type of news and content they produce. Edit: that said, having them as primary sources for consumption is obviously much worse than actual journalism built on journalistic principals. We simply don't have much of that at all anymore (if we really ever did, which I think an argument could be made it was somewhat better previously).
    - ericmay 4y ago
      Are they honest about it? What do you mean? Like does Breitbart come out and list it in the site “we are far right blah blah blah”? If not I don’t see how you couldn’t also say that CNN, Fox, and Bloomberg aren’t also honest about their slant.
      - CydeWeys 4y ago
        Jacobin at least is honest and unapologetic: https://jacobin.com/about https://jacobin.com/about
JohnFen 4y ago
> I see lots of articles get posted which are worth reading in full, but the comments under them make it clear few if any people actually read them. This is how people have always read the news. In the old days, there was TV and radio news, which are really just headlines and a brief summary of stories, and newspapers. Most people didn't read the majority of the stories in the newspapers -- they'd skim the headlines, maybe read the first paragraph of a few, and read one or two of the stories that particularly interested them. That's what's hard to monetize online. I have no answers for this problem, but it's certainly a problem.
- Ntrails 4y ago
  > they'd skim the headlines, maybe read the first paragraph of a few... Yeah, we have newspapers at work. I still read them that way, not needing to read a whole segment unless it is obviously interesting beyond the core story.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  Yep, and I don't mean to imply that this is necessarily bad, just pointing out how shifting the place where that headline and summary are consumed from radio and TV where the news source makes money to a third party social media site where they don't is a problem. Good journalism follows an inverted pyramid writing structure, where the most important information is at the top (the headline) and the information becomes less critical the further down the article you move. This has conditioned people to think they can rely on the headline and the first few sentences to get a rough but accurate idea of what's going on. Getting them to actually go to the news website after they've gotten the most important bits from Facebook or Twitter is an incredibly tall order.

SQueeeeeL 4y ago

They have simply made this calculus and decided that there is no way to monetize the Facebook posts. It turns out minor attention engagement just doesn't get enough click throughs ever. Simply. The only things that can exist in earnest on social media sites is junk food, similar to infomercial spots at 4 AM on cable

HardlyCurious 4y ago
They could embed ads in their cover photos. Just a banner or something. Not sure how the tracking would work, but there would certainly be value in it since sharing headlines can get many millions of views.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  Do cover photos even get viewed often? When I see a News post it's usually just in my feed. If I click to view comments it expands in my feed. There's no reason to visit the news website's page directly. This also isn't about stories posted by news organizations on Facebook. It's about people posting links to news stories on their own pages.
timbit42 4y ago
If people aren't clicking, then their headlines and summaries are either not interesting enough or too revealing. The news media needs to put up strong paywalls and give up on full subscriptions. No one wants to pay $100 per news source to access hundreds of articles they don't want to read. They need to let people pay per article. Paying one article at a time is too expensive due to transaction fees. They need to offer something like 40 articles for $20 and request another payment when the 40 articles run out. The news media needs social media to spread their article links around. Charging social media per click will result in their article links being reduced or blocked because of the cost. News media with lower cost links will be promoted.

908B64B197 4y ago

> Maybe the news companies should figure out how to attract more people to their sites rather than trying to charge rent on other sites? > Maybe the news companies should write articles that are worth reading in full? Why innovate when you can just regulate and rent seek "evil foreign tech giants"?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

marstall 4y ago

maybe Facebook should pay for the products it's using to engage to engage its own users?

peanuty1 4y ago
Meta has done the calculus and it's not worth it for them to pay for news sharing.

HDThoreaun 4y ago

Or maybe people just aren't interested in news beyond headlines at all and if society wants news to exist it needs to be subsidized. What better way to subsidize than forcing the people who are profiting off it to pay its creators?

viscanti 4y ago
> if society wants news to exist it needs to be subsidized. Does society want to subsidize mostly clickbait journalism and incentivize creators to predominantly write articles that will be shared widely? Or if society wants to subsidize news beyond headlines, might there be other content they would prefer is subsidized?
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  I think giving everyone $10-50 a year or something as a tax rebate to be spent on news organizations is a better way to subsidize news that people actually want, but that seems like a tough political sell.
  - restitutorOrbis 4y ago
    Canada already does this but the way we choose to do it requires jumping through a whole set of hoops for journalists. Take a look at this: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individuals/topics/about-your-tax-return/tax-return/completing-a-tax-return/deductions-credits-expenses/deductions-credits-expenses/digital-news-subscription.html https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individ...
    - squeaky-clean 4y ago
      > The maximum credit will be calculated by: > multiplying the lowest personal income tax rate (15%) by the total of all amounts paid by the individual for qualifying subscription expenses in the year up to $500. Not a Canadian so I've never heard of this before, but does this mean it's just a 15% discount?

bentlegen 4y ago

Re: “news companies should write articles that are worth reading in full”. Tell me: why is the first, highest-upvoted comment to every paywalled article posted on HN, actually just an archive.xx link that defeats that paywall? Coincidence? It strikes me that writing quality content is not actually the challenge; people here certainly read paywalled content, for free, on the regular. Perhaps monetization is actually just really hard.

nulbyte 4y ago
For me, the problem is there isn't a lot of high-quality content centralized in one or two services I'd be willing to pay for like that. There's maybe one or two articles worth reading a year in a given pay-for service, and that's just not worth my money. I'm certainly not going to subscribe to every service out there to get a variety of news, because it's cost prohibitive, and yet I'd like a variety, because high-quality content is so spread out. What I want, and what I suspect several others want, either isn't available or isn't easy to discover.
- loandbehold 4y ago
  If there was a way to pay small fee to read just one article, say $1 article, I would pay. Someone needs to come up with micropayment system that works for news media. Another alternative that may work is a single subscription that gives you access to all major publications, similar to what Spotify did for music. Did anyone try building a startup like that? Would it be possible to get major publications on board for that kind of system?
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Take a look at this. https://blendle.com/ https://blendle.com/
    - LadyCailin 4y ago
      I think Blendle is slowly dying. There are less and less news orgs publishing through them, so it seems like it isn’t a viable model either, which is a shame.

juve1996 4y ago

How can you possibly attract people to your store if you can just go next door and get it for free?

31337Logic 4y ago
In one word: ethics. Consider the following: There's a store giving away "free" coffee, if you agree to have your photo taken and shared publically on social media. And you agree to sign up to their mailing list. And, in the very fine print, you implicitly agree to have your contact info shared with other companies for the purposes of direct marketing. (Of course, you can opt out of the mailing list after you receive your first email... but as for the other companies that now also have your email address, well then it's not so clear. I suppose you'll just have to deal with those, individually, over the course of the weeks/months/years that you receive (and try to opt out of) their marketing barrage.) But hey, free coffee, right? Next to that store is another coffee shop. This store charges $1.75 for a rather plain, unmarked cup of surprisingly adequate coffee. The store has a tip jar on the counter that's clearly labeled as going towards supporting the local kids' hockey team. (Does it actually go there? Who knows. But people report feeling good dropping loose change in there once in a while, and that's sufficient.) The store clerk knows the regular patrons by name, and the staff tend to "source locally" (not just their materials, but even for their part-time and student help during peak seasons). They're small. They're struggling. And thanks to the "free shop" next door, there's even talk of raising their prices to $2/cup for a small. Given that scenario, will people choose the "free" coffee? You bet your ass they will. But know these 2 things: there will still be a sizable portion of folks that, given the above scenario, would STILL choose to pay for a product if they knew the "warm fuzzy benefits" that came along for the ride. In other words: money isn't everything. The 2nd thing to note is that, after a while (perhaps, after being sufficiently educated? Or just being tired of treated like a product themselves?) there will be folks who jump ship from the "free store" in search of a more sustainable and ethical alternative. I suppose it might happen in the other direction as well (people leaving the pay shop in order to get free coffee next door) but I hope by now you can understand WHY someone would want to pay a nominal fee for something that is apparently "free" somewhere else.