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As someone who works with a national news outlet, I can tell your for certain that paywalls are failing, and we're now considering how to recoup lost revenue wi
by asow92 3y ago
As someone who works with a national news outlet, I can tell your for certain that paywalls are failing, and we're now considering how to recoup lost revenue with ads that don't pay as well as they did five years ago.
- coldpie 3y agoThat sucks, but I'm still zero percent interested in supporting the unaccountable, global surveillance panopticon. Don't blame me that Facebook & Google destroyed your business model!
- asow92 3y agoThe alternative is that—without an act of congress—private journalism will die, and that is a tragedy.
- coldpie 3y agoYes, surveillance capitalism has been an incredibly destructive force for the past several decades, and it shows no sign of stopping.
- asow92 3y agoWhat's your solution to the problem then?
- coldpie 3y agoI don't know. I think the best approach would be to ban surveillance capitalism, (e.g. make gathering personal data illegal), and then new business models would fall out out of the new situation. More likely, old business models would re-appear: selling ads to relevant publications (e.g. video game ads on video game websites), instead of targeted to users; selling products direct to customers instead of funding via ads (this is currently difficult because the surveillance business model out-competes it). Another approach could be to break up the big tech companies into a bunch of tiny pieces, and hope something more ethical comes out of the more distributed market power & natural competition.
- eropple 3y ago> and hope something more ethical comes out of the more distributed market power & natural competition. ...and keep a watchful eye and a litigious gun pointed at them lest they reconstitute.
- asow92 3y agoI'm not a marxist by any means, but breaking up the monopoly into smaller companies might make sense. The newspapers before them had similar regulations and faired well.
- coldpie 3y agoThere's no need for Marxism to justify breaking up huge companies! Capitalism only works with lots of effective competition.
- gen220 3y agoI think you need a more nuanced take than "journalism is dying" – a more accurate take might be that journalism is centralizing for professionals (NYT, major cable networks have scarcely ever been doing better... don't take my word for it, read the financial statements) and decentralizing for amateurs (substack, twitter, etc.). Journalism is evolving and changing, but it isn't dying or going away. Hyper-targeted ads will not "save journalism".
- asow92 3y agoThat’s a great take, and I agree with a lot of that, and I also feel like targeted ads would help the company that work with.
- gen220 3y agoNews sites can't compete with big tech companies on targeted ads, they're at a systemic disadvantage. News sites have to spend X% of their margin to continuously generate content to attract viewers, while big tech companies spend 0 to attract viewers because viewers are the generators of their content. For this fundamental reason, news sites never be able to compete on targeting granularity or ad pricing. Rather than fighting a losing battle, it's better to put your chips behind a battle where you have a differentiated advantage (in the NYT/Cable News companies, it's the cornered resource of accredited voices in reporting and editorial). It would be net-negative to try to compete in the space targeted ads. They'd be better off offering low-revenue, low-cost blanket ads (i.e. advertise in the "automotive" section of the website to non-subscribers), where the cost to the ad operator is effectively zero because they don't have to maintain a database of user ad profiles.