4 ms·

>...or you bought them ad hoc one by one at the newsstand... 100% This is what is missing. I don't want to subscribe to the New York Times for £90 per year bec

by willyt 2y ago

>...or you bought them ad hoc one by one at the newsstand... 100% This is what is missing. I don't want to subscribe to the New York Times for £90 per year because I only want to read about 5 to 10 NYT articles a year. Why can't I pay £1.50 for 15 articles? That would be about the same as buying a physical copy of a paper from a newsagent; if I buy a physical copy I probably read about that many articles from it before it gets recycled. Instead I either don't read the article I've found to or I try to find it on the internet archive which is really irritating. I would like to read articles in a range of papers; say 3-4 UK broadsheets, occasionally some international papers like the NYT, Le Monde and a couple of trade papers. If I subscribed to 4 UK broadsheet newspapers I would already be paying >£400/year in newspaper subscriptions. Who does this? I can't understand why newspapers can't see that no-one wants to be spending that sort of money and why they can't come up with a better solution. If the problem is card fees on micro transactions why don't they club together and create some kind of patreon type thing that agglomerates transactions together?

twoWhlsGud 2y ago
Post News tried this and failed. Not sure why.
- sgerenser 2y ago
  There was also Blendle which I thought was a great idea, but it flopped: https://www.pugpig.com/2023/08/18/why-micropayment-champion-blendle-ditched-the-model-and-where-it-might-fit-in-subscription-strategies/ https://www.pugpig.com/2023/08/18/why-micropayment-champion-...
- jaredwiener 2y ago
  Because there's a difference between what people say they want and what they actually want. Micropayments do not work. They've been tried over and over, but generally speaking, they aren't helpful. Users don't really use them, and they don't actually help the publisher/author long term. FWIW I've been working on a startup with a different vision, but trying to make news profitable: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-news/ https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...
  - Terretta 2y ago
    It can't be conscious site by site. It has to be a toggle or setting that's a browser standard, backed by your IAP platform of choice, and pages check then drop the paywall and don't show ads. Call it IWP, In-Web Purchase, total up fractional costs until it makes sense to charge them, then charge them, on the same user/device IAP platform rails. Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads. This is where the break is. On a per content or per month basis, sites want to charge individuals orders of magnitude more than they charge advertisers. No avid reader (those most likely to be happy to pay!) can afford the same footprint of reading that content is happy to give them through ads. And so, content is writing for ads, not readers. It's self defeating. . . . PS. I bookmarked https://www.forth.news/topstories https://www.forth.news/topstories ... it's not how I find / read content, I need much higher density (somewhere between https://upstract.com/ https://upstract.com/ and https://www.techmeme.com/ https://www.techmeme.com/) and if I want a personal feed, there's feedly and its kin, but what I personally do is something like this socially curated discovery except generated by a process something like Yahoo Pipes that scavenges an array of tentacles into the newsosphere. But I see what you're doing there. This kind of experimentation is awesome. Will come back and see how hard it is to "make it my own". Thanks for sharing your position essay!
    - jaredwiener 2y ago
      Thank you for trying it out -- "top stories" is a generic feed; I'd encourage you to sign up for a free account and follow authors and topics you're interested in. That said, this point -- > Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads. is the disconnect. The ads aren't providing enough revenue to be self-sufficient. Hence the paywalls.
      - Terretta 2y ago
        I hear you, however, firms that took ad sales back in house instead of auction, and went back to pairing ads with content instead of profiling each visitor, found they increased both ad revenue and user satisfaction. They were able to cover costs again. Separately, many who took time to build, say, substacks, found they could cover costs if audience and content were a match. Most folks never look up from the adwords grind to consider that the whole existing ecosystem is misguided, and something from before might be better. Excessive rent extraction, and content that targets ad revenue instead of sustained interest, seem to be where most sustainability gets lost. An auction engine at the heart of both these broken models accelerates the enrichment of the rent extractors and the decline of sustainability.
brewdad 2y ago
I gather you are outside the US, so my solution likely doesn't apply. For those in the US, check your local library's digital offerings. Mine offers 3 day access to the NYTimes web site for free. There is a bit of a friction as I must first log into my library account and click a link. Then I have to log into my NYTimes account if I'm not already. Bam! Full access to everything for 72 hours. It can be endlessly renewed if that's your thing. I tend to use it about once a month.
- reaperducer 2y ago
  I gather you are outside the US, so my solution likely doesn't apply. For those in the US, check your local library's digital offerings. Libraries in some larger cities will let you have a guest/out-of-town library card for a fee, which is often far less than the cost of subscribing to the digital content the library offers.
aworks 2y ago
I'd also like to subscribe to some rate-limited plan for newspapers, magazines, and newsletters. I can usually find some workaround but it's too much hassle to do that for all the sites I'd like to read (and where I would be willing to give some limited amount of money).
- reaperducer 2y ago
  After being away from it for a couple of years, I checked out Apple News+ again, and it's added a lot of newspapers and magazines in the time I was away. The newspapers are almost all American, with a smattering of Canadian, but there seems to be a ton of British and Australian magazines. It might be worth checking out to see if what's on offer matches your interests. Unfortunately, unlike Apple Music, it doesn't have a web client. https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    Didn't Apple just layoff a ton of people in this group?
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      Books.
pineaux 2y ago
Internet Archive is irritating. Just archive.is it and 9/10 times it's already archived. Especially with articles here on HN. And if it's not archived it will be archived on the spot.
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
I used to buy magazines in the 90s that cost upwards of $6-8 a magazine each, that's $18 in today's dollars. You want access to multiple large reporting agencies work but want to pay less than a fraction of the non-adjusted 1990s prices. Your better solution has zero way to work financially. Imagine saying 'why do I have to pay for a whole buffet, I only pick from 5-10 of the buffet dishes that I pick and choose as I walk down the line, I don't take something from all of them. I should pay like fifty cents.'
- jaredwiener 2y ago
  Exactly! The economics of journalism are constantly misunderstood here. People want thoughtful, insightful, investigative stories of the non-obvious (or so they say) but also do not want to pay for the dead ends that a reporter has to find to get there. Journalism is more like hard-tech research than SaaS. You don't necessarily know what you're getting into when you start reporting, and getting something of value can take an incredibly long time. The actual writing of an article or shooting of a video is the last part of a long process. Unlike hard-tech, the result often has a very short shelf-life. It's not going to continuously earn payouts for the reporters/news outlet for more than a couple of weeks (at best) after publication.
  - willyt 2y ago
    Or that one article you wrote for motherboard about undersea cables in (2010) occasionnaly makes it to the top of hacker news…
  - willyt 2y ago
    Also, we did use to pay for the dead ends by just buying a paper with some ads in it. You haven’t explained why this model doesn’t work anymore? The newspapers have reintroduced the ‘you read it you pay for it’ with paywalls but they’ve overshot, now it’s like you go into the newsagent on the corner and they are shouting ‘you read it, you buy a years worth of that newspaper’ when you see one headline that interests you.
    - 2y ago
jaredwiener 2y ago
> I can't understand why newspapers can't see that no-one wants to be spending that sort of money NYT adds 210,000 digital subscribers in Q1. "The company said it had about 10.5 million subscribers overall for its print and digital products at the end of the first quarter, up roughly 8 percent from a year earlier. About 640,000 of those were print subscribers, down about 10 percent from the same period last year. " https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/business/media/new-york-times-earnings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/business/media/new-york-t...
- kelnos 2y ago
  I don't subscribe to the NYT, but I do have a WaPo subscription. I'm considering canceling it. Most of what I read I can get syndicated elsewhere, or the same information presented with similar quality, elsewhere, for free. (Plus I'm tired of further lining Bezos' pockets, and I very much disagree with some of the current editorial staff.) I get that real, actually-solid journalism is not cheap to make. But I'm not sure what the solution is when good-enough articles can be had for far cheaper, or free. The good stuff really is a joy to read, but I'm not convinced $120/yr (looks like it's twice that for the NYT?) is worth the price of admission. Certainly a lot of people do buy and keep these subscriptions, and subscriber counts do seem to be growing (which is genuinely great), but I would wager that far, far, far fewer people today have a newspaper subscription than in the mid-90s. But maybe that's changing; maybe people hate all the sensational, clickbaity, in-your-face ad-supported garbage floating around for free. I would only hope that as online publications grow their subscriber base, instead of getting greedy, they actually lower their prices, since their marginal per-subscriber cost is near-zero. Given that NYT home delivery prices in 1995 were ~$350/yr, (~$700 in today's dollars), it seems a little absurd that they're charging 35% of that (for digital) when their cost of distribution is a fraction of a percent what it used to be. Presumably the reason behind that is because their subscriber base is much smaller than it used to be?
  - jaredwiener 2y ago
    Because the product isn't the newsprint, it's what's written on it. By your own math, a subscription is 65% cheaper than it once was -- but the reporting is still expensive. Try outfitting a team to go into a war zone, or maintain bureaus, etc. The problem is that the "good enough" free articles are usually just rewrites of the ones from the people who did the reporting.

by willyt 2y ago

twoWhlsGud 2y ago

Post News tried this and failed. Not sure why.

sgerenser 2y ago
There was also Blendle which I thought was a great idea, but it flopped: https://www.pugpig.com/2023/08/18/why-micropayment-champion-blendle-ditched-the-model-and-where-it-might-fit-in-subscription-strategies/ https://www.pugpig.com/2023/08/18/why-micropayment-champion-...
jaredwiener 2y ago
Because there's a difference between what people say they want and what they actually want. Micropayments do not work. They've been tried over and over, but generally speaking, they aren't helpful. Users don't really use them, and they don't actually help the publisher/author long term. FWIW I've been working on a startup with a different vision, but trying to make news profitable: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-news/ https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...
- Terretta 2y ago
  It can't be conscious site by site. It has to be a toggle or setting that's a browser standard, backed by your IAP platform of choice, and pages check then drop the paywall and don't show ads. Call it IWP, In-Web Purchase, total up fractional costs until it makes sense to charge them, then charge them, on the same user/device IAP platform rails. Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads. This is where the break is. On a per content or per month basis, sites want to charge individuals orders of magnitude more than they charge advertisers. No avid reader (those most likely to be happy to pay!) can afford the same footprint of reading that content is happy to give them through ads. And so, content is writing for ads, not readers. It's self defeating. . . . PS. I bookmarked https://www.forth.news/topstories https://www.forth.news/topstories ... it's not how I find / read content, I need much higher density (somewhere between https://upstract.com/ https://upstract.com/ and https://www.techmeme.com/ https://www.techmeme.com/) and if I want a personal feed, there's feedly and its kin, but what I personally do is something like this socially curated discovery except generated by a process something like Yahoo Pipes that scavenges an array of tentacles into the newsosphere. But I see what you're doing there. This kind of experimentation is awesome. Will come back and see how hard it is to "make it my own". Thanks for sharing your position essay!
  - jaredwiener 2y ago
    Thank you for trying it out -- "top stories" is a generic feed; I'd encourage you to sign up for a free account and follow authors and topics you're interested in. That said, this point -- > Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads. is the disconnect. The ads aren't providing enough revenue to be self-sufficient. Hence the paywalls.
    - Terretta 2y ago
      I hear you, however, firms that took ad sales back in house instead of auction, and went back to pairing ads with content instead of profiling each visitor, found they increased both ad revenue and user satisfaction. They were able to cover costs again. Separately, many who took time to build, say, substacks, found they could cover costs if audience and content were a match. Most folks never look up from the adwords grind to consider that the whole existing ecosystem is misguided, and something from before might be better. Excessive rent extraction, and content that targets ad revenue instead of sustained interest, seem to be where most sustainability gets lost. An auction engine at the heart of both these broken models accelerates the enrichment of the rent extractors and the decline of sustainability.

brewdad 2y ago

I gather you are outside the US, so my solution likely doesn't apply. For those in the US, check your local library's digital offerings. Mine offers 3 day access to the NYTimes web site for free. There is a bit of a friction as I must first log into my library account and click a link. Then I have to log into my NYTimes account if I'm not already. Bam! Full access to everything for 72 hours. It can be endlessly renewed if that's your thing. I tend to use it about once a month.

reaperducer 2y ago
I gather you are outside the US, so my solution likely doesn't apply. For those in the US, check your local library's digital offerings. Libraries in some larger cities will let you have a guest/out-of-town library card for a fee, which is often far less than the cost of subscribing to the digital content the library offers.

aworks 2y ago

I'd also like to subscribe to some rate-limited plan for newspapers, magazines, and newsletters. I can usually find some workaround but it's too much hassle to do that for all the sites I'd like to read (and where I would be willing to give some limited amount of money).

reaperducer 2y ago
After being away from it for a couple of years, I checked out Apple News+ again, and it's added a lot of newspapers and magazines in the time I was away. The newspapers are almost all American, with a smattering of Canadian, but there seems to be a ton of British and Australian magazines. It might be worth checking out to see if what's on offer matches your interests. Unfortunately, unlike Apple Music, it doesn't have a web client. https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  Didn't Apple just layoff a ton of people in this group?
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    Books.

pineaux 2y ago

Internet Archive is irritating. Just archive.is it and 9/10 times it's already archived. Especially with articles here on HN. And if it's not archived it will be archived on the spot.

_DeadFred_ 2y ago

I used to buy magazines in the 90s that cost upwards of $6-8 a magazine each, that's $18 in today's dollars. You want access to multiple large reporting agencies work but want to pay less than a fraction of the non-adjusted 1990s prices. Your better solution has zero way to work financially. Imagine saying 'why do I have to pay for a whole buffet, I only pick from 5-10 of the buffet dishes that I pick and choose as I walk down the line, I don't take something from all of them. I should pay like fifty cents.'

jaredwiener 2y ago
Exactly! The economics of journalism are constantly misunderstood here. People want thoughtful, insightful, investigative stories of the non-obvious (or so they say) but also do not want to pay for the dead ends that a reporter has to find to get there. Journalism is more like hard-tech research than SaaS. You don't necessarily know what you're getting into when you start reporting, and getting something of value can take an incredibly long time. The actual writing of an article or shooting of a video is the last part of a long process. Unlike hard-tech, the result often has a very short shelf-life. It's not going to continuously earn payouts for the reporters/news outlet for more than a couple of weeks (at best) after publication.
- willyt 2y ago
  Or that one article you wrote for motherboard about undersea cables in (2010) occasionnaly makes it to the top of hacker news…
- willyt 2y ago
  Also, we did use to pay for the dead ends by just buying a paper with some ads in it. You haven’t explained why this model doesn’t work anymore? The newspapers have reintroduced the ‘you read it you pay for it’ with paywalls but they’ve overshot, now it’s like you go into the newsagent on the corner and they are shouting ‘you read it, you buy a years worth of that newspaper’ when you see one headline that interests you.
  - 2y ago

jaredwiener 2y ago

> I can't understand why newspapers can't see that no-one wants to be spending that sort of money NYT adds 210,000 digital subscribers in Q1. "The company said it had about 10.5 million subscribers overall for its print and digital products at the end of the first quarter, up roughly 8 percent from a year earlier. About 640,000 of those were print subscribers, down about 10 percent from the same period last year. " https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/business/media/new-york-times-earnings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/business/media/new-york-t...

kelnos 2y ago
I don't subscribe to the NYT, but I do have a WaPo subscription. I'm considering canceling it. Most of what I read I can get syndicated elsewhere, or the same information presented with similar quality, elsewhere, for free. (Plus I'm tired of further lining Bezos' pockets, and I very much disagree with some of the current editorial staff.) I get that real, actually-solid journalism is not cheap to make. But I'm not sure what the solution is when good-enough articles can be had for far cheaper, or free. The good stuff really is a joy to read, but I'm not convinced $120/yr (looks like it's twice that for the NYT?) is worth the price of admission. Certainly a lot of people do buy and keep these subscriptions, and subscriber counts do seem to be growing (which is genuinely great), but I would wager that far, far, far fewer people today have a newspaper subscription than in the mid-90s. But maybe that's changing; maybe people hate all the sensational, clickbaity, in-your-face ad-supported garbage floating around for free. I would only hope that as online publications grow their subscriber base, instead of getting greedy, they actually lower their prices, since their marginal per-subscriber cost is near-zero. Given that NYT home delivery prices in 1995 were ~$350/yr, (~$700 in today's dollars), it seems a little absurd that they're charging 35% of that (for digital) when their cost of distribution is a fraction of a percent what it used to be. Presumably the reason behind that is because their subscriber base is much smaller than it used to be?
- jaredwiener 2y ago
  Because the product isn't the newsprint, it's what's written on it. By your own math, a subscription is 65% cheaper than it once was -- but the reporting is still expensive. Try outfitting a team to go into a war zone, or maintain bureaus, etc. The problem is that the "good enough" free articles are usually just rewrites of the ones from the people who did the reporting.