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Maybe I'm just getting old, but I've gotten tired of these "Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding profitable ads, they should just put in ad
by Bratmon 7mo ago
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I've gotten tired of these "Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding profitable ads, they should just put in ads that look pretty but pay almost nothing and supplement their income by working at McDonalds" takes.
- ronsor 7mo agoWell, I'm going to block the ads anyway (or just leave), so if they're trying to find profitable ads, they may need to revise their strategy.
- jdross 7mo ago“I’m going to either steal your work in a way you don’t consent to, or not consume it” isn’t really great. The alternative is paywalls
- zoklet-enjoyer 7mo agoMuch of their work consists of poorly sourced articles, sensationalism, disinformation, and bias to sway the audience.
- Xenoamorphous 7mo agoThen the correct stance is to not visit those sites.
- xigoi 7mo agoSteal? Their server gave me some HTML and it’s up to my user agent to present it however I want.
- int_19h 7mo agoAnything that kills adtech faster is a good thing at this point.
- decimalenough 7mo agoI'm pretty sure people would read more and click on more ads if they didn't have to endure waiting for 49 MB of crap and then navigating a pop-up obstacle course for each article.
- Bratmon 7mo ago100,000 people clicking at $0.01 CPM is way worse for them than 10,000 people clicking at $2 CPM.
- bsjshshsb 7mo ago49MB or homelessness? There is surely other options.
- hilbert42 7mo agoSolution, see my post. ;-)
- surcap526 7mo ago[dead]
- Bratmon 7mo agoIf you can think of any, then congratulations! You've saved journalism! You should probably tell someone so the knowledge doesn't die with you.
- pocksuppet 7mo ago48MB
- Bratmon 7mo agoWhich MB should they cut out? Bear in mind that any cut that reduces their CPM or rate of conversation to paid will have to also include an equivalent reduction in their staff.
- bsjshshsb 7mo agoMaybe the old "speed the page up and fewer people will bounce" adage applies?
- pocksuppet 7mo agoReminds me of the recent discussion about how news websites have to get more shit as they lose users, but wait no they don't because nobody heard of a restaurant making worse food because people didn't want to eat there, because that would become a death spiral very quickly. (Can @dang explain why he decided to rate-limit me now?)
- neya 7mo agoThis argument is valid if journalism was actually journalism instead of just ripping off trending stories from HN and Reddit and rehashing it with sloppy AI and calling it a day and putting in 4 lines of text buried inside 400 ads.
- pibaker 7mo agoI don't like the state of journalism either but you realize this is a vicious cycle, no? People not paying for news (by buying newspaper, or more importantly paying for classified ads) leading to low quality online reporting leading to people not wanting to pay for online news.
- curtisblaine 7mo agoI never understand this type of comment. People don't pay for news so newspapers (which by the way have pay walls) are forced to degrade their service. It seems strange to me. If I have a restaurant and people don't want to pay for my food, making even worse food with worse service doesn't seem a good solution. If I write books and people don't buy them, writing worse books doesn't make my sales better. Why journalists are different? They sell a service for money like all the others, but for some reason they have a special status and it's totally understandable that they respond to bad sales with a worse product. And actually, somehow it's our fault as customers. For some reason we should keep buying newspapers even if we don't think it's worth to save them from themselves.
- apublicfrog 7mo agoUsing your analogy, if every restaurant in town had a problem where most people wanted to come in and get food for free (and it was an expectation in the industry) and people refused to go in and pay, everyone would be upset they could no longer go out to eat when there were none left. If nobody is interested in paying for their meal, you can't be shocked the ingredient and chef quality drops in turn.
- curtisblaine 7mo ago
- scared_together 7mo agoIn the case of the New York Times, they have subscriptions and many are willing to pay for their work - but their subscriptions are not ad-free.
- vesselapi 7mo agoThis is what killed my willingness to subscribe to most outlets. If I'm paying, I expect the page to load in under a second with zero tracking. Instead you get the same bloated experience minus a banner ad or two.
- curtisblaine 7mo ago> Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding profitable ads I mean, they can absolutely try. That doesn't mean they should succeed.
- hrmtst93837 7mo ago[flagged]