So I get ads are terrible, obviously. I run ad-blockers all the time. But people also get angry at paywalls. So that leaves me wondering, if not through ads or subscriptions, how is a news publisher supposed to sustain itself?
I dunno, but it’s not like this.
I’ve tried supporting multiple news sites, but it’s always something. Like the site just crashing before I can get to pay, or an endless captcha, or my credit card being rejected as sussy, but the credit card company claims they haven’t declined anything. I’ve tried multiple credit cards, multiple computers, Firefox and Chromium, always the same.
The Onion is the closest thing to news I successfully paid for.
By doing good enough journalism that people want to pay for it.
Sadly, this appears to be an unreachable bar for most.
By selling papers?
Worked for centuries.
What do you think a subscription is? Or do you really think people are going to go back to buying physical papers?
The news article should be free to read. After all it’s only text and it was written to be read. Ads greatly detract from the whole experience.
My proposal for a new model of news would be to be able to create an account for a one time fee of $5, which allows you to comment on articles for $0.25 per comment. Users who are logged in are also allowed to tip articles they enjoy, with proceeds going at least 50% to the author. Another option would be to hide or blur all images on articles unless the user pays $0.25. I think this model could make money, and allow customers to pay as you go and support the content they want more of. A regular subscription is a blank check for them to publish anything.
Publicly funded
I’m ready to be wrong but isn’t that what the associated press is for?
No, AP isn’t publicly funded. You might be thinking of NPR and/or PBS and/or VOA.
I mean isn’t there a world where we have unobtrusive adverts that are for products people actually want, and can sustain the reporting?
I think people would use less ad blockers if the ads were not designed / placed in a way that feels almost seizure inducing at times.
Unfortunately I think threads/twitter might be the future as a type of open source reporting, as everytime I hit a pay wall I turn around and leave.
adverts that are for products people actually want
This requires metadata fingerprinting which can be used to deanonymize people. And has been used as justification for intense surveillance of users and aggregation of user data. It is also profitable to sell this data to third party data brokers which inturn sell the data collected to other private entities which might have nefarious intent.
Basically, this means that modern advertising on the internet is inherently wrong, even if it’s ads that people might actually like.
Maybe? I think they used to advertise based on the content and expected demographics for the website, which is an alternative method that doesn’t require invasive digital fingering.
This is reasonable for a hobbyist publication, it would make sense to buy ad space for a new fishing rod in Bass Fishing Quarterly or whatever. Harder when it’s something more generic as “the news”, but as a poster above said this is where quality journalism comes in. If millions of people want to read well-written pieces, advertisers are paying to get their products in front of millions of people.
But advertisers want the most bang for the littlest buck and it’s easier to buy targeted ads in the attention economy so here we are. I have no issue with the existence of ads in certain places, moreso the whole system built to track every aspect of your waking attention.
This means that the ads will not be personalized and that people will receive ads the do not care for.
There are reasons why the advertising industry has adopted personalized ads and surveillance capitalism, because it is profitable and legal. Not because it is ethical or the right thing to do.
Strong protections and regulations on what counts as ‘news’ and then offering subsidies paid for via taxes on Internet/cable TV/etc subscriptions to non-profit news outlets.
Of course that’s near impossible and humanity would corrupt it eventually, so I don’t know.
I agree in theory, but that makes journalism too dependent on state approval. There are too many journalists throughout time who were publicly discredited and shamed for not towing the line. Publishing something of which the state does not approve is scary enough without the news orgs funding being cut as a result.
deleted by creator
Sorry, but did you mention any of these 250+ banned words in your article? OpenAI has said you did and now we are revoking all grants and funding ever promised to your organization. You have also lost your media license and will be placed on a watchlist.
Mining crypto on visitors’ machines. (/s)
Installing ransomware on every computer that visits the site. (/s)
Maybe the solution is some Spotify like service for journalism. Ie. Pay $20 a month and get access to most papers, and the revenue is split by view count. Even better would be making it a tax so since everyone is paying there’s no need for login.
The NYT has this model, but everything in the subscription is in-house. Their games are so popular they have a small fee games only subscription now too.
I really like your idea.
I get my access to most of my news through my local library. My library card comes with access to NYT, WaPo, and the Seattle Times, amongst others. I pay my taxes, my library pays a deal with the news site, and everyone’s happy. Seems like a good setup to me.
Hmm, I’ll have to check what my library system has available. Ty. Another one of those things you forget about if you’re not a regular user.
It’s not just ads. It’s ads that cover what you want to see. Popups that intentionally trick people into clicking on it when they are trying to close it. Hiding the X. Having subtle ‘click to read more’ instead of scrolling down into ad slop.
Let me read the fucking article without being harassed and bombarded. Let’s not pretend like this is a binary ads / no ads concern. When ads are predatory and take up the majority of the space, don’t act like you’re a victim trying to make a buck. There’s a long way to go from hosting ads on your site to making the experience as ad-intrusive as possible, which seems to be the goal
(The generic ‘you’ is used. I don’t know what website this post is referring to and am not calling them out specifically)
Let’s not pretend like this is a binary ads / no ads concern
It def is though… people, myself included, turn on an adblocker or install pi-hole and set it and forget it. All ads blocked. That’s binary. No one is going to a site, turning off the blocker, investigating the quality of the ads (lmfao), then deciding if they want to turn the blocker back on or not - total fiction.
Id bet most people only set up an adblocker because the ads got out of hand. If it was just a little image here and there for generic stuff it would be fine and most people wouldn’t bother.
So you’re kinda the problem that OP is asking about though. How are they supposed to generate income? Paywalled articles that you skirt those restrictions too? At what point does it become theft? This silent battle between a site needing revenue to exist, and users trying their hardest to block ads and take the content for free?
I pay an annual subcription 😆
Normalize paywall.
You had to buy the newspaper to read the newspaper, so paying for a digital newspaper isn’t any different. Plus, people will pay a reasonable fee for good content.
Even the ny times has paying subscribers. This isn’t much different from Netflix. As long as the pricing is fair, and the articles don’t double dip by including ads on top of subscription, it will work just fine.
Give people a free trial to test the content.
Aside from maybe my local paper which reports on things NOBODY else cares about, there is not one source that I would want to invest in like that.
Paywalls nudge people towards choosing one or two sources for all of their information. The more sources they pay for, the less value each one provides.
Diversity of information is better for society.
The news organizations that exist eight paywalls are things like info wars, fox and oan. People who’ve gravitated to those free sites have gotten us to the mess we’re in now.
I’m happy to pay subscriptions, it’s just frustrating on aggregate sites like this where you see all these interesting titles and want to interact, but don’t subscribe to THAT news site. I can’t pay for all of them, and I don’t want to support a lot of them.
Nyt is an interesting case because they do have good quality reporting i might be willing to pay for. Then they post some ultra-conservative sociopathic stuff on their op-ed or opinion page and I want to block their shit.
Washington Post was also under consideration before it got Bezo’d
Basically this. I will pay for good coverage and news that doesn’t normalize insane bullshit.
Normalize paying like 1€ for 1 article.
I don’t want some 9€99/month*(12 months then 15€99) bullshit.
*If paid for a whole year in one go.
Donations.
I don’t find subscriptions too offensive, however any kind of restriction of the flow of information (e.g. by paywalling it) implies its enforcement. What are you going to do about people bypassing the paywall? Even if you only responded by patching whatever allowed them to bypass the paywall, you’re either going to have to let up eventually, or get into a protracted cat-and-mouse game with paywall bypassers. And you don’t want to end up on the side of the people who want to gatekeep information.
So that leaves us with the possibility of having a subscription that’s not stringently enforced—in which case it is just a recurring donation anyway.
Of course, this discussion is limited to the scope of “what would a news outlet do without changing anything about society”—but the decent news outlets do also try to change things about society. Within capitalism, things like UBI would make it much easier for free journalism to exist. And of course this problem goes away entirely with capitalism.
A local website shows article comments to everyone, but to make one you have to subscribe. The comments are mostly boomer rage bait.
Idk but people seemed more okay with paying for a physical item… like newspapers, rather than just words on a page that they cant touch…
I remember my dad used to read newspapers, now he just scrolls WeChat…
(But then again the newspapers he used to read in China were all state-approved anyways… not really the beacon of truth…)
Physical items need to be manufactured and distributed. And they were fucking cheap either way. Now the distribution and printing cost next to nothing and the content has not really gotten better or cheaper… So
