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Prepare for the New Paywall Era (theatlantic.com)
Alexis C. Madrigal, writing for The Atlantic: If the recent numbers are any indication, there is a bloodbath in digital media this year. Publishers big and small are coming up short on advertising revenue, even if they are long on traffic. [...] In a print newspaper or a broadcast television station, the content and the distribution of that content are integrated. The big tech platforms split this marriage, doing the distribution for most digital content through Google searches and the Facebook News Feed. And they've taken most of the money: They've "captured the value" of the content at the distribution level. Media companies have no real alternative, nor do they have competitive advertising products to the targeting and scale that Facebook and Google can offer. Facebook and Google need content, but it's all fungible. The recap of a huge investigative blockbuster is just as valuable to Google News as an investigative blockbuster itself. The former might have taken months and costs tens of thousands of dollars, the latter a few hours and the cost of a young journalist's time. That's led many people to the conclusion that supporting rigorous journalism requires some sort of direct financial relationship between publications and readers. Right now, the preferred method is the paywall. The New York Times has one. The Washington Post has one. The Financial Times has one. The Wall Street Journal has one. The New Yorker has one. Wired just announced they'd be building one. (Editor's note: CNN is building a paywall, too.) Many of these efforts have been successful. Publications have figured out how to create the right kinds of porosity for their sites, allowing enough people in to drive scale, but extracting more revenue per reader than advertising could provide.
I think this is a good idea too. NYT's paywall is $15/mo. I presume Wash. Post is similar. That just two sites for $30. One quickly runs out of money to pay for a reasonable collection of different editorial stances and investigative journalism.
The current situation also means small sites that do not need much to spew their "contents" have an oversize influence. They do not have to pay for investigative journalism, or quality op-eds.
central micropayments site for the media providers.
There's your problem. There won't be one central micropayment provider. You'll end up like the e-wallet (PayPal, Apple Wallet, Samsung Pay) where there are multiples and users have to put money in multiple providers. That, or the content providers will need to have accounts with all of the micropay providers.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
In 2001, NYTimes increased newsstand prices in southern california to $0.50 with $1.50 for sunday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02...
I have no idea how much a delivery subscription cost at that time.
That's $0.50 * 52 weeks * 6 days = $156.
Add Sunday for $1.50 * 52 weeks * 1 day = $78.
Add those and you get $234.
A $15/mo subscription is $180.
I am not sure how much of the NYT's costs come from the printing and distribution of phyisical newspapers, but I would have expected the prices to go down as a result of the digital editions.
Then again, as someone else said, their costs are subsidized by advertising, so they aren't really passing the straight costs onto their users anyway. That's why many sites still have advertising even for their paying subscribers, which is a deal breaker for me.
Then again, as someone else said, their costs are subsidized by advertising
Their costs were also heavily subsidized by classified ads. Huge source of revenue for any newspaper, large or small, now completely gone thanks to Craigslist, e-bay, etc. etc. That's a large part of the revenue that has to be made up since the glory days before the Internet.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
the only ${majorNewsSite} that parrots the prevailing party line that I know of is Fox news.
Whatever you thought about Fox during the Obama years, in 2017 it's the only major network that can make any remotely credible claim at being unbiased. A Harvard study of his first 100 days show most news networks were 80%+ negative in their coverage of Trump (compared with about 40% for Obama) with CNN and NBC well over 90% negative (and the ARD in Germany at 98% negative). Meanwhile Fox is almost dead-on 50/50.
https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-first-100-days/
There was a more recent study that showed not much has changed since, but I can't find it again now...