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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.
And it won't work this time. You're just looking at a ton of closures and maybe some consolidation between whoever is left standing
This is a problem that needs to be solved. Since copying content has become easy, how do the people who create content get paid? How do news organizations pay reporters to investigate stories?
There are no easy solutions.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Eyeballs you need to view your adds.
I may sign up for one subscription, but I'm not going to get $10/month subscriptions for 20 different websites that I occasionally visit.
If there's one thing 2017 has taught me, it's that national and international news is not essential information.
Honestly? I have no problems paying a sub to visit the WSJ and/or similar trusted, thorough news sources. Maybe as a bonus it'll knock the clickbait bullshit sites offline? Likely not, since many of those sites (especially political clickbait sites) usually have massive backers (e.g. MoveOn was launched and backed financially by George Soros, etc.)
Something to consider - maybe freebie sites that don't have a massive media presence in another medium (or some other visible and transparent means of non-biased/partisan financial support) should eventually be written off as mere propaganda sites? Certainly there are good sites that are small and struggling, that try to get it right, that do a decent job of investigation and such, but they seem to be very few and very far between these days. Just a thought.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
This could be interesting when looked at in the net neutrality conversation. Pay for CNN, get internet access to CNN. The paywall is the connection? Maybe. On yhe other hand who care if you have a connection if every website is pay walled? I refuse to pay for anything on the internet. I see this ending badly for pay walled placed like nyt, CNN, etc.
You still neeed only a young, cheap journalist to write the recap, but now he also needs a single cheap subscription for the paywall. Can you finance those expensive investigative journalistic scoops on those few subscriptions from other journalists?
DRM already tried this model and they lost: there only one cracker for the DRM was needed and the war was lost: the media is on bittorrent and OCHs. Good crackers are actually much much rarer than these cheap young journalists. It took almost around year for Denuvo to be cracked, BluRay longer I think, etc.
All the scoops: less than 5 minutes for a recap to appear on all the other big sites. News works 24/7.
And in less than 5 years it will probably be a deep learning algorithm by google or amazon that writes the recaps, like they can do sports news today already. It will be marketed as "awesome AI", which of course it isn't. So not even cheap young journalists will be needed anymore
Maybe the reason that the internet is devolving is your unwillingness to pay. I pay for the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, and The Washington Post. And they are well worth every penny. I have no idea why anybody would expect to get their news for free. Real journalism is a resource-intensive process that has to be funded. Now I don't *like* the current paywalls in that I often get blocked from content I've paid for since I haven't logged in on a particular device or linked a publisher to a specific account. But having the price for quality news set at zero is nonsensical.
The Associated Press approach seems to work pretty well for news. We need an expanded version of this approach for all of the various (non-news) things the internet offers. In this way you might subscribe to one site but get access to the work from multiple players. In this way small players could work together to share revenue and content with each other. This solves the issue of subscribers having to pay a small monthly amount to 20 different sources and gives these sources a non-advertising source of revenue.
They positioned the well with overly aggressive advertisement, and now they wonder why they are getting thirsty?
Webcomics have a similar problem when it comes to revenue, and many of them have turned to voluntary donations like Patreon where you can schedule a regular monthly donation to your preferred sites.
Combined with some unobtrusive ads, it seems to work pretty well for lots of artists.
(some even add bonus content for those that donate over a certain amount, such as a browser cookie that disables the ads on their site for the month)
As long as there are activist billionaires, I suspect the propaganda organs among them will still have income if they truly need it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
to death. All of these paywals want you to subscribe. They all want you to pay roughly $10.00 per month. So now you pay for 2 or 3 paywals, plus a media streamer or two and you're paying the same or more as if you never cut the cord in the first place. What's the point? I realize that news organizations need to make a living, but they need to live with slimmer subscription margins. subscriptions need to be sub $5.00/month It's not going to work.
This is going to give a powerful voice to people who can afford to pay for it. With more newspapers and websites adding a paywall, the market will be left open for wealthy people to buy newspapers, operate them at a loss, and use them as their personal mouthpiece. Wealthy individuals already have significant influence on our society, and their influence will only grow when theirs is the only opinion we can read for free.
This is a worrying situation.
I've been flogging this horse for maybe 20 years... central micropayments site for the media providers. Joe Surfer makes a deposit. every news site he now hits, there is a deduction to the provider to pay for the posting. why in hell can't they do this, and be assured of a wider, non-PO'ed audience providing cash?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This will be great for people who have money and want to push an agenda. As more and more content becomes paywalled, non-paywalled content will become more viewed, since many viewers won't have the willingness or inclination to pay for the content. Organizations that don't need income from viewers will continue to leave their content non-paywalled.
Easy and simple are not the same thing. Easy was letting 3rd party companies manage advertisement sales (and of course get a cut) for the publisher.
Simple is going back to direct-sales marketing management. Let bloggers and YouTube use 3rd parties, NYT, WaPo, and more should be selling their valuable screen real-estate directly and reaping all the money from that.
I mean... damn people. Its not complex, just more work. Since the YouTube Adpocalypse many YouTubers have started doing sponsored content (many more than were before all the kerfluffle). Even controversial left- and right-wing vloggers are managing to put together advertising deals to support themselves. And most of them are idiots!
I've been on about this for years now, because this lack of managing one's own content is terrible for everyone, even investors. 3rd party ad networks are garbage. Advertisers have little control over where their ads are displayed (because its not about the content of the pages, its about the person looking at the page). Content creators have little control over what is advertised on their pages for the exact same reason! And this is the world its leading to, with more and more people choosing to block ads, with more and more "controversies" over ads being shown next to controversial content.
Paywalls are just a great way to stop growing your audience. Sure, you can cannibalize your existing audience and survive on them for a while, but they are nothing more than life-support for a failing business. Go back to the old ways and find better ways to modernize them. Put people back into the system for a while, and make sure they stay there, because AI is simply not going to catch up anytime soon, and the people running the ad networks care as much about content creators and advertisers as the guy in India cares about any of the 7 corporations in the US he's answering the phone for. Ad networks need to show more, and get more clicks, and to do that, they cheat. Just like that call center in India wants you off the phone as fast as possible to take the next call because they get paid by call volume and no other metric.
Problem solved.
A micropayment system that could pay a few pennies per story might help. It's worth 1-5 cents to take a look at a hot news story, and maybe 10-20 cents for a longer magazine read. Generate enough traffic and it will pay the bills for the real news organizations. What it takes is building a micropayment system without somebody skimming more than their share off the top of each transaction. I don't mind paying for content I read, but I like to read varied content from different sources, so that way I could sample broadly, then subscribe to the handful I read the most. It's much better than wading through crapvertising that sometimes is carrying malware.
People will continue to read a headline for free, make assumptions based on their beliefs, and convince themselves they know what the article talked about.
"Right now, the preferred method is the paywall. The New York Times has one. The Washington Post has one."
No, they haven't. They have a pay-cookie, delete it and there's no 'wall'.
Or just install one of the extensions that resets them immediately
I don't mind paying, but I do mind paying AND being annoyed.
I dropped my NYT subscription because it showed the same unstoppable video, the same annoying adverts and the same Nicholas Kristof whining. I expected the latter but not the former.
And quit pestering me to get a gift subscription to somebody else.
Absolutely tasteless. So no money to them.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"They" want money for that:
https://motherboard.vice.com/e...
and:
This website (www-blahblah) attempted to extract HTML5 canvas image data, which may be used to uniquely identify your computer."
- not from me.... severely scale down on that shit....
Ah - then Slashdot forces one to view on brain-damanged m.slashdot.org, no matter how huge your iPad is, not using that anymore either.
What was that:
https://hackernoon.com/more-th...
anyone can claim that comments are fake - who controls that statement and the disputes of it?
Got my back button primed and everything.
I appreciate that people have gotta make money, but I'm not paying for a news subscription. Someone needs to figure out a sane microtransaction platform sooner than later.
Log in or piss off.
You're joking, right? The internet devolved into a shithole of ads, malware, and scams from the very first days of Flash, popups, and those goddamned "punch the monkey" ads. And it's only gotten worse.
Over time, the degree to which you need to block 3rd party javascript, analytics, and other crap has gotten insane. I'd say the average web page has around 10 external parasites ... and I'm sorry, but I didn't sign up with them and didn't agree to their terms of service, which is why I block them ruthlessly.
Trusting any online entity with your actual name or financial information is just making you a target for getting your information stolen when they inevitably get hacked.
Sorry, but the greedy douchebags and assholes started this, and the reality is they've pretty much fucked up the whole game for everyone else.
For now, there's a remarkable amount of national broadcasters around the globe with good quality free content to let you get different editorial slants. But most media in the US these days is increasingly owned by a hand full of rich assholes, who I have no intention of enriching.
So, you'll forgive me for not giving a fuck, when ads have been a source of malware and other bullshit for almost as long as we've had web browsers. Kill off some of those parasites, give me an internet I can trust, and sites who I can rely on to have some decent security, and we'll talk.
But incompetent idiots with shit security are just the icing on the cake as far as why the paid internet can go fuck themselves.
Having subscribed since the second issue in 1993 or 1994, starting with the third issue. they finally priced me out of paper, despite design and my personal preference for the tactile experience kept me until my max price was finally exceeded.
Now I read the occasional article, but I found I wasn't that interested after all. A paywall will just make that a less frequent occurrence.
And nothing of value will be lost for me.
Of the other paywalled publications, most object to my adblocker so vehemently I avoid the 'free' stuff the would have permitted me to read. and nothing of value is lost there either.
I wish them luck. They will need it.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Perhaps then we're returning to the pre-Internet paradigm where you probably get a single newspaper and a small handful of magazines. Except at least in the Internet era, we're no longer locked into the one local paper in our small town.
If this lets me use an ad-blocker, then I welcome it. Truth be told, I already pay for a half-dozen or so sites I value anyway -- so for me, little would change.
I've been flogging this horse for maybe 20 years... central micropayments site for the media providers.
That existed 20 years ago, and it was called Adult Check. Subscribers gained access to all participating sites, and sites were paid per page view. I guess if you ignore the erotica on the network, you could explain the name as "Because grown-ups can pay for nice things."
The problem comes when a single company operates both an ad network and a micropayment network. Such an operator has an incentive to track viewers' browsing habits across the Internet in order to build a dossier on their interests. For example, Google operates AdSense/AdWords on the one hand and Contributor on the other.
A micropayment provider will appear more trustworthy to viewers if it doesn't have ads as a side business.
The fact that news costs money to produce and deliver has never stopped being an issue, there was just a brief period of easy capital where players tried to stake out their turf in the digital world. What people don't seem to realize is that if you are getting your news for free it means someone else has paid for it. It's naive to believe the only advertising they see is obvious and commercial, when the media has always been seen as a way to push viewpoints. Your ad blocker doesn't work when the ad is the content.
Very soon the only free-to-read news media will be far left/right populist, conspiracy theory and other nutwing media with agendas.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
There's something to be said here about efficiency. If bandwidth is a commodity then conserve it, write pages smartly. Don't have auto playing videos, huge parallax backgrounds, giant click through splash pages because you arrogantly believe everyone should see your quote of the day... Instead have some consideration for each element you send to the user. Make better use of vector based graphics. Use bitmaps sparingly.
Twinstiq, game news
How will all of the big blue media companies control the (growing) population of have-nots who can't afford the nickel? They are still going to vote....
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Maybe the reason that the internet is devolving is your unwillingness to pay. I pay for the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, and The Washington Post. And they are well worth every penny.
Well, only one (the Economist) is. The rest have devolved into holdovers from the days of Yellow Journalism.
Now, the preceding opinion is *why* your assertion isn't as clear-cut. To wit, what you think to be "worth every penny", others may think of as propaganda organs for $politicalParty. But then, such people will happily pay for their favored news sites of choice. Or, like in my case, would only bother with paying for subs to sites (WSJ, Economist, and similar) that carefully unearth and curate the straight news with as little bias as possible, and not bend/twist/mutilate it to fit the political narratives of their ownership. Sites that provide actual insight an analysis, with no regard to any particular political view or ideology.
Those sites are few and far between, while clickbait political propaganda organs are more plentiful than blades of grass in Iowa.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
> Who in their right mind would EVER pay for CNN?
I think one would have to be in their left mind to pay for CNN.
Of course, FoxNews is completely fair and balanced. Unbiased. Truthful. Not propaganda at all. (snicker)
It's really a matter of what echo chamber one wants to listen to. But CNN joined FoxNews in quality once CNN closed all their foreign bureaus and fired all their investigative reporters. It's all talking heads now. Talking heads all the way down. Like turtles.
Then there is the Leftist Tree data structure.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
If we has a sane public policy rather than rampant neoliberalism, we could do as the UK does and fund a BBC type news organization out of a tax.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
or the content providers will need to have accounts with all of the micropay providers.
What practical problem do you see with expecting each publisher to have accounts with all of the micropay providers?
the problem would seem that the advertisers are not willing to pay enough to support the number of pages that visitors look at
Correct. This is the model of print newspapers, print magazines, and pay television. Neither subscription revenue alone nor advertising revenue alone is enough to fully fund the production of works of authorship without, say, making every pay TV channel as expensive as HBO. Only the sum of the two is sufficient.
Is the subscription price too high?
Yes in many cases. $25,000 per year for one article that happens to be exclusive to the Bloomberg subscription is far too high for the vast majority of individual readers. Even a more modest $4 per month is cost-prohibitive for someone who reads only one article per month from a given site. Anything lower than $4, however, and the commission that a merchant pays to a payment processor for each transaction begins to dominate.
Static inline images from the originating website.
Does this mean that you propose to eliminate the intermediary ad network or ad exchange? If so, how would you expect a smaller site to afford to hire ad sales personnel in order to find advertisers and sell ad space directly to them?
Or you could charge the advertiser more for the ad impression.
Publishers already charge the advertisers more for what the Internet advertising industry calls "rich" ads. But publishers have come to rely on the increased revenue for rich ads as the new normal.
People expect to get their news for free because that is what they have done their whole lives. Print newspapers charged a small minimal fee but their main revenue was from advertising, just like it is now. The problem is they lost their vertical integration and someone else owns the printing presses.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
A lot of madness in the current public discussion comes from people reading too much biased news. Most of it is on the left but the right has a few juicy ones to keep the balance. What will happen if all of those are behind a paywall so there is not much inflammatory I mean investigative journalism to share and read for free?
Maybe it will be peace across the land again.
Has it become common for public libraries in the United States, in both large and small cities and in states with both conservative- and liberal-leaning legislatures, to carry subscriptions to popular paywalled websites? Could I, say, visit a library branch, put in my library card number, and read WSJ.com articles without charge?
The solution is bundle publications for a fixed price per month. Texture sells access to about 200 magazines for $10/month on phones and tablets, but not on the web.
See:
https://www.texture.com/
Of course, this works much like the much derided Cable TV bundle. Don't think of it as a TV bundle. Think of it as Netflix for newspapers. The monthly costs are spread across enough content that purchasers do not feel ripped off even if they only read a subset of the offerings.
Here is the list of magazines Texture offers:
https://www.texture.com/all-ti...
Texture magazines are somewhat searchable. There are highlights and even some daily news.
What we don't know with Texture is how all the various publishers are being compensated from the monthly subscriptions fees readers are providing.
I won't pay $2 for a magazine on Google, but I will pay $10/month for access to over 200 magazines. It keeps the rest of family happy too.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
the same way I treat the full screen notices that demand I disable my ad-blocker.
I simply shut down the tab and move on.
If the story or information is worthy enough, it will be found on someone elses site.
"Those sites are few and far between"
So you've found some? Care to share?
-Unresolved symbol? Byte me!
Want a paywall? Sure, you can do that. But you'll have to give up traffic from search engines and find potential subscribers on your own. Google shouldn't be complicit in your drug dealer "the first hit is free" sales strategy.
Once upon a time I had multiple magazine subscriptions. Some cost upwards of $15 / month each.
As time went by, I noticed there were more ads in my magazine than there was actual content.
At which point I cancelled my subscriptions. Can't see any reason to pay a monthly fee for what amounted to nothing but advertising. :|
If I pay for one of these sites (WSJ, LAT, etc), will I be paying for the privilege of seeing ads, too?
Does it seem odd that the same media companies that lambaste Trump's wall rhetoric now want to erect walls of their own to keep folks from coming onto their digital properties and taking content that they don't legally have rights to.
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.
The print version of newspapers have ads as well. Just because you paid $0.50 (or whatever) for the NYT on paper didn't mean you got a bunch of dead trees without ads: you paid for the paper and got the ads. This is true of just about all newsprint that I've ever come across.
The only two exceptions that come to mind was/is Consumer Reports and Cook's Illustrated, both of which were completely subscribed-supported and without ads.
BBC, CBC, NPR, etc. might end up being the only viable investigative news organizations.
You may now begin the flames.
Between all the trackers and pay walls the Internet is going down the shitter.
I pay for the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, and The Washington Post. And they are well worth every penny.
So what do you do when someone shares with you a link to an article in a publication other than the four you mentioned, such as The Wall Street Journal?
What is bad about having multiple subscriptions?
It's simple: To get any sort of breadth of subject matter or perspective, you'd end up having...
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Except I don't block ads per se. I use Firefox tracking protection to block things that track my viewing habits from one website to another. When a site serves ads that don't track me, as on Daring Fireball, I see them. But for over a year, Wired confused tracking protection with an ad blocker instead of serving ads that don't track me. TV Tropes still does.
Reddcoin
That is all.
#DeleteFacebook
I bail on websites that don't work after allowing 2-3 javascript domains. Do they really think erecting another barrier is going to keep me on their site and make get out my credit card? What a joke!
I only get magazines for free when I find free offers.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
http://www.shirky.com/writings... ... Like the salami slicing exploit in computer crime, micropayment believers imagine that such tiny amounts of money can be extracted from the user that they will not notice, while the overall volume will cause these payments to add up to something significant for the recipient. But of course the users do notice, because they are being asked to buy something. Mental transaction costs create a minimum level of inconvenience that cannot be removed simply by lowering the dollar cost of goods. Worse, beneath a certain threshold, mental transaction costs actually rise, a phenomenon is especially significant for information goods. It's easy to think a newspaper is worth a dollar, but is each article worth half a penny? Is each word worth a thousandth of a penny? A newspaper, exposed to the logic of micropayments, becomes impossible to value. ..."
"This strategy [of micropayments] doesn't work, because the act of buying anything, even if the price is very small, creates what Nick Szabo calls mental transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price.
My alternative solution is a *mix* of four types of economic activities:
* people producing their own personal content through better personal tools (subsistence production)
* a basic income (to soften the rough edges and rich-get-richer exchange economy)
* people giving away high-quality content (gift economy)
* more government funding of free information providers (an improved democratically-planned command economy)
The promotion of artificial scarcity (e.g. paywalls for digital content) as a way to fund content is one of the biggest problems we are facing as we transition to post-scarcity. There are several reason artificial scarcity is a problem -- but one of the biggest is that ensuring artificial scarcity in an age of technological abundance ultimately requires the equivalent of a police state monitoring everything everyone does 24X7.
See also Alfie Kohn: http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic... and Dan Pink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You do understand by "logging in", you are being tracked even better than websites track you for advertising to you , right ?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Paywalls are a short-sighted solution. Soon enough, even the Times will lose its remaining influence once it's only preaching to the converted.
I'm concerned that in the UK this is making left/right polarisation worse - In the political centre we have the BBC and on the left we have the Independent and Guardian, all free. All the serious right of centre/conservative news sources are paywalled (Times, Telegraph, Spectator). So the free news sources are left biased, or hard right.
I obviously have no way to quantify this, but as my job involves interacting with people, knowing what's going on in the world certain seems like a basic prerequisite. And the annual cost of all of the subscriptions is about my hourly pay rate, so I would say that yes, we can conclude that the subscriptions more than pay for themselves.
Online doesn't have newsprint expenses
Hosting facilities aren't without cost. Amazon charges real money for EC2, S3, and CloudFront.
This problem [of selling ad space] is identical to the one the paper newspapers of the previous century, right ?
For one thing, how did "the paper newspapers of the previous century" solve it? And to what extent would those solutions continue to apply? Individual publishers back then didn't have to compete with interest-based ad networks for advertisers' money.
I listen to the news once or twice a day and sometimes from stations with different political orientations. I actually like my local NPR station best and make a small annual donation to them.