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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
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.
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.
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?
"I refuse to pay for anything on the internet."
Then you get nothing but the crap you deserve.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Nope, there are too many people who are happy with the echo chambers they visit. They wouldn't recognize propaganda if it danced naked in front of them.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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!
People STILL don't know what Net Neutrality is about.
Net Neutrality is not that all content should be free from content creators. Paywalls are just fine. Net Neutrality is about what the guy-in-the-middle can do, your ISP, the guy who's supposed to just shut up and deliver the packets, but who now thinks he's got the right to add a little extra for himself.
Net Neutrality rules prevent your ISP, and any intermediate provider between you and your content, from inspecting what it delivers to you before it delivers to you, and charging the sender a fee to deliver it to you.
Think Comcast, which owns Universal, billing Disney for the delivery of its packets along the last mile to your house. Why? Because Comcast owns the wires and the equipment between you and the rest of Internet, because streaming Disney movies requires a lot of Comcast's bandwidth (think equipment upgrades, more fiber, angry customers saying service sucks), and why should Disney get all the money (from your subscription with Disney) when Comcast's wires are crucial to you consuming the content? The MBA's at Comcast feel like they are doing Disney a service, providing this last mile of delivery, and with their monopoly over subscription territory, they got Disney by the balls, so it's time to give 'em a squeeze.
Net Neutrality means delivering Internet is boring... shut up and deliver, regardless of content or sender. On December 14, this rule will disappear (on a party-line vote), and delivering Internet will become super-exciting, because ISP's can discriminate between one packet and another, throttling some content and expediting others. So, Disney may have to charge you a dollar more to stream that movie because, too bad, you're on Comcast and Comcast throttles non-Universal content; your friend on FIOS may get Disney cheaper because Verizon chooses not to throttle Disney packets. Or maybe Disney will just hike up subscription fees on everybody, just to be safe. Gee, ain't de-regulation great. May weasels eat Ajit Pai's eyes out and piss up his nostrils.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...