Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers
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Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers
#2To block news sources in Google News go to Settings > Sources and add the domain to the Block section.
Used to have to add the source, then slide the frequency slider down to 0. Looks like Google automatically moved them to blocked.
Better yet, just have a setting to automatically block all sites using paywalls. They have a right to deploy paywalls, we have a right to request never to see them in our feed.
Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers
#3Paywalls are a dying gasp being uttered by the publishing industry.
Here's why they don't work:
- If I respect a publication and feel that the content has value for me, I'll happily subscribe.
- If I click on a clickbait headline only to arrive at a paywall, it's like a small and unpleasant electric shock, punishing me for clicking the link.
- Paywall creators think that the combination of clickbait and paywalls is magical and gets people to subscribe, but it does not, it only creates negative emotion and irritation.
- There is no such thing as a free lunch. If publishers want subscribers they need to consistently produce high quality content day after day, week after week. They also need to forego the sugar high of clickbait.
- That means there can't be some sort of social virality genius telling the editor how to title articles and showing charts of all the clicks from Reddit, etc. Doing this may generate some incremental subscribers, but it does so at the cost of the publication's brand image.
- The approach Salon used of showing the first third or half of the article is better than a "You obviously love great journalism" banner. Let the content stand on its own and earn the subscription.
- I have not been able to bring myself to subscribe to the NYT or WaPo for one simple reason -- around half of the articles they publish are very low quality and many have clickbait headlines. The article headlines have the feel of being ads themselves that falsely represent the content of the article. In many cases the articles are pretty solid reporting, but the headlines oversell them as being the article that will bring down the Trump presidency.
If I were a journalist I'd be pretty outraged if I took the time to write a thoughtful article and then some virality genius retitled it something silly and tribe-oriented to get the shallowest of readers to thoughtlessly click it.
Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers
#4Just change your web browser's User-Agent to the Google crawler?
Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers
#5Paywalls are a dying gasp being uttered by the publishing industry. Here's why they don't work: - If I respect a publication and feel that the content has value for me, I'll happily subscribe. - If I click on a clickbait headline only to arrive at a paywall, it's like a small and unpleasant electric shock, punishing me for clicking the link. - Paywall creators think that the combination of clickbait and paywalls is m…
Agree. Also, the websites that try to get you to unblock ad blockers are equally irritating. Usually I just leave, and find another source of the same news. In many cases their ads are super annoying and CPU-intensive, which is the main reason I block them; it's not that I hate advertising itself. If they were just a simple tag and a hyperlink without a huge pile of JavaScript bloat I would probably not bother blocking them.
Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers
#6[deleted]
Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers
#7archive.is still captures text from most of these.
Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers
#8Paywalls are a dying gasp being uttered by the publishing industry. Here's why they don't work: - If I respect a publication and feel that the content has value for me, I'll happily subscribe. - If I click on a clickbait headline only to arrive at a paywall, it's like a small and unpleasant electric shock, punishing me for clicking the link. - Paywall creators think that the combination of clickbait and paywalls is m…
Agree. Also, the websites that try to get you to unblock ad blockers are equally irritating. Usually I just leave, and find another source of the same news. In many cases their ads are super annoying and CPU-intensive, which is the main reason I block them; it's not that I hate advertising itself. If they were just a simple tag and a hyperlink without a huge pile of JavaScript bloat I would probably not bother blocki…
Indeed. It's true, in a world where a major newspaper will decide to write a multi-page story about one of Trump's silly tweets and run it on the front page, it's not all that hard for a large number of news orgs to write a similarly informative story, and many make it available for free.
I agree about ads, but my least favorite are the ones that begin playing video in a tiny window that devours laptop battery life... It's strange to imagine the marketers who are designing these pages. They must imagine that all of us read only when watching TV is not an option, so they try to make the website as much like TV as possible, complete with a tiny screen that you can click on to simply shift into couch potato mode.
Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers
#9I have no problem with this. But in return I should be able to opt out of results that I cannot view. A result for a news article that changes when I click on it to a "Please subscribe..." plea is not the result that was returned that I clicked on.
Unfortunately, like the AMP fiasco, I doubt this is what will happen as Google doesn't exist to serve it's users.
Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers
#10Paywalls are a dying gasp being uttered by the publishing industry. Here's why they don't work: - If I respect a publication and feel that the content has value for me, I'll happily subscribe. - If I click on a clickbait headline only to arrive at a paywall, it's like a small and unpleasant electric shock, punishing me for clicking the link. - Paywall creators think that the combination of clickbait and paywalls is m…
Agree. Also, the websites that try to get you to unblock ad blockers are equally irritating. Usually I just leave, and find another source of the same news. In many cases their ads are super annoying and CPU-intensive, which is the main reason I block them; it's not that I hate advertising itself. If they were just a simple tag and a hyperlink without a huge pile of JavaScript bloat I would probably not bother blocki…
I find that the Anti-adblock killer list in uBlock takes care of most of these. There's an additional addon you can install that pushes it even further.
The fight against browsers rendering markup in the way their users want is a losing one.