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Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

nytimes.com

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Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#111

Post by EGreg »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #35
mindcrime wrote: post #28

Subscriptions are just the wrong model for news publishers. There's NO way I could possibly afford to subscribe to every news output I occasionally read news from, unless the subscriptions were so close to free as to be useless as a revenue source for the publisher. It's just not going to happen. What we desperately need is a real, useful micro-payments model where you can pay per-article. I'd be happy to pay you a f…

> What we desperately need is a real, useful micro-payments model where you can pay per-article The other side of the coin is that if you're a news organisation, "the economics just don't work" with micro payments. You can't fund a month long investigative report based on micropayments, even if it produces a prize-winning piece, if you don't have guaranteed income to support it. What happens if you spend the month in…

Instead of micropayments, why not have a Netflix-like aggregator experience with an overall subscription?

Also, has anyone considered that collaboration may be better than competition when it comes to news, and many other things? Look at open source and wikipedia beating the pants off closed source and britannica, encarta etc over the years.

Why not fund wikinews and such sites instead? Much less clickbait and spam and fake news. Different incentives.

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#112

Post by jjcm »

pavlov wrote: post #81
jjcm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the approach I've been working on: -Pay $~4/mo -Every upvote you give during that month (not just views, since I think views encourage clickbait) gives an equal slice of that $4 pie. -At the end of the month, a flat $1 goes to pay for server costs, then the rest is distributed evenly between every upvote. You can see a mini-demo here: http://syd.jjcm.org/soci/ The nice part of it is it ranks by quality while d…

That's basically what Medium is doing now, right? They offer $5/month subscriptions, and the money from subscribers is distributed among those writers who published members-only content based on the amount of "claps" (likes) each subscriber gave.

Similar yea, though Medium is strictly blog posts. I feel like with the issues youtube is having with advertisers right now and things like imgur trying to monetize image hosting there needs to be a content platform that supports all media types.

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#113

Post by jjcm »

IanCal wrote: post #101
jjcm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the approach I've been working on: -Pay $~4/mo -Every upvote you give during that month (not just views, since I think views encourage clickbait) gives an equal slice of that $4 pie. -At the end of the month, a flat $1 goes to pay for server costs, then the rest is distributed evenly between every upvote. You can see a mini-demo here: http://syd.jjcm.org/soci/ The nice part of it is it ranks by quality while d…

Can you talk about how this compares to flattr?

I think the biggest thing is that flattr doesn't address the issues of ads intruding on privacy, nor does it guarantee that your user information isn't being sold as a way of monetization (since it's an add-on to an existing site rather than a content host itself). The one I'm trying to build does the hosting as well so we can guarantee that ads wont be present (at $1 per user per month, there shouldn't be a need for any additional revenue per user to stay running / make a small profit).

The other thing though is flattr doesn't deal with content discovery very well. It doesn't rank content, it simply measures your own. Think of the one I'm working on as a reddit/hn except upvotes distribute a portion of your payment pool, that way we get a quality hierarchy in addition to distributing payments.

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#114

Post by shinamee »

mindcrime wrote: post #28

Subscriptions are just the wrong model for news publishers. There's NO way I could possibly afford to subscribe to every news output I occasionally read news from, unless the subscriptions were so close to free as to be useless as a revenue source for the publisher. It's just not going to happen. What we desperately need is a real, useful micro-payments model where you can pay per-article. I'd be happy to pay you a f…

I think you're talking about https://blendle.com/

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#115

Post by smsm42 »

mindcrime wrote: post #28

Subscriptions are just the wrong model for news publishers. There's NO way I could possibly afford to subscribe to every news output I occasionally read news from, unless the subscriptions were so close to free as to be useless as a revenue source for the publisher. It's just not going to happen. What we desperately need is a real, useful micro-payments model where you can pay per-article. I'd be happy to pay you a f…

I probably won't pay a dollar per article, that'd be hundreds of bucks per month for me (if you count all articles I read, skim or glance at), but I'd pay a couple of cents. The problem is I don't see how to make pricing structure transparent, and how to avoid gateway problems like we have with cable TV - where to get 3 channels you need you have to subscribe to 200 channels of junk and pay for it all.

There should be a model where it does not incur significant cognitive load when I want to read an article, and does not allow abuse by dishonest players. I imagine some billionaires could be made that way. Brave browser team seems to be working on something like that, no idea how good it would be...

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#116

Post by smsm42 »

Cleisthenes wrote: post #110
stefco_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but unlike clickbait advertising, microtransactions actually encourage a positive publisher-reader relationship. If you trust a news source to do good journalism and if you don't have to jump through hoops to pay for an article, my bet is that most people would happily throw down ¢10 or something for a good short read (or more for a better read). Conversely, I would be even more reluctant to read click bait if I…

My bet is you are overly optimistic and instead will have click bait for people with disposable income seeking articles that they can use to prove their point.

To prove their point, other people must be able to read this article. Which means somebody has to pay for it. Maybe they should make sponsored links - if you have disposable income, finance 1000 people reading this article, in hope they get convinced by it. That'd be putting your money where your mouth is!

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#117

Post by jawns »

zackmorris wrote: post #102
jawns wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we desperately need is a real, useful micro-payments model where you can pay per-article. Former news editor here. I have spent a loooong time thinking about how to help my beloved news industry find a payment model that works. I've become convinced that a "cable subscription" model has more promise than a micropayments model. Here's what's wrong with a micropayments model. Each microtransaction is an addition…

I agree with your analysis. The current (and biggest IMHO) problem with journalism in the US is that it's coupled with advertising and so inevitably has an element of corporate propaganda. The main way to combat that is to have the industry as a whole receive funding from a central source so that advertisers can't dictate what is acceptable to each reporting agency. This is why networks like PBS (which is largely pub…

If you're worried about propaganda and bias, getting the majority of funding from a central source sounds like a really bad way to go. Look at all the state-funded media in other countries. Guess how critical of the government they are?

While it's true that advertisers may exert some pressure on publishers (and corporate consolidation has made this worse), it's far better to have hundreds of advertisers, any single one of whom you can freely tick off, than to have a single large benefactor whom you can't. Even if the benefactor is largely benevolent and hands-off, it's not something you should bank on.

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#118

Post by pmyteh »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #74

The O'Reilly Safari system is a great alternative to paywalls. You pay for Safari and it pays out royalties to the authors proportional to how many users read your book that month. So an author of a book that had 200 readers would get roughly double the pay of one that has 100 readers. I would gladly pay for a kind of all access pass that divided up my subscription money to the news sites I visited the most. Of cours…

There's an older version of this principle used to compensate authors for library borrowing in the UK and other countries called Public Lending Right.

The government puts some tax money into a pot, and it's paid out to authors in proportion to the number of loans of their books. There's also a cap to stop the bulk of the money going to a handful of bestselling authors.

In some ways, this can be seen as croudsourcing decisions on government subsidy, which is an interesting model.

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#119

Post by smsm42 »

EGreg wrote: post #111
NeutronBoy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we desperately need is a real, useful micro-payments model where you can pay per-article The other side of the coin is that if you're a news organisation, "the economics just don't work" with micro payments. You can't fund a month long investigative report based on micropayments, even if it produces a prize-winning piece, if you don't have guaranteed income to support it. What happens if you spend the month in…

Instead of micropayments, why not have a Netflix-like aggregator experience with an overall subscription? Also, has anyone considered that collaboration may be better than competition when it comes to news, and many other things? Look at open source and wikipedia beating the pants off closed source and britannica, encarta etc over the years. Why not fund wikinews and such sites instead? Much less clickbait and spam a…

Wikipedia however is explicitly a secondary source, by design. For news, it becomes contradictory - because news naturally tends to be primary source things, why would you want secondary source news if you can have primary source ones?

Of course, nothing prevents wikinews from being primary source - but that requires much larger expenses of people actually doing original research and reporting (things explicitly shunned on the rest of Wikipedia) instead of refining, curating and summarizing existing source (which is a very useful thing too, but for news it's not enough).

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#120

Post by arkades »

jjcm wrote: post #76
mindcrime wrote: post #28

Subscriptions are just the wrong model for news publishers. There's NO way I could possibly afford to subscribe to every news output I occasionally read news from, unless the subscriptions were so close to free as to be useless as a revenue source for the publisher. It's just not going to happen. What we desperately need is a real, useful micro-payments model where you can pay per-article. I'd be happy to pay you a f…

Here's the approach I've been working on: -Pay $~4/mo -Every upvote you give during that month (not just views, since I think views encourage clickbait) gives an equal slice of that $4 pie. -At the end of the month, a flat $1 goes to pay for server costs, then the rest is distributed evenly between every upvote. You can see a mini-demo here: http://syd.jjcm.org/soci/ The nice part of it is it ranks by quality while d…

If things like Reddit are anything to go by, upvotes will quickly stop denoting quality and start denoting agreement with the perspective offered. In short, paying for an echo chamber.
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