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Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

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Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#121

Post by jfoutz »

jawns wrote: post #117
zackmorris wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

You're right. Newshour is notorious for heavily biased poorly researched 'news'. What little i've seen of the BBC is pretty shameful as well. We're fortunate in the western world to have a free press that delivers such deep, thoughtful, even handed and well researched news. Can you imagine how horrible the situation in puerto rico would be today without that coverage? I'd say the U.S.'s deft handling of Iraq and Afghanistan are direct consequences of the quality of our news.

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#122

Post by smsm42 »

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…

State financing and governmental curation of content is the worst thing you can think of if you want freedom of the press. It doesn't matter if it's called "fairness", or "public good", or "truth", or anything else - by the end of it, it would be just a means by which people currently in power can shape the content of the news. It is never a good idea to give governmental enforcers control over the content of the press, and it never ends well.

> There may be a solution that would work well for both specialties, as they seem to be getting left behind by purely free market forces.

Open source is doing spectacularly well on free market, what are you talking about? Linux is kicking ass, most of content served on the web is served by open source, most of the browsers used to read that content are fully or partially open-source, number of active open source projects is in the thousands and number of participants is probably in millions.

Journalism is not doing as well, but I wonder if it has to do not only with the payment model but with the quality of their product, which, sadly, has lately drastically declined.

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#123

Post by 1123581321 »

sgk284 wrote: post #52
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…

Unfortunately, micropayments encourage click-bait and pop-news (but that's not to say that advertising doesn't either). We've also have seen other failure modes with payment-per-article in academic journals, though payment is much larger there, so may not be a fair comparison. In general a la carte payments usually lead to overall higher costs (e.g. Classic Blockbuster vs. Netflix). My ideal system would be a Spotify…

Chances are that you're not willing to spend enough per month.

The music industry is (according to googling) about $25BB a year for live events and $15BB a year for retail (streaming, downloads, discs, etc.)

Spotify's revenue is about $3BB/year, ballpark 10% of the revenue needed to support the music industry. (Spotify has its own expenses, which we are ignoring.)

News media can't command live event revenue the way music can, and their physical sales are disappearing faster than music's. That suggests, to use the music analogy, that subscribers to a Spotify-like system would have to support most of the approximately $25BB that this industry commands. Depending on how many news readers there are compared to music listeners, that's possibly $50-150/mo that would need to be asked of subscribers.

Outside of Financial Times subscribers (even that $600/year is ad-subsidized), most people aren't willing to spend this much on a newspaper. You can quibble with the numbers, but ultimately the news industry is more reliant on individual subscribers than the music industry.

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#124

Post by y_u_no_rust »

Flammy wrote: post #41
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…

> Micro-payment per-article will only encourage "safe" journalism - articles that you know will resonate with your readers, rather than controversial pieces or in-depth, resource intensive research. I actually disagree, from what has happened when trying ads ads (basically micropayments in terms of $ amount per view), we get click bait and sensationalist headlines for any news source which focuses on income-per-artic…

Honestly I just want ads that are not intrusive and hosted the at same place the article i'm reading is at that's it

it's not very complicated..

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#125

Post by 96aeb1e335 »

smsm42 wrote: post #122
zackmorris wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

State financing and governmental curation of content is the worst thing you can think of if you want freedom of the press. It doesn't matter if it's called "fairness", or "public good", or "truth", or anything else - by the end of it, it would be just a means by which people currently in power can shape the content of the news. It is never a good idea to give governmental enforcers control over the content of the pre…

> State financing and governmental curation of content is the worst thing you can think of if you want freedom of the press.

You can have public funding with independent editorial control and content curation. This is how most publicly funded news outlets work in liberal democracies, such as the BBC.

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#127

Post by stevenwoo »

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…

The Guardian lets do one time payments. You have to get past them asking for subscriptions but the option is there. I would like to give to The Atlantic without getting a paper subscription but they don't have that last time I looked.

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#128

Post by zackmorris »

smsm42 wrote: post #122
zackmorris wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

State financing and governmental curation of content is the worst thing you can think of if you want freedom of the press. It doesn't matter if it's called "fairness", or "public good", or "truth", or anything else - by the end of it, it would be just a means by which people currently in power can shape the content of the news. It is never a good idea to give governmental enforcers control over the content of the pre…

Very few people are able to make a living today maintaining open source projects.

As for public vs private planning - that's an argument as old as time. One thing to consider is that since the free market doesn't consider externalities, that's one reason why problems with the environment, inequality, declining health and human services, etc etc etc aren't being adequately addressed by the mainstream media.

I view free speech, the airwaves and even the internet itself as public property. So it makes sense that having a greater share of public funding/ownership in those areas would be better than living under the corporate oligopolies that control it now.

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#129

Post by EGreg »

smsm42 wrote: post #119
EGreg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shun…

WikiNews.org

Re: Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers

#130

Post by smsm42 »

zackmorris wrote: post #128
smsm42 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State financing and governmental curation of content is the worst thing you can think of if you want freedom of the press. It doesn't matter if it's called "fairness", or "public good", or "truth", or anything else - by the end of it, it would be just a means by which people currently in power can shape the content of the news. It is never a good idea to give governmental enforcers control over the content of the pre…

Very few people are able to make a living today maintaining open source projects. As for public vs private planning - that's an argument as old as time. One thing to consider is that since the free market doesn't consider externalities, that's one reason why problems with the environment, inequality, declining health and human services, etc etc etc aren't being adequately addressed by the mainstream media. I view fre…

> Very few people are able to make a living today maintaining open source projects.

I think you underestimating the number, but even if true, if open source is still so strong despite of that - where is the problem?

> I view free speech, the airwaves and even the internet itself as public property.

Free speech is not a property, it is a human right. Internet is mostly distributed private property, and works just fine with that. As for airwaves, it's a mess, let's not go there, it's irrelevant for our discussion.

> So it makes sense that having a greater share of public funding/ownership in those areas

No it does not. How forcefully extracting money from people mostly unwilling to pay them and allocating them by opaque decisions of people who have little expertise in what is needed and mostly are bothered by looking good on TV is better than voluntary funding by consumers who know what they need? I mean, I can get if you say some things can not be financed otherwise, for reasons. Maybe for some things there's just no way to work out suitable non-governmental model that would work. But here we have a model that already, provably, works. And we have governmental model which is notorious for its poor efficiency, corruption, wastefullness and constant scandalous mismanagement. How it makes sense to replace a working model with it?

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