I thought the begging letter was shown just because I had an ad blocker on. The site works well for the ad blocking crowd, maybe they make it so deliberately, so at least they can send you the begging message.
Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads
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Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads
#12People within the "journalism" ecosystem can support itself with creative and different financial remedies. They strongly believe in their cause and benefit to humanity.
I would focus fundraising efforts to parties that economically rely on a free or paid press.
Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads
#13The physcology behind this is more political than business, the guardian is a lefty newspaper and is getting political support
While this comment is down-voted, it is not necessarily wrong. As an Indian, I was so exasperated after Americans voted a criminal as the President that I subscribed to multiple organizations which are considered left-wing by American conservatives or libertarians. These include regular fees to NY Times, Propublica and Guardian with occasional donations to various organizations in the United States.
The danger is that "leftie" journalists hang out with leftie friends and they tell themselves "All my friends are voting Hillary/Remain, Trump/Brexit will lose". and then we lefties get shell-shocked the morning after.
At least these papers are intellectually honest and admit mistakes, one trait of the right-wing, and their press, is the metaphorical putting fingers in ears and going "La-la-lala!".
Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads
#14The physcology behind this is more political than business, the guardian is a lefty newspaper and is getting political support
While this comment is down-voted, it is not necessarily wrong. As an Indian, I was so exasperated after Americans voted a criminal as the President that I subscribed to multiple organizations which are considered left-wing by American conservatives or libertarians. These include regular fees to NY Times, Propublica and Guardian with occasional donations to various organizations in the United States.
NY Times is far from "considered left-wing". It's currently heavily criticized for publishing terrible articles sympathizing with and humanizing literal neo-nazis.
Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads
#15The physcology behind this is more political than business, the guardian is a lefty newspaper and is getting political support
Don't know why this got downvoted, it's the same as dailymail or the sun, or times, they have right wing donors and subscribers
Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads
#16Does members having a tracker free access ? Because it seems fair that if you pay you are not in the "if it's free you're the product" anymore. It's important to move to this model.
It would be difficult to implement a membership model that doesn't have some tracking of whether you are a member or not. Exemption from third party trackers I totally agree with though.
Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads
#17I thought the begging letter was shown just because I had an ad blocker on. The site works well for the ad blocking crowd, maybe they make it so deliberately, so at least they can send you the begging message.
> begging letter
> begging message
I keep seeing this in many online spaces and for the life of me, I just can't understand how asking for money in exchange for value (journalism in this case) is considered begging.
Seriously, this [1] is their ask, can you (or anyone else) show me exactly which part of it is begging?
[1] http://www.niemanlab.org/images/guardian-membership-ask.jpg
Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads
#18That certainly highlights the importance of the right UX, but I wish they had invested in Patreon style features to allow support for specific authors.
I would pay £5/month to the Guardian and be happy for them to take a 30% administrative cut if they ring fenced the rest for writers I want to support.
The Scott Trust has failed to preserve a newspaper that is fiercely independent. Only experimenting with democratisation of commissioning and hiring is going to break it out of the nepotist trap it has fallen into.
Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads
#19This. Years ago it was obvious to most newspapers that paid subscribers are their lifeline. Advertisers come and go, daily sales come and go, but long-period subscribers keep you afloat. Somehow, when the respected newspapers moved to the web, they forgot that, and kept pumping ads like crazy. This, in essence, moved the sense of their product from quality content to clickable content - these two don't mix. Consequen…
My understanding is that paid subscribers (and newsstand sales) largely went into paying for printing and distribution while ads paid for basically everything else. Therefore, I expect that part of the thinking was that ads by themselves could pay for digital content creation and delivery.
It's also the case that most people assume that an outsized percentage of costs goes into the physical copy of things. At one point, this came up a lot when eBooks were getting big--though, in that case, the publishers ended up being able to hold the line fairly effectively.
Finally, there just aren't that many pubs that can really command a viable subscription price online--or really any at all. That the WSJ, NYT, and apparently the Guardian can isn't necessarily a recipe for a broader subscription model.
Re: Asking members to support journalism, The Guardian raises more revenue than ads
#20The physcology behind this is more political than business, the guardian is a lefty newspaper and is getting political support
You're making an unsupported assertion that people pay for leftist writing rather than for quality writing.
Please supply arguments to support that.