51–60 of 83 posts
None of them. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of blogs and media sources I like, but at the end of the day I can get any information I want somewhere else for free. Heck, in many cases, the information I need is either paid for by taxes (the BBC) or provided by hobbyists for free anyway.
There's also some sleight of hand in that headline...
Which git repos would you be willing to pay $5/month to clone?
If I could pay the online ad companies to pay the content creator like I was a "click" or a "view" I could have an ad-free online experience while the content creator continues to get paid like I had seen the ad.
The opportunity for Google is huge I know a lot of people who would cough up $5-10/mo for an ad-free online experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's very rare for someone to make their primary living from blogging. But that's true of most creative things, be it writing, music, art, custom bicycle frames Some kinds of blogging/newsletter-writing is cheap. Other kinds, particularly the investigative kinds, are not.
That's true, and what we are witnessing in real time is those forms of journalism evaporate, as the web destroys their business models. I think that blogging is not the same thing as journalism, in many, many ways.
The Wall Street Journal and New York Times are doing fine. Smaller publications, too, like The Information seem to do okay. Paywalls work because (a) online ads are crap and (b) most readers are too cheap to pay unless forced to.
> I think that blogging is not the same thing as journalism
I agree. I also think this blurring of the line has caused people to expect both for free, which is clearly untenable. That said, newspapers include op-ed sections and some "thinker" newsletters I subscribe to (e.g. Mike Allen's political daily) have broken legitimate news.
We need a subscription business model that aggregates content like cable/pay tv, so I can pay a fair price once, and continue grazing across most sites without worrying about individual subscriptions or micropayments. WSJ and Economist are only sources I would pay for (at a reasonable price) that aren't providing specific data points I can use. And, most people wouldn't find those as useful as I do, so it's down to personal preferences and how much of any source you'll get value from.
It's why individual subscriptions to everything is a dead-in-the-water business model that's going to kill off most journals. Most sites will be abandoned if there is a paywall.
Think about it this way -- how many people would pay for The History Channel or HGTV as individual add-on tv channels? Yet a very large number of people will occasionally watch those sources if it's included in general subscription, and they add value to the overall package, even if you rarely watch them. That's the way I view 99% of online content.
And, you have to make it dead easy, and not be constantly harrassing me about subscriptions or micropayments, or I'm gone. And, I also expect sites I'm paying for to be ad-free and not slowing down my browser, or I won't pay.
I just began paying $5/mo to be a "member" at Medium. It's meant to enhance the discovery feature and the ability to access curated archives. Really it was a spur of the moment decision after I found myself reading and greatly appreciating an article from 2015[1], but I haven't really used the membership or understood it well enough to say that I'll continue yet. I think there's great need for a specific type of pers…
Unfortunately it's really hard to build a community if you charge.
There aren't many. HN is the closest, but the truth is that I'd not start out paying $5 a month for it: I'd have to have 3 months free to test, then .... maybe. I'd probably pay for Reuters, AP, or BBC. The thing with these is varied content or content I check on my own. The problem with most things bogs is that I don't get that much out of them. They are like newspapers or magazines: Might be OK every now and then,…
Those are almost certainly not their morals that they're including in the recipe, but rather their monetization strategy. Those brand-specific ingredients are likely examples of brand placement.