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Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

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Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#121

Post by abdullahkhalids »

reaperducer wrote: post #115
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will wait till we get a micro-transaction system built directly into the browser (same system for every browser) that allows me to pay 1 cent per news article - maybe 5 cent for a super duper long essay. I am poor but I am willing to pay as much as 5 dollars a month. My personal information is not for sale or distribution and I refuse to allow any computations on my computer that enable someone to gather it.

I am poor but I am willing to pay as much as 5 dollars a month. So subscribe to your local newspaper. One of my subscriptions is $25/6 months of Sunday delivery and you get free unlimited online access. That's $4.16/month — below your stated budget. If more people put their money where their mouths are, then we could break the media of their third-party ad serving addiction.

I do get one print newspaper at home. But I want to consume a wide variety of news sources, and a wide variety of news sources want me to consume their news, so I don't think there is anything wrong with demanding that I pay per article from any source.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#122

Post by mynewtb »

cratib wrote: post #104
gwbas1c wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the payment model is broken. I'm not going to subscribe to a site that I only want to read a single article. We need a way to pay a few cents to read an article, ad and tracker free.

> We need a way to pay a few cents to read an article, ad and tracker free. Blendle[1] is exactly that. They are in semi-private beta, but if you follow a link from their twitter[2] you can sign up right away. Their model is put a few dollars in your account and pay $0.10-$1.00 per article. You can also get an instant refund after you've read, which is supposed to solve clickbait type articles. They have a lot of maj…

And they track all you read, thanks to being a private, centralized service.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#124

Post by akho »

davidgh wrote: post #38
gwbas1c wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the payment model is broken. I'm not going to subscribe to a site that I only want to read a single article. We need a way to pay a few cents to read an article, ad and tracker free.

Agree. I hope someone comes up with a “Netflix for online content”. I’m not going to subscribe to a dozen news sites individually and I also don’t want to make a purchase decision, even if tiny, every time I visit a site. For me a bundle of the top 10-15 high-quality news sites, perhaps letting me choose from different packages at different price points, and allocate the revenue to sites based on which content I read…

Yes, that’s my thinking as well (also — I already pay my ISP for access to the web, why can’t they all just work together and find a way to share?)

There is a tricky point though. “allocate the revenue to sites based on which content I read” implies mandatory, centralized tracking. I’m not at all sure I want that.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#125

Post by hakfoo »

speedplane wrote: post #91
hakfoo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that per-article adds a lot of friction. If I buy a newspaper, I don't have to buy it by article or section. Nobody wants to think about "this is 3 cents to read the article linked on HN" and they also don't want a surprise $80 bill at the end of a month. However, the newspaper style "every article from today" or even "monthly access" still focuses around the thought of "you've picked one, or a very na…

NYTimes is $16/mo Washington Post is $10-15/mo WSJ is $15/mo Seems like the price range is $10-25/mo for many periodicals, so a bundled plan of $20/month might be a bit low. But I can imagine a $50/mo plan for including two national newspapers, a local newspaper, and a news weekly (e.g., economist) being pretty popular.

I tend to think that the low takeup suggests that we already overprice some of these news services. Some also seem to be oddly priced for marketing reasons (for example, to make the print paper look like a good deal to potential online-only customers).

But on a network-of-services level, you also have a "value plateau" effect on both the supply and demand side though.

Each news source you add to a network typically provides a little less value than the one before. By the time you've got 100 newspapers in the network, number 101 is probably only contributing a few articles a year that weren't handled first or better by other papers, so nobody's going to pay much more to get it in their subscriptions.

And for readers, the number of interesting articles and the amount of time we have to read doesn't grow nearly as fast as the sheer number of available articles, so each additional provider doesn't produce that much more consumption.

So to be seen as a good value, we need a pricing model that tracks those "plateaus".

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#126

Post by int_19h »

c487bd62 wrote: post #54
asknthrow wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered voting with your wallet?

I couldn't agree more. Everybody complains that monetizing content is really hard on the web, and then they try to triple dip the same user (subscription, ads, data).

While we're on this subject, check out Blendle. I find that they have the most interesting stuff from WaPo (and others) there anyway, but I pay per article (micropayments), and the reading experience is consistent across all outlets.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#127

Post by int_19h »

ilovecaching wrote: post #61

For those of you advocating for a payment model over the ad model, I want you to consider two perspectives. First, consider the people who will be denied access to information on the basis of class. People who consider it a luxury to be online at all, let alone logging on to find a paywall for basic news. Now consider the editors at the Washington Post, who now have to cater the demographic who can pay their fees. In…

Why can't it be both? Amazon seems to be doing pretty well with their "special offers" / "no special offers" arrangement.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#128

Post by reaperducer »

eksemplar wrote: post #56
paulgb wrote: post #40

What infuriates me about WaPo is that even though I pay for it, their site is pretty much unusable without an ad blocker. The text jumps around as I scroll to make room for dynamically loaded ads. And then there are the bottom-feeding Outbrain (or whatever vendor they use) ads at the bottom of the article. It's a mess.

I switched from digital news to paper and I couldn’t be happier. It took a little getting used to not checking the 24/7 news cycle, but it’s less stressful and the quality of articles is higher. I did specifically chose a news paper with high quality content, and one that only arrives once a week to further the distillation of what News makes it my way, but it’s danish, so it wouldn’t do you much good. I’ve really gr…

Ditto.

It takes a few months to get used to, but going back to traditional media consumption methods (paper, television, radio) reduced my stress and anxiety/FOMO level considerably.

The reason this works is because the newspaper eventually ends. The magazine eventually ends. The CBS Evening News eventually ends. That finality means I'm not hooked on a dopamine-fueled scroll->reward hamster wheel of diminishing quality "news" articles.

I'll admit that I will occasionally slip and lose an hour of two plowing through the endless Apple News feed. But for the most part, I only use online news sites for breaking news, weather, and occasional research.

As a side benefit, I have a surprising amount of extra time in my life to actually live a life.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#129

Post by tannhaeuser »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #96
qwerty456127 wrote: post #12

This is the problem about sites that want to show ads. I don't mind reasonable (not annoying) and responsible (I want to be sure ad links don't lead to frauds or viruses so I won't have to deal with any kinds of problems if I stop blocking ads on my mom's computer) but I absolutely do mind any kind of tracking. Why do ad-funded sites insist on tracking so much? I understand tracking adds value to advertisers but are…

Since you can buy targeted ads in many places, venues that only offer untargeted ads are not competitively attractive unless they happen to appeal directly to a specific demographic you're after. And building extensive user profiles on massive numbers of people is something that can be monetized and otherwise exploited in a practically countless number of ways beyond advertising. For instance many news sites have now…

And that's why blocking targetted ads and tracking not only is convenient, but should be encouraged as a necessity and social norm to everyone - to reach a tipping point where targetted ads aren't effective. The news media business has shown they're not able to get themselves out of monopolistic and privacy-invading ad and attention economics. If news outlets can't be bothered to stop contributing to this, they're displaying cluelessness in their very business, and I don't want their journalistic spin anyway. I can always go to reuters.com to read the facts.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#130

Post by Pyxl101 »

reaperducer wrote: post #112
TeMPOraL wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, all of it. Honestly, it's not our job to find a business model that works. It's literally the job of a company trying to make money. Find a way that works. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for cooperating and working together to solve things. But the ad industry is so out of control that there's no cooperating with that. If they find a way to serve ads that are not privacy-invading, do not expose users to malw…

The problem is that the management at traditional media outlets have been conned into believing that they need tracking in order to serve their advertisers. Advertising worked fine before internet tracking was a thing. Everything from Coca-Cola and the New York Times down to Fred's Corner Dry Cleaner and The Podunk Tribune survived and thrived on the old, low-tracking model. It's companies like Google and the other i…

> by falsely convincing them that an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper

What makes you believe that this hypothetical comparison is false?

The problem with traditional advertising is that everyone sees it, regardless of their interest in the subject matter or lack thereof. As an advertiser you have to pay to show your ad to a lot of people who aren't likely to be interested.

What Google and Facebook brought to the game was targeting. If you can target your ads to people who are already interested in that subject -- or even just more likely to be interested than the average person -- then your ads will in fact be more effective dollar per dollar. You avoid paying to show the ad to everyone else who is unlikely to be interested.

Some companies like Coca-Cola engage in brand advertising, where their goal is to build awareness and respect for their brand among everyone in the general population. This kind of advertising has less need for precise targeting. But not all companies need this kind of advertising. Plenty of smaller companies are looking to advertise to people who are likely to want their specific product, whether it's a video game or women's clothing or a product for parents of young children, etc.

To give a made-up example, if you're trying to sell an indie video game, then you'll spend your small advertising budget much more effectively if you target your ads to people who enjoy video games, than if you target the general population. If you're selling a first-person shooter video game, then you'd like to target your ads to people who play first-person shooter video games (and not necessarily target video game players who only play Farmville or Bejeweled).

It's very possible for me to imagine that highly targeted advertising to a segment of people who are interested in a product like that will be 1000 times more effective than traditional advertising that everyone sees. You're paying to show it to far fewer people, and each person is far more likely to act on it.

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