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Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
131–140 of 314 posts
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#132Earlier 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.
A monthly flat fee that gives access to practically all paywalled websites, video services and amazons digital bookshelf. The fee is divided to content creators based on time spent on content, not clicks. No ads, no other tracking. (You may need some time multiplier for different types of content.) I would imagine you could count me in with significantly larger monthly fee than what I currently spend on digital media…
> no other tracking
What other tracking could there possibly be once they're tracking everything I view on every site that monetizes its content?
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you or proxygeek by chance subscribers to WaPo? If not, I'm not sure why. Also, opening articles in private windows also has it pop up on my laptop. BTW, if the take away is subscription is the answer for their sustainability over having to serve ads that utilize tracking, that's an argument to be had. Of course, inherent in that argument is that non-tracking ads are simply not profitable enough for them, which s…
I worked in ad tech for a number of years, so maybe I can address this one. Ads that are annotated with tracking/targeting capabilities are in fact substantially more valuable. There's the obvious aspect (targeted ads in general) but there's also the ability to measure whether your ads are actually working. Analytics requires tracking too. This is an oversimplification, but let's say you're buying ads at 10 cents per…
there's also the ability to measure whether your ads are actually working.
This is not unique to online advertising. It's possible to tell is ads are working in paper/radio/television, as well. Companies have been doing it for literally hundreds of years.
The only value online ad tracking adds is near real-time feedback, and granularity. Which is useless to 99% of companies, since the process of making large ad buying decisions still takes weeks or months.
The benefits of online ad targeting have been perverted from a nice add-on to something that is absolutely necessary because it helps fuel the paychecks of the advertising middlemen.
Want to advertise your movie to movie fans? Put ads on a movie fan web site. Want to attract car buyers in Bedrock City? Put your ads on a Bedrock City web site. Want to increase sales of Slurm Cola to American man 18-25? Put Slurm Cola ads on content of interest to American males 18-25.
It's not rocket surgery.
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
There actually aren't too many national news gathering services in the U.S. You generally have NYT, WashPo, Reuters, AssocPress. Even LATimes, BostonGlobe, and ChicagoTribune, which are big, focus most of their real reporting locally.
So for most general national news, there really isn't as much content as many would think, and adding each one still brings significant value.
The 100s of newspapers you refer to derive most of their content from the big ones, and maybe add their own analysis and slant.
A subscription model that provides access to 2 or 3 of the big ones, plus 1 or 2 local ones, and 1 or 2 special interest ones seems to make a lot of sense.
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> There's a cliché about "the internet killed newspapers." No, internet ad companies killed newspapers by falsely convincing them that an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper, so they have to make up the difference by harvesting everyone's data. I think it's a little bit of both. Internet commoditized newspapers and unbundled them, allowing us to peruse individual articles wi…
Then again, were they wrong? The model works.
I think you're mistaken there. If the model worked, then thousands of newspapers wouldn't have closed, downsized, or worse. We'd be back in the 80's when cities like Cincinnati and Chicago had FOUR real daily newspapers, and just about every single radio station had its own news department.
What happened is that the internet ad companies convinced newspapers that an ad that used to cost $1,000 for 1,000 people to see in print should only cost 10¢ for 1,000 people to view online.
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#136Can you explain how it is prompting users? Working fine for me (using 62.0.3 on OSX)
Are you or proxygeek by chance subscribers to WaPo? If not, I'm not sure why. Also, opening articles in private windows also has it pop up on my laptop. BTW, if the take away is subscription is the answer for their sustainability over having to serve ads that utilize tracking, that's an argument to be had. Of course, inherent in that argument is that non-tracking ads are simply not profitable enough for them, which s…
But with subscription, they track you with even more accuracy. Unless you are ready to subscribe using a different identifier everyday.
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#137Sure, it's always the ads. Dem evil users want free content without ever even seeing an ad. As long as websites misrepresent their users concerns, nothing will change. The real problem is, people are starting to become aware that opening a website isn't what it used to be. Code is run, data is stored, behavior is evaluated... All that while making it seem like you're only shown dumb content.
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked in ad tech for a number of years, so maybe I can address this one. Ads that are annotated with tracking/targeting capabilities are in fact substantially more valuable. There's the obvious aspect (targeted ads in general) but there's also the ability to measure whether your ads are actually working. Analytics requires tracking too. This is an oversimplification, but let's say you're buying ads at 10 cents per…
there's also the ability to measure whether your ads are actually working. This is not unique to online advertising. It's possible to tell is ads are working in paper/radio/television, as well. Companies have been doing it for literally hundreds of years. The only value online ad tracking adds is near real-time feedback, and granularity. Which is useless to 99% of companies, since the process of making large ad buyin…
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Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#139Why are different organizations taking such an affront to Firefox's tracking protection? I don't have this problem at WaPo with uBlock + uMatrix. As far as I understand it only takes effect by default in private browsing mode. I think it's more crucial than ever that everyone use adblockers and refuse to support sites that retaliate with anti-social behavior. Yes, news orgs need funding, but there's no requirement th…
Are we really blocking ads or are we really blocking malware? Calling our privacy tools adblockers is a misnomer don't you think for any site can simple put ad in a div and not get it blocked.
Are there any ads that aren't just scams anyway?
Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if WaPo makes a distinction between subscribers and non-subscribers for this behavior (I'm not sure if they do or don't), they they are very clearly giving you a choice for how to pay for your content, with your money or with whatever information that can get out of you, and to that end they don't want you to block that because they actually want to get something of value out of the transaction. > I think it's…
I don't know how WaPo does this, but all newspapers I've tried including NYT and The Guardian and The Economist have a lot of tracking in their apps even for subscribers. So it's a crap deal.
Yep, this is what really makes me mad. You can't argue that alternatives to tracking don't exist when no one is actually trying the alternatives. You can't choose between paying and getting tracked; it's get tracked regardless and hear them nag you to pay them for the privilege.