The Free and Open Internet

What was your startup about?

The article Fred was looking for, without the paywall: https://beta.trimread.com/articles/27

> End-users might derive more value from some sites than others. In the extreme case there could be two or more sites where one site had a really really good article that the end-user derived a lot of value from but in the same month they read a lot of content on the other site/sites that did not provide them with anywhere near the value of the single only article they read on the other site. And yet they end up giving most of their money to the sites that provided them with less value.

The solution to this is to allow the user to apportion their monthly fee between the sites, but only for the current month. If the user doesn't specify anything for this month then it gets apportioned based on articles read. Then there is no trouble in forgetting because if you forget then the default is in proportion to the number of articles. On the other hand, if the publication posts clickbait or articles padded with filler, the user can retaliate by allocating 0% to that publication for the month. And if there is a really great article you can do the opposite and allocate more.

I suspect the real problem here is that the publishers would need to take the long view, even though they're struggling already. Because if they did this, the first thing that would happen is that any users who subscribe to more than one such publication already would subscribe to the combined service and save money. So the first thing that happens is a short-term revenue decline.

Then the advantage of getting every publication for one fee allows them to gain new users, but that takes longer. You need to advertise the new offering to non-existing customers and convince them to sign up. But the publications need to stick with it long enough for that to happen. If they start to drop out before it does, the whole thing falls apart.

With Spotify and Netflix, you measure engagement by how many times a piece was listened to/viewed, and the only measure is popularity.

With advertising-based journalism, you measure engagement by clicks - which is bad because it gives us clickbait. You can argue about whether there is clickbait in music and video, but we know that clickbait in journalism is definitely a problem.

In an ideal world, there would be a simple measure of how good/relevant/interesting/informative a news or opinion article is. I don't think anyone has discovered that yet. To my mind, this is the core problem. If we can solve "how to measure objective quality in journalism", then we can apply all sorts of business models to it. All the current business models fall short not because the model is inherently flawed, but because they reward bad journalism. If how much an advert paid the publisher was linked to how good the article was, then we'd have good journalism. As it is now, we reward clickbait-y high-volume low-quality journalism, so that's what we get.

yeah was gonna say Medium literally makes you pay money to read now.