> Like many, I was wrong about the subscription model for the news media. I thought that a possible scheme for subscriptions could be: one for national media, in the $12–20 a month range, another, less expensive ($5–$9/month) for local news, and the last one for specialized content, whether it is a business or a leisure publication. I can't imagine how that could ever have worked. Back in the day, I mostly read stuff…
If i am going to pay to read an article, then there better be no tracking cookies, no sharing with 3rd parties and no ads on the page of the article i am reading. If not i might as well read the same content on another site.
> Netflix eats online news If Netflix is eating online news both in terms of attention and money then why wouldn't they partner with Netflix? I know a few seniors that are reluctant to switch because it doesn't have news or weather.
Honestly having a daily news show on netflix seems like such a no-brainer that I can't fathom why it isn't on there yet. You'll get a whole load of people opening netflix at least once a day for basically.
Each story could have its own video (like news stories on a text-based news site having their own page) and viewers could just watch the ones that interest them. Or they could stream them back-to-back like a season of TV. The weather forecast could be a separate video too. On-demand news.
Maybe if the different news medias organized to create a shared payment account, then individual articles could be easily deducted from that one bucket.
I thought I saw a company recently doing this... in the past, Discors tried this, but only offered a selection of articles across the various sources it covered: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/02/discors-adds-nyt/
Edit: Sorry, my reading comprehension is bad. This is a pay once, read all you want across multiple source things, not a bucket to deduct payments from. So what I responded with is not what you were looking for... but maybe it's interesting anyway.
A lot of articles don't nourish me, they make me stupider. I wouldn't pay for a poisoned meal.
To continue this analogy. When I go to a restaurant and order a steak I don't get told by the waiter that I should really be eating vegan gluten free instead. What really bothers me the most about modern "news" is that a lot of it is really just biased political commentary and editorials masquerading as news.
Biased political commentary's better than armchair political campaign strategy commentary and horserace-style campaign coverage. At least that's about something that might matter. Looking at you, NPR.
A lot of articles don't nourish me, they make me stupider. I wouldn't pay for a poisoned meal.
To continue this analogy. When I go to a restaurant and order a steak I don't get told by the waiter that I should really be eating vegan gluten free instead. What really bothers me the most about modern "news" is that a lot of it is really just biased political commentary and editorials masquerading as news.
It's no secret that many news articles these days are simply paid advertisements. Generally, I avoid the Big N mainstream "news providers" and stick to some combo of HN, twitter and reddit just to name a few.
I don’t want to pay for all the meals I eat, a large number of them are terrible... So I don’t go back. But you have to pay for what you eat.
I doesn't physically cost any practical amount of money to read an article, a tiny amount of processing power and data transfer. A physical meal costs orders of magnitude more. I understand why we should pay for articles but if you enforce payment then you'll see a flood of poorly written click bait and a race to the bottom.
What about payment with a refund option? Obviously this could be abused (and likely would be), but I'd think most people would only use the refund option if the article was truly terrible / clickbait.
It's a very difficult market. I have the feeling that journalists need support and more money to provide quality content but the current price-point of subscription is too high for the majority of people. On the other hand, free content financed by ads generally does not deliver on quality.
Business models for online media are still immature, I hope they will find the right formula.
> Like many, I was wrong about the subscription model for the news media. I thought that a possible scheme for subscriptions could be: one for national media, in the $12–20 a month range, another, less expensive ($5–$9/month) for local news, and the last one for specialized content, whether it is a business or a leisure publication. I can't imagine how that could ever have worked. Back in the day, I mostly read stuff…
If i am going to pay to read an article, then there better be no tracking cookies, no sharing with 3rd parties and no ads on the page of the article i am reading. If not i might as well read the same content on another site.
Presumably you're running an adblocker - so what does it matter?
I doesn't physically cost any practical amount of money to read an article, a tiny amount of processing power and data transfer. A physical meal costs orders of magnitude more. I understand why we should pay for articles but if you enforce payment then you'll see a flood of poorly written click bait and a race to the bottom.
Im not suggesting that it will work (to pay per article as we’re describing). But the idea that you should get something for free because you don’t like it isn’t how most things work. Caveat emptor. Conversely, people said it didn’t cost any practical amount of money to listen to music, yet Spotify thrives.
FWIW, "I didn't like it" returns culture has been growing in the US for a while. If you've ever run an Amazon seller account, you'll have gotten plenty of returns from customers for no reason other than that they didn't like the thing they bought or it "didn't meet expectations". The Costco returns line is also packed with people doing this. Point is, the mindset of not paying for something because you didn't like it is quickly making its way into the physical goods world as well, so it's not as simple as shooting down this digital goods mindset entirely.