We Never Paid for Journalism • Hacker News Board

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#41

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 8:27 PM UTC

cwbrandsma wrote: post #37

jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

My understanding is that Craigslist really killed the newspapers. What funded them was a combo of full page adds and the classifieds. I remember paying $30 to post a garage sale. Since Craigslist expanded you could see each newspaper get steadily smaller and smaller over the years.

> My understanding is that Craigslist really killed the newspapers.

The newspapers had been steadily dying since the 1970s, but Craigslist certainly didn't help them any.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#42

Post by pjkundert » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 8:31 PM UTC

jbattle wrote: post #19

jagged-chisel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other major distribution network already visited every addressable location and took packages of varying sizes: the postal service. Newspaper delivery was closer to 'real-time' - it was printed this morning, and arrived for consumption during morning coffee. Many children took paper routes for some cash and delivered on their bikes. You slow down paper delivery when you start sending along multiple shipments, wei…

I never thought of this angle before, but imagine if a SV startup started a distribution model in 2019 depending on young teens riding their bikes around neighborhoods early in the morning before school. There'd be endless articles shaming them for child labor and for foisting their costs on to vulnerable workers. Really not sure what to make of that. Other than maybe our outrage triggers have been honed to a razor's…

The outrage machine has damaged our civilization, and must be pushed back harshly, by the liberty machine.

I find it handy to evaluate the source of the outrage by this metric:

If they, personally, would not lay down their own lives in defense of whomever they are “protecting”, especially if they disagree with what that person is doing — they are somebody’s shills, and should be harshly disagreed with.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#43

Post by WalterBright » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 8:37 PM UTC

jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

> newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue

Back in the 1980s (in the Datalight/Zortech days), the only game in town was advertising in computer magazines. We knew it worked because the day the monthly mag appeared on the shelf, we'd get a big spike in sales, that would then taper off through the month. It was fairly easy to correlate which computer mags mattered, how ad placement in the mag affected results, and how the size of the ad worked out.

For example, we learned to never bother advertising in August. Programmers apparently all went on vacation in August :-) but September would be a huge month for us.

I tried print advertising in the aughts, but there was literally zero return on investment.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#44

Post by notahacker » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 8:38 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #33

jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

As a consumer, the biggest appeal of print newspaper advertising (as opposed to web, social media, etc) is legitimacy. No fly-by-night scam operation will be able to afford a full page ad in a reputable magazine, and I hope newspapers also do due diligence on the advertisements they run, as their reputation (and possibly even legal liability, especially in certain fields like medicine, etc) is at stake. This means I…

I think the theory behind the legitimacy is better than the practice. Sure, you can't buy ads in national publications for a fly-by-night level scam the way you can buy social ads. But outright scams can be as big as Enron, and people running scam ICOs/MLM companies etc can definitely afford the ad bill if they don't find the sucker ratio higher through more targeted digital channels...

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#45

Post by bluk » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 8:38 PM UTC

kodablah wrote: post #36

jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

> With the dawn of digital advertising, where every view, click and conversion is neatly accounted for, advertisers have come to realize that newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue, even when it was the only game in town. They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. How does this compare with television advertising? I see them as similar. Is traditional television advertis…

Related to this, I wish more of Hulu's financials were made public. They have essentially concentrated on growing their ad-supported subscriptions by cutting the consumer price and doing subscription bundle deals with others like Spotify. Sometimes you could get Hulu for $1 per month (when it costs about ~$12 per month for an ad-free subscription).

Is it due to ad supported subscriptions being worth more to Hulu or is it just a subscription count growth strategy?

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#46

Post by WalterBright » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 8:39 PM UTC

kodablah wrote: post #36

jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

> With the dawn of digital advertising, where every view, click and conversion is neatly accounted for, advertisers have come to realize that newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue, even when it was the only game in town. They just didn't have the metrics to prove it. How does this compare with television advertising? I see them as similar. Is traditional television advertis…

An ad executive famously remarked: "I know that half of our advertising budget is wasted. I just don't know which half."

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#47

Post by im3w1l » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 8:42 PM UTC

jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

> What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog

That just seems like common sense to me. The advantage of newspapers should be that they have more readers, not that their readers are any "clickier".

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#48

Post by akgerber » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 8:47 PM UTC

jbattle wrote: post #19

jagged-chisel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other major distribution network already visited every addressable location and took packages of varying sizes: the postal service. Newspaper delivery was closer to 'real-time' - it was printed this morning, and arrived for consumption during morning coffee. Many children took paper routes for some cash and delivered on their bikes. You slow down paper delivery when you start sending along multiple shipments, wei…

I never thought of this angle before, but imagine if a SV startup started a distribution model in 2019 depending on young teens riding their bikes around neighborhoods early in the morning before school. There'd be endless articles shaming them for child labor and for foisting their costs on to vulnerable workers. Really not sure what to make of that. Other than maybe our outrage triggers have been honed to a razor's…

Outrage about child labor in the bicycle delivery business is well over a century old, and for good reason [0].

Newspaper delivery, on the other hand, was a short before-school/after-school job (back when evening papers were a thing) that didn't particularly interfere with schoolwork, and had already been displaced by adults in cars in the 90s after our society ceded street space as automobile death zones instead of treating it as public space that children could be expected to ride bikes along safely[1].

[0] https://mashable.com/2016/07/20/bike-messengers/ [1] there was plenty of resistance, but ultimately American society evolved into a technological dystopia where we permitted a new technology to be introduced to public spaces in spite of massive safety issues, ultimately overwhelming traditional uses https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/10/street-safety-am...

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#49

Post by ghaff » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 8:51 PM UTC

Reedx wrote: post #40

Journalism is in such a disastrous state, I feel like/hope there's a growing appetite for a source that is of genuinely high quality and has an uncompromising approach. No ads, no clickbait, no partisan nonsense, no dark patterns, no hit pieces, no mixing of news and opinion. Just uncompromisingly focused fact-based journalism (of course there will always be some bias and mistakes, but there's a lot you can do to mit…

You pay about $20/month today for a digital subscription for one of the global brands like the New York Times, Economist, etc. which still have ads to a greater or lesser degree.

They're doing kinda/sorta OK with digital subscriptions but basically journalism is expensive to produce.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#50

Post by vilhelm_s » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 8:52 PM UTC

jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

I would point to the graph here: https://baekdal.com/thoughts/what-killed-the-newspapers-goog...

The increased income of Google (which is nearly all ads) matches the decreased income of the newspapers, so it doesn't seem like the ad spending actually decreased, it just moved away from the papers.