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We Never Paid for Journalism

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Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#91

Post by ghaff »

WalterBright wrote: post #85
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer Shopper was more of a condensed catalog of multiple vendors. It served as a search index and comparison pricing utility. Nobody "liked" the ads other than that was the only way to become informed about a wide range of products.

> Nobody "liked" the ads People like reading ads about products they're interested in. I know I do. This idea that ads are all toxic because their purpose is to sell just isn't right.

In the Computer Shopper case, it was mostly about price discovery for things you wanted to buy. You wanted X. You flipped through pages to find a good price on X.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#92

Post by pravda »

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?…

>So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?

Because they lost their monopoly!

In most markets, there was one newspaper and that newspaper could charge advertisers as much as they wanted to.

When your monopoly rents go away, you go out of business.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#93

Post by pdonis »

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?…

> why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?

It isn't in a shambles; it's just shifted to a more efficient mode of delivery. Who is going to bother with ads printed on paper that readers have to shuffle through when they can get them delivered direct to the readers' eyeballs online?

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#94

Post by ip26 »

ghaff wrote: post #90
ip26 wrote: post #74

The model I've wished for is a large micropayment network covering many to most online news sources charging, I don't know, a penny or two per article. Maybe no charge if you close the page after two seconds. Ad views are worth less than that, and I can easily afford ten or twenty cents a day to read the news across a variety of sources. I want to pay for news. But I don't have the budget to pay $20/mo each to six gr…

$20/month is pretty much the rate in current dollars to pay for (at most) one "great newspaper."

Sure, but I think it's just one local optimum. The price is so high that few people will pay it, which means the price has to be high. But if the price was low and paying was painless, far more people might pay and generate the same or better revenue.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#96

Post by jdsully »

ghaff wrote: post #91
WalterBright wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody "liked" the ads People like reading ads about products they're interested in. I know I do. This idea that ads are all toxic because their purpose is to sell just isn't right.

In the Computer Shopper case, it was mostly about price discovery for things you wanted to buy. You wanted X. You flipped through pages to find a good price on X.

It was also how I found out that I could now have a whopping 2GB hard disk in my own machine - or that I could upgrade my 486 to a pentium with this cool new thing called the Pentium Overdrive. Computer mags were especially exciting because you got to see the progress of technology.

I think most people back in the day came away from these magazines wanting more things they didn't even know existed prior to opening it up.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#97

Post by flukus »

blueyes wrote: post #31

While the 50 cents per edition that newspapers charged was not enough to cover their costs, it sent a signal to advertisers that they were getting a certain type of eyeball. An eyeball that had 50 disposable cents per day to buy packaged news in a local market. That 50 cents was an important signal. Newspapers would find other ways of getting those same eyeballs, by striking deals with hotels and airlines and essenti…

I thought it was more to do with the type of person that read papers more than any price signal. If I were to generalize my experience with people reading papers it's that the poorest 20% of society never read them, the next 20% read the Sunday paper, the next 20% read it daily and the 20% after that read something like the economist. Through self selection advertisers could target their audiences somewhat. Of course those are extremely broad generalizations.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#98

Post by chrisco255 »

musicale wrote: post #59
ghaff wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck, Computer Shopper was an absolutely huge magazine that was almost nothing but ads. There were some mostly low quality articles to lend a little credibility but basically people bought it for the ads.

People like advertisements and used to read whole magazines made of them, but web advertising is a hated, privacy-violating, battery-draining, performance-crushing, pop-up and autoplay-infested, malware-tainted monstrosity. Advertisements used to engage and attract magazine readers, but web advertising detracts from web sites so much that ad blockers are immensely popular if not essential for a pleasant browsing expe…

I think Instagram has nailed this, personally. Their ads get seamlessly placed in your feed, they're usually interesting to look at with high quality graphics and videos, and if I don't want to see them, it's trivial to scroll past them. But the ads have definitely snagged me to make a few impulse purchases this year.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#99

Post by mrunkel »

sacrificedcapon wrote: post #81
Nextgrid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hate to burst your bubble, but fundamentally, all advertising is a "scam". It's to get you to buy stuff you really don't need. Also, the print newspaper industry isn't as clean as you think. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html You shouldn't be trusting any ad, wherever it is. Actually, the most reputable the platform, the more skeptical you should be since you are more trusting of the platform to begin with. The e…

This, like so many extreme opinions, is just wrong.

An advertisement that happens to reach someone who has a problem that your product solves isn't a scam. It is a way to get that person to know about your solution.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#100

Post by mrunkel »

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?…

The old joke was "We know 50% of our ad buy money is wasted in newspapers, we just don't know which 50%."

Now they know, and they also know the amount of waste is much higher.

This plus the destruction of classified ads has hit the newspaper industry hard.

Now pile on top all the "news" sites that don't really spend any money on editors, research, or reporting (all those sites that post articles about other articles or even worse tweets) that directly compete with newspapers on advertising money and you have a very bleak environment.

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