Live data from Hacker News

L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

variety.com

451–460 of 568 posts

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My paper? I live in NYC. One sided? There is a quote (forget who) "Facts Have a Well-Known Liberal Bias". I'll leave it at that.

That formulation comes from a Paul Krugman opinion piece from 2017: "Facts Have a Well-Known Liberal Bias" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/opinion/facts-have-a-well... Krugman used the similar "The Facts Have A Well-Known Center-Left Bias" in 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160509144531/https://krugman.b... Stephen Colbert's 2006 Press Correspondents' Dinner roast used the line "reality has a well-known libera…

Addenda: There's a ... related ... sentiment expressed by John Stuart Mill regarding conservatives, ~1865-68

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1486818-conservatives-are-n...

I suspect the general notion goes back further.

Einstein's "great spirits" quote also reflects a similar sentiment:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/470750-great-spirits-have-a...

I'd be shocked if Voltaire didn't have a few related bon mots.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Barista's sister would fall into the thousands (or even 10,000s) of 2nd connections you have, in which there will almost certainly be young deaths. The goalie might have had health complications. I personally know at least 2 people with diabetes, 2 with asthma, plus one post-cancer. Maybe I'm a little older than you, but many of us would know a young-ish person that would die (a quarter maybe if the 0.2% chance o…

Are the chances of these people dying from COVID greater than other risks we take every single day, yet don't shut down society and curtail freedoms over? That is really the only question that matters.

Yes, for example covid deaths in Scotland are 1/3 of all deaths, deaths in UK:

"The Office for National Statistics said that in the week to 3 April, 16,387 people died in England and Wales, an increase of 5,246 deaths compared with the previous week and 6,082 more than the five-year average."

And that's WITH a lock down, way before the massive peak that could have happened.

It's like you're stuck in the wishful thinking stage the rest of us were in two months ago.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#453

Why has no one developed a news subscription service yet? I want to be able to pay 50¢ here or $1 there for an interesting article from NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Bloomberg, The Guardian, The New Yorker etc., without paying for a subscription. I can't afford to subscribe to all of them. There are not enough hours in the day for getting a return on my investment. New York Times $50/yr Wall Street Journal $100 Bloomberg $420 LA T…

The whole "competing for clicks" model seems to lead inescapably to a race to the bottom.

I currently subscribe to the Boston Globe, but 90% of the articles I read from them is the sports section, but (I hope) less than 90% of my money is spent covering the Red Sox and Patriots. If it was pay by the article the incentives would be terrible.

Some systems need not to be optimized to chase metrics, they need slack and produce value that is hard to measure. This is the kind of problem that the technology and business worlds have been uniquely incapable of solving.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#454
post #26

I’m definitely in the camp that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” itself. Sitting in California where there are so few cases makes me wonder if the economic toll is totally worth it. Seems like we’ve used a tsunami to put out a campfire.

Why did I eat? I’m not even hungry anymore!

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden's deaths per capita is neck and neck with the United States and following approximately the same trajectory with no lockdown. It's neither appreciably better nor appreciably worse. http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

The US, like the UK, did a terrible job early on when containment was most critical. Several states are in lockdown now but arguably, the reason for our awful current new cases/death rate is due to the resistance to taking action in February when it first hit. There are also many places in the US that are not in lockdown. From another comment: “Approximately 44 of 50 states have lower per capita death rates than Swed…

> the reason for our awful current new cases/death rate is due to the resistance to taking action in February when it first hit.

The reason is actually NYC, specifically Cuomo and DiBlasio passing the buck back and forth and doing nothing. If you remove just NYC, the rest of the country is for the most part doing a lot better than Europe.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#456

There is no point in advertising if no one can buy your product right now. Retailers, dine-in restaurants, movies, hotels, travel, pro sports, big clothing brands, concerts, events, tourism. The list goes on and it is massive. All these industries are huge spenders on advertising. Then there are all the products and services that _could_ be bought, but consumers and companies have pulled back on because of uncertaint…

Since ads are a supply-demand market, supply must equal demand. There is nobody who can store ad slots in a warehouse and sell them later. Since publishers are unlikely in the short term to take down their websites just because revenue falls, that has led to prices dropping to near zero on the open market. The only real revenues now are from advertisers who have fixed price per impression or per click contracts, or w…

That's not really how ads are priced, though. Google and FB will be reluctant to see the price of ads go down. They also control the supply of how many ads they put on the page. They make sure the supply of ads for keywords is always less than the demand to fit an optimal price/revenue curve.

It's more like OPEC, and less like a free market.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one can argue that Sweden has a larger immigrant population than those countries. Majority of deaths in Sweden are from immigrant populations. They are blamed for not following the social distancing rules that most Swedens follow day to day. Also they are poorer, live in larger families in small houses etc. and it is harder for them to follow the rules.

One can also argue that the virus doesn't care about your ethnicity, and just because it's hit some particular community hard first doesn't mean it's not going to spread through the rest of your society too absent serious measures being taken. In the US, focusing on the "others" who had the virus, in our case the Chinese, while not taking effective measures early enough to stop the disease, was a huge mistake. It was…

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/us/coronavirus-race.html

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#458
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a per capita basis sweden isn't really more worse off than many other countries that have shutdown. It's about middle of the pack. Personal responsibility lets us have our cake and eat it too. http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

I hope you're not looking at case numbers, because Sweden is so far behind on testing compared to most of europe. Look at the rate of growth for deaths per day (filtering out weekends because obviously swedes refuse to die on weekends) Most places are seeing a plateau in number of daily deaths while Sweden is still growing exponentially

I'm looking at deaths per capita. It can still be manipulated but it's the hardest to manipulate.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#459
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it would be indirectly controlled by Government in power,In effect WORSE than current state.

Hence an independent entity. The history is complex. Presently the press are ruled by advertisers. https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft

There's no such thing as a truly independent entity if someone else controls the purse strings.

Re: L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm just not clever enough, but this reads like a homework assignment saying the same thing OP did much more eloquently: "There is no point in advertising if no one can buy your product right now"

The element I was trying to add but not wording well is that even if some people are still paying for ads, and still have things to sell, they price they pay will be dropping dramatically. Theres a reason Netflix has been advertising so heavily lately - with cheap ad spots, they might as well collect as many customers as possible now.

Fair enough, my comment was a bit tongue in cheek. Thanks for clarifying the point.
Post reply on HN