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

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

#481

Post by CydeWeys »

DeathArrow wrote: post #377
dx034 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a few quarters. They'll survive and be back where they are now when the economy bounces back (whenever that may be). They could take a 100% cut for several quarters without cutting expenses. Small ad companies are the ones that will really suffer. They don't have Google's deep pockets and diversification.

Until then people might learn that an online experience without ads is possible.

The current online experience is not remotely possible without ads. I'm willing to wager that the vast majority of content that you consume online is advertising supported, not directly supported by you. All of that is gonna start going away without advertising revenue.

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

#482

Post by CydeWeys »

serf wrote: post #332
CydeWeys wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not funny, it's just tired and repetitious, and HN discourages joking around anyway because it leads to low quality conversations and contests over who can be funnier instead of who can contribute the most meaningfully to a conversation.

If you think a comment is inappropriate, flag it. Don't complain about it -- the guidelines ask you not to. Just flag it. I found that guideline when looking for the 'discourage joking' guideline. I never found the joking one, though. I don't think that it exists. I sort of get what you mean that it's discouraged, but I don't think it's something as broad as 'joking', more like "Jokes require substance and relatabili…

My larger point here is that everyone on HN knows about ad blockers and is using them if they want to be, so it's tired and repetitious to keep seeing the same smug "Well why are you even seeing ads, just use an ad blocker" comments. The ads matter, even if you aren't personally seeing them. Ads are what funds the majority of content online. Most people are still seeing them. It's reasonable to have a discussion about ads, and responses like "Just use an adblocker" are just thread derails, as we're seeing here.

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

#483

Post by CydeWeys »

dataduck wrote: post #406
kitotik wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s not talk abstractly. How many deaths within your family and circle of friends are you willing to accept?

Good question. How many deaths within your family and circle of friends are you willing to accept from political instability resulting from lockdowns?

Zero. And so far there have been zero, but I know of people who've actually died from COVID-19.

We are very, very far from political instability still. Let's not be alarmist.

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

#484

Post by stronglikedan »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #449
pgrote wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't want to subscribe to just one paper. There are so many good articles in all the papers. A few years back I just went ahead and subscribed to the ones I wanted to support to try to support journalism. It was more affordable than I thought, but there is friction to keep them from taking advantage of you. For instance, at one point it was cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday edition of the NY Times to get…

Spending $100 a month on a grabbag of various newspapers is completely infeasible for the average person. Ergo, it's not a solution to the problem.

I'd posit that the average person who would make use of all the subscriptions, as the OP seems to be, could most certainly afford it. As hobbies go, it's really not that expensive.

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

#485

Post by CydeWeys »

malandrew wrote: post #457
CydeWeys wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That doesn't remotely change the fact that non-black people are still dying in droves, and you can't attempt to minimize this pandemic as saying "Well it's mostly black people dying, so if you're not black don't worry", which is the analogy to the post about the poor foreign immigrants dying from it in greater numbers in Sweden.

Don't just drop a link, let's hear your real argument here.

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

#486

Post by [deleted] »

soperj wrote: post #476
rgovostes wrote: post #125

The LA Times's investigation into Purdue Pharma in 2016 revealed internal Purdue documents demonstrating the company's culpability in fueling the opioid crisis. > The documents provide a detailed picture of the development and marketing of OxyContin, how Purdue executives responded to complaints that its effects wear off early, and their fears about the financial impact of any departure from 12-hour dosing. I don't h…

Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion and Scott Glover Wonder if they still work for the Times? Maybe if we rewarded the journalists behind the investigations more than the newspaper itself, they could all bandy together and create something that only does investigative journalism.

[deleted]

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

#487

Post by AtlasBarfed »

CydeWeys wrote: post #446
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a... micropayments platform? Maybe regulated by a cryptocurrency or embedded blockchain based on eyeball tracking? That would analyze the articles you like and dynamically assemble articles that are related? That would collect "quality" ratings on the article based on how deep you scrolled into it? Outside all the tech wordsoup I just spouted, there is real potential in that. Maybe it needs to be couched in an indepe…

You don't need any of those buzzwords, you just need a multi-site SSO login that you pay more per year for than any one individual paper and that lets you into the paywall of all of those paywalls. It's a trivial technology problem; the hard part is in the business partnership building, specifically in getting the different newspapers to come to an agreement in how revenue from this subscription is going to be shared…

All the mumbo jumbo is the revenue sharing part.

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

#488

Post by gdulli »

lostgame wrote: post #443
rsweeney21 wrote: post #413

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…

And nobody should be spending money beyond necessities right now - and stocking up on backup necessities. It’s not the time to be buying a new car, it’s not the time to be trying new makeup products, and then we have other issues - it’s not the time for new films in the cinema, it’s not the time for sports, the lists go on. It’s not time to buy new products, and certain subsets of products are no longer allowed to ex…

We can't be at the extreme of consuming normally, because that requires all stores to be staffed normally.

We also can't go all the way to the other extreme. If we have unprecedented employment now, with partial non-essential consumption, we don't want to see what it looks like when we turn down consumption to further extreme degree on top of that.

We need an equilibrium, and shutting down the economy fully is as misguided as reopening it prematurely.

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

#489

Post by patrickcteng »

soperj wrote: post #476
rgovostes wrote: post #125

The LA Times's investigation into Purdue Pharma in 2016 revealed internal Purdue documents demonstrating the company's culpability in fueling the opioid crisis. > The documents provide a detailed picture of the development and marketing of OxyContin, how Purdue executives responded to complaints that its effects wear off early, and their fears about the financial impact of any departure from 12-hour dosing. I don't h…

Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion and Scott Glover Wonder if they still work for the Times? Maybe if we rewarded the journalists behind the investigations more than the newspaper itself, they could all bandy together and create something that only does investigative journalism.

I think ProPublica does what you're describing.

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

#490

Post by CydeWeys »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #218
dkobran wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden has by far the highest number of cases/deaths with respect to neighboring countries. Finland has 1/10th of the number of deaths per capita [0]. They are also faring much worse than Denmark and Norway (in terms of both cases and deaths) where much stricter measures are enforced. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/04/14/sweden-22...

Why limited to neighboring countries though? The fact is Sweden has no full quarantine and they have less infection rates and less fatalities per capita than many countries with full quarantine. It's clear that full quarantine may not be effective.

Full quarantine is effective, almost tautologically so. If the virus is still increasing exponentially then whatever quarantine measures you do have in place simply aren't full enough yet. At the extreme end of a full quarantine, imagine everyone is prohibited from leaving their homes for any reason, and once a week someone in a fully sealed bunny suit comes by to drop off food for the week. That's a pretty darn full quarantine, and you better believe it'd be effective.

Fortunately, we don't need to go to such extreme measures to get the replication rate below 1, but my point is, that extreme measures absolutely do work. The virus isn't magic; it needs to spread through relatively close personal contact. If you eliminate personal contact and sharing of spaces entirely, it cannot spread at all.

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