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Won’t Subscribe

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Re: Won’t Subscribe

#101

Post by marcus_holmes »

I don't see a solution to the subscription vs micropayment problem, but I wonder if we can solve three problems with one solution.

We have a problem where "who is a journalist?" is not defined.

We have another problem that the advertising model of paying for journalism isn't going to work (as TFA points out), and readers need to start paying for their news.

We have another problem that bad actors in our society are paying for misinformation to be spread in order to warp people's political perceptions.

So... can we:

Define a journalist as someone who makes their entire living from selling articles that they write to their readers (also applies to videos/podcasts/radio/etc). And by extension, a "news organisation" is one that sells news articles to its readers (and pays journalists to write them).

Define a difference between "news" - articles that readers pay for, and "fake news" - articles that are paid for by a sponsor organisation.

Organisations that don't charge their readers are still able to publish whatever they like. But they're not considered "news" organisations. The credibility that goes with printing actual paper moves to selling the stories, not the adverts.

Citing or quoting an article that isn't paid for results in a "but that's not news, it's promotional bullshit" - if someone is paying to have this published, then clearly they have a reason for that, and that reason is probably not because it's the truth (otherwise they wouldn't need to pay to publish it).

Forcing news organisations to make their readers and not their advertisers or owners their primary customer would definitely improve the quality of news.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#102

Post by foxrider »

jdc wrote: post #97
bbarn wrote: post #95

Media is one of the most complicated problems we face in this age. We have on one side a desire for information to be free, and on the other side a desire to profit for one's labor. The middle ground between that is to attract people to give you some of their money for your labor, which changes the nature of the published works. Now your published works must not only be informative, but exciting, and more so than any…

Where does advertising fit into this viewpoint?

It used to be an ideal choice, but as article correctly mentions - we killed it. First some websites got way too greedy with annoying and harmful ads, then the adblockers cut all ad revenue to maybe 1/3 of what it was and then Google and Facebook took over.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#103

Post by bloak »

Symbiote wrote: post #28
ziml77 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly doubt Bloomberg cares enough. They make their money selling terminal subscriptions and data feeds for obscene amounts.

Sites are gradually tightening up on workarounds like clearing cookies. Simply opening Bloomberg nwes in a private tab now fails (I think it's a bug that the site can detect a private tab is used).

It worked for me just now, with Chrome. If you're on Linux, have you tried `mkdir /tmp/t234 && HOME=/tmp/t234 firefox` or creating a new local user and logging on as that user? It would be interesting to know why your private tab isn't working.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#104

Post by marcus_holmes »

jdc wrote: post #97
bbarn wrote: post #95

Media is one of the most complicated problems we face in this age. We have on one side a desire for information to be free, and on the other side a desire to profit for one's labor. The middle ground between that is to attract people to give you some of their money for your labor, which changes the nature of the published works. Now your published works must not only be informative, but exciting, and more so than any…

Where does advertising fit into this viewpoint?

Advertising was the primary business model for newsprint (also cable news, etc). When the internet came along, the news organisations continued this model. It worked at first, but then (as TFA says) the duopoloy has effectively strangled the advertising model. And some organisations (looking at you Buzzfeed) gamed the system to produce clickbait.

Advertising isn't intrinsic to journalism. You can happily employ journalists and publish stories without advertising, provided someone provides the money.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#105

Post by marcus_holmes »

foxrider wrote: post #102
jdc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does advertising fit into this viewpoint?

It used to be an ideal choice, but as article correctly mentions - we killed it. First some websites got way too greedy with annoying and harmful ads, then the adblockers cut all ad revenue to maybe 1/3 of what it was and then Google and Facebook took over.

Not the ideal choice - who provides the money becomes the customer, and keeping the customer happy is important.

I used to run a newspaper, and you definitely get calls from advertisers saying "I don't like this article, change it or I stop advertising with you". Tough calls.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#106

Post by ecmascript »

The main problem with media today is that I don't want to subscribe, I want to pay for maybe a specific piece. But all media outlets require one to subscribe so I won't even consider it.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#107

Post by himinlomax »

samsquire wrote: post #3

It's so difficult to make money when everyone wants things to be free. I pay for Medium and that's all right now. I would much like to see the micropayment future - it has to be part of the browser. I would like to pay in lieu of time. If I could see page statistics of how much time it took for a page to be put together and costs of hosting - I could make a contribution based on this information. I've given random £1…

> It's so difficult to make money when everyone wants things to be free.

From a sysadmin POV, the main benefit of the free-as-in-beer-ness of Free Software is that I don't have to deal with the bullshit of licensing, CALs, talking to sales reps and so on, even when my employer would have the cash to pay for it.

Likewise, the main benefit of free content is that I don't have to worry about things like monitoring my bank statements. I can and do pay for some services, and I could afford to pay for more, but each addition increases my financial cognitive load non linearly.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#108

Post by ramanathanrv »

This is indeed a huge problem. In the current form, it quickly become unsustainable (in terms of both time and money) for customers to work with so many subscriptions. Maybe the end state is Netflix/Prime like platform for digital news wherein the platform can share the subscription revenue across all the participating media companies depending on the usage. The argument against that is - these platforms now control what is produced, their price and distribution. Such an arrangement will eventually subvert democracy.

Our team is working on creating a micro payments platform called ana.money.

We don't see this as micropayments vs subscriptions. But micropayments & subscriptions. Media outlets (text/audio/video) will benefit from offering both these forms of payments to let customers access their content.

Our goal is to build an infrastructure that supports this worldview. We will make it incredibly easy for publishers to sell both individual articles and subscriptions: taking care of user identity, invoicing, taxation, cross border/multi-currency, etc..

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#109

Post by isolli »

notatoad wrote: post #23
gombosg wrote: post #7

How would you pay for individual articles? Up-front? (If not, that's called donation.) If so, then what happens if you happen not to enjoy the content? Will you (users) feel like playing lottery every time you purchase an article? Feel disappointed for the purchase you just made? Or just quit paying on a certain site, for a certain author etc. after reading too many 'bad' (subjectively) articles? From this standpoint…

the way blendle works (worked? i heard it was shutting down) is to charge you when you click the link, and the at the bottom of the article offer you a one-click refund if you didn't like it. it seemed like a great way to do it, but ultimately i found i never used their site because it was slow and confusing to navigate.

It would be a shame if it closed. But I entirely agree with you: searching for content is very limited! There should be a proper search function, by keyword, with the ability to filter by publication.

For instance I once read part 1 of a very interesting investigation, but I could never find part 2 in Blendle (even though I could easily find it on the web). Also, a way to copy-paste a URL in the app and thus pay for an article one has already found is a must-have, in my opinion.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#110

Post by sam_lowry_ »

When I contribute to an article or help a journalist in the investigation, I usually receive the full text from that same journalist around publication time. It's a sign of gratitude, pretty much like a final Thank you in an email.
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