A few years ago I might have payed for Reuters news, but they sort of destroyed themselves this past few years perhaps because of financial incentives or mismanagement or simply the journalism zeitgeist. Maybe just another casualty of 2020.
Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy
61–70 of 127 posts
Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy
#62"audiences prepared to pay $34.99 per month for a deeper level of coverage" Holy crap...who is this audience? NYT is $4/month, WAPO is $4-6/month, etc. Edit: Ah, okay, intro pricing that shifts to ~$17/month after a year. Still, though, that's half of this proposed pricing.
NYT is $4/4 weeks (not per month) during its trial period. That plan jumps to ~$18/mo after that ($17 per 4 weeks => ~$18/mo). WaPo is similar. The audience appears to be people who subscribe to Bloomberg, which is in the same price bracket.
I'm surprised they would be competitors. My (perhaps incorrect) assumption is that Bloomberg would have much more in-depth business coverage.
And that Reuters would have more breadth, but significantly less depth, and competing more generally with AP than Bloomberg.
Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy
#63I wonder at what point Google needs to pay attention to this. If a large number of websites are behind registration or paywalls, then the chance that any individual person searching would have a subscription (or registration) to any individual news site is pretty low. People might have some small number of subscriptions, but not for many sites. So, why keep returning search results that the end user can't use without…
Google used to have a policy of banning cloaked sites but they also don't want users to search for 'New York Times' and get some result that is not 'The New York Times'.
So that rule seems to go out of the window for this reason?
Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy
#64Although it's regrettable that Reuters' content will be harder to access, it's a positive trend for the news ecosystem to generate increasing revenue through a subscription-based business model rather than selling ads. The more money that comes from subscriptions, the more that news coverage will reflect the interests of subscribers rather than advertisers.
Here's the thing with the proliferation of paywalls in news sites: it just makes disinformation and the spreading of fake news all that much easier if you can't fact-check easily. I understand people need to get paid, but I don't know if this is quite the right way to go.
They should charge for today's news, but give free access to older news (olds?) to facilitate research.
Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy
#65Although it's regrettable that Reuters' content will be harder to access, it's a positive trend for the news ecosystem to generate increasing revenue through a subscription-based business model rather than selling ads. The more money that comes from subscriptions, the more that news coverage will reflect the interests of subscribers rather than advertisers.
Here's the thing with the proliferation of paywalls in news sites: it just makes disinformation and the spreading of fake news all that much easier if you can't fact-check easily. I understand people need to get paid, but I don't know if this is quite the right way to go.
It also presents a problem for the news companies, as it makes it even harder to inform viewers of things that the viewers don’t want to know / believe.
Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy
#66"audiences prepared to pay $34.99 per month for a deeper level of coverage" Holy crap...who is this audience? NYT is $4/month, WAPO is $4-6/month, etc. Edit: Ah, okay, intro pricing that shifts to ~$17/month after a year. Still, though, that's half of this proposed pricing.
FT is even worse; $50-$100 per month for individual subscribers, depending on which package you have and whether you catch a promotion.
I agree with the other poster who suggested Reuters is targeting pros with this pricing.
Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy
#67I wonder at what point Google needs to pay attention to this. If a large number of websites are behind registration or paywalls, then the chance that any individual person searching would have a subscription (or registration) to any individual news site is pretty low. People might have some small number of subscriptions, but not for many sites. So, why keep returning search results that the end user can't use without…
could not agree with this more and this has gone on far too long. why does google allow this? as you say it is 100% cloaking to have the entire article indexed but not present it in the subsequent page. Sure, publishers feel they need paywalls for revenue purposes; have at it. That should not absolve them from the "rules" everyone else has to follow. Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or…
If they are cloaking, can we get around the paywall by using the Google crawler user agent string?
Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy
#68Thompson Reuters business model at least used to be similar to Bloomberg’s: create first to market reporting and use that data as Alpha to sell financial services.
While moving to monetize the news side certainly doesn’t preclude this, I wonder if it will produce more friction than value?
Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anyone pay for these kind of sites? I just can’t imagine doing it. I already have streaming subscriptions I just cannot imagine paying for news. I know that is a problem for the internet and journalism in general but what person will buy a Reuters sub? I can maybe see a NY Times sub or WSJ for some people but it has to be the best of the best. And still I personally wouldn’t do it. I don’t need to know news. It’…
I'm not sure, but I would have thought it would be the opposite — you should not pay to read (or read at all) biased journals such as the NYT, WSJ, or Fox etc. , and instead only pay attention to journals with minimal bias like Reuters and AP.
You can't equate WSJ/NYT with Reuters or AP.
They serve completely different purposes. The "biases" of them is hardly relevant unless you are routinely taking their opinion sections as fact.
Re: Reuters website goes behind paywall in new strategy
#70"Reuters.com will remain free for a preview period, but will require users to register after five stories. It is not immediately clear when it will begin charging." Reuters reporting about Reuters in the third person is amusing. "We asked ourselves when we would begin charging but we didn't know."
They should consider https://www.digitimes.com/index.asp 's model:
The news articles are free for a few days. After that, access to older articles require premium subscription. This generates eyeballs and ads revenue for the site especially for hot news.
They also generate the premium quarterly industrial reports which are very informative and marketing, product folks of certain industrial love to pay for them.