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Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

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Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#131

Post by eitland »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #80
eli wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a publisher, there's absolutely no way I'm letting Google, Apple or Facebook manage the identity or control the authentication of my readers.

Why not? Saves you the trouble of building and maintaining a secure access system. You likely gain more users because of network effects, which doesn’t cut your advertising budget so much as supplements it. If your trying to preserve user privacy, there’s a good chance you’re too late there - they most likely already gave that up a long time ago.

> there’s a good chance you’re too late there - they most likely already gave that up a long time ago.

People on HN keep using this in a number of contexts as an excuse to not even try.

I'm tired of it. Maybe we are to late. But if try to avoid failure then at least we have a small chance.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#132

Post by eitland »

echelon wrote: post #76

Could a startup go the Spotify/streaming music route and aggregate all of the popular news stories? I imagine bootstrapping content from NYT, WaPo, and all of the other popular news orgs, stuffing them into a common and unobtrusive web interface, and then providing them all for free to visitors. The startup could then try implementing micro transactions or minimal ads and do a revenue share with the original publishe…

Blendle has been doing something similar and I happily send some dollars their way from time to time although I'd admit it would probably be more if they hosted more linux magazines etc.

Also I hear they are changing their business model to monthly payments. If this is true I guess I'm out unless they suddely - like Spotify - will give me access to everything I'm interested in.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#133

Post by readams »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

God, the tone of that article was nauseating. Google isn't "unlocking" anything. They're just fixing a loophole in incognito mode that shouldn't have been there in the first place. And it's not like that was the only option for this. When these 'incognito detectors' first became viable, I just set up firefox where when you quit out it automatically cleared your entire history. So I would normally browse in Chrome, bu…

Cookie Autodelete on FireFox is really great; it automatically clears cookies and local storage as soon as you navigate away.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#134

Post by Skunkleton »

dymk wrote: post #107
brandmeyer wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think this was a tiny minority, too. But a key takeway from https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-n... was this statistic: "26% of Internet users are now blocking ads." Its a minority, but its not tiny.

Very, very probably only to declutter their screen. Does the survey collect intent about why they install it? I doubt anywhere near 26% block ads because of tracking. I doubt even 1% if users even understand what tracking means.

I doubt that even 1% of internet users understand the extent of the PII that is collected. I would guess if the general public understood how all this worked, there would be many more people who objected to the practice.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#135

Post by playpause »

eappleby wrote: post #104

Is this update preventing publishers from identifying if a reader is accessing its site using Incognito mode, or is it preventing publishers from identifying who the reader is and whether they've reached their article limit? If the former, why is knowing whether an unidentifiable reader is accessing a website via Incognito mode a privacy issue? If the latter, why wouldn't publishers just block all access to their sit…

It's the former.

> why is knowing whether an unidentifiable reader is accessing a website via Incognito mode a privacy issue?

Because it makes Incognito less useful, and Incognito is a tool for people to control their privacy.

Anyway, Incognito isn't only used for anonymous browsing. For example, a user might use an Incognito window to register on a shopping site, providing all their personal details, just because they don't want Facebook to see their activity on this third party site (and they don't want to bother signing out of Facebook in their main browser context). So it's reasonable to consider "is using Incognito mode" to be private information.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#136

Post by throwaway542134 »

eli wrote: post #54
qmarchi wrote: post #10

There are going to be people complaining about the new requirement to have an account to view content. To the publishers, you should _really_ use some kind of federated login. Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. but don't forget those who are willing to have a unique account.

As a publisher, there's absolutely no way I'm letting Google, Apple or Facebook manage the identity or control the authentication of my readers.

As a user, there's absolutely no way I'm going to give you a real name and email address if you roll your own authentication. I probably won't use your service at all.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#137

Post by johncalvinyoung »

reaperducer wrote: post #129
52-6F-62 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Apple News?

Yep. And if the price of two cups of coffee a month is too much of a burden on one's wallet, there's always Blendle for 40¢ an article.

I go the other direction. I am way too fast a reader and read too widely to handle per-article microtransactions well. I do have a subscription to a couple of my top magazines and news sources, but end up reading up to the free allotment on many, many more every month. I'd happily pay $30-50/mo for unlimited access to many sources, but it'd have to have 10+ of my favorites on board to make it worthwhile. I read 20-50 serious articles a day, across free and paywalled and subscription content. I'm unwilling to pay $10-25/mo for each source individually. But if the average could get down around $5/mo for each major source (that I'll read 15-50 articles/mo from, given the access), and leftover change to the ones I read only occasionally, I'd be delighted. Basically, yeah, I want Spotify for journalism, even if it's a good bit more expensive.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#139

Post by austhrow743 »

aorth wrote: post #40

The title is confusing click bait and the article content is garbage... "intrusion attempt"? "master key"?

The whole thing uses weird language to try to paint the practice of serving one thing to google and another to people coming from google as some kind of feature.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#140

Post by afastow »

liability wrote: post #124

So real news continues to make their content harder to read, while fake news does everything they can to spread far and wide. Journalism for profit is fundamentally broken.

I don't think anyone argues that journalism is in a healthy place today, but what is the alternative? The problem is that real news costs real money to produce. Newspapers could be not-for-profit but their reporters would still need a salary to do their jobs.
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