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Won’t Subscribe

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Re: Won’t Subscribe

#131

Post by hackerfromthefu »

MattieTK wrote: post #57
zdw wrote: post #54

Can anyone comment on whether Apple News: https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ Is a good option as a single-subscription aggregator of multiple magazines and newspapers?

Generally they have a lot of media at a low cost. But if you want to support the production of this media, Apple currently take 50% of your monthly subscription as the cost of providing the service. That's even more than the app tax!

Apple are extracting 100%, or equivalent, revenue to the news providers .. but pay a fraction of the costs incurred to create it, probably 1% of revenue or less for the digital distribution.

If the costs of the news creators to create and administer those news networks was 50% of the revenue, then Apple is taking all of the profit.

Apple is simply a vampire, a troll shaking down the weak

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#132

Post by mcherm »

ricardobeat wrote: post #112

Bring back traditional advertising. No user profiling, no retargeting, no data collection. Pay for exposure and not clicks. Problem solved. Micropayments is a red herring. Print newspapers use to cost what, 50c a piece? And that included an absolutely massive printing, sales and distribution infrastructure. It is preposterous that digital publishing would cost more.

That cost also was supported by significant advertising revenues, including things like a "classified ads section" and "want ads", whole categories that now support separate industries.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#133

Post by mnky9800n »

What's strange is it used to be you would pick up a newspaper at a stand for the day, pay a dollar or whatever, and then have quite a lot of articles to read for that day. But now, it is impossible, the only way is to lock-in. And that may be for the rest of your life if the complaints about the labirynth you may navigate to unsubscribe the nytimes is to be believed. If there was some sort of daily access pass that didn't bother you, require any subscription, perhaps not even ask you to sign up for an email, that would be quite nice.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#134

Post by bigiain »

ako wrote: post #122
jeremiahlee wrote: post #114

I think the Web Monetization API currently incubating as a proposed W3C standard would provide the experience you are desiring. Consumers establish a wallet provider and install a browser extension (for now, until the standard is formally adopted). When a Web Monetization HTML tag is encountered, the browser starts streaming micropayments every second while you are engaging with the content. Content creators can then…

It solves the problem only partially: newspapers can't live from small payments on popular articles only, they need bundling to generate enough volume. Same thing can be seen with music industry: spotify doesn't pay enough per play, so artists are now told to use spotify as marketing, and make money from performances. Not sure what a newspaper performance would look like.

> Not sure what a newspaper performance would look like.

An election? /s

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#135

Post by kevsim »

ricardobeat wrote: post #112

Bring back traditional advertising. No user profiling, no retargeting, no data collection. Pay for exposure and not clicks. Problem solved. Micropayments is a red herring. Print newspapers use to cost what, 50c a piece? And that included an absolutely massive printing, sales and distribution infrastructure. It is preposterous that digital publishing would cost more.

I think if the world switched back to traditional advertising (which on the web for me means contextual targeting) and we stopped allowing third party ads to run a bunch of JS, I'd be willing to switch off my ad blockers. Until then, I'm afraid these publications won't be get paid for my eyes/clicks.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#136

Post by davidhyde »

If a newspaper is already subjective then they could make money by charging companies to write articles on topics that would influence public opinion to their benefit. That is not a serious suggestion btw ;)

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#137

Post by Santosh83 »

mnky9800n wrote: post #133

What's strange is it used to be you would pick up a newspaper at a stand for the day, pay a dollar or whatever, and then have quite a lot of articles to read for that day. But now, it is impossible, the only way is to lock-in. And that may be for the rest of your life if the complaints about the labirynth you may navigate to unsubscribe the nytimes is to be believed. If there was some sort of daily access pass that d…

Here in India the printed newspaper is still the dominant mode. Very few people I know subscribe to digital news.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#138

Post by bigiain »

mikelward wrote: post #10

> “But wait,” says Mr Manager, “you already subscribe to five publications, so you’ve proved you have a propensity to subscribe! You’re exactly my target market!” Wrong. It’s exactly because I’ve done some subscribing that I’m just not gonna do any more. Exactly. Same thing is happening with cable unbundling. Few people want to subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, ESPN+, Disney+, Peacock, and YouTube TV/Sli…

And I see it amongst my friends, who're gradually all moving to "pay for a subscription to something, to salve the 'I'm not a pirate!' conscience, and go back to BitTorrent and shared/private Emby server networks for anything you want to watch that's not on the service you're paying for".

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#139

Post by notimetorelax »

jimkleiber wrote: post #75
notimetorelax wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were printed newspaper I could go and get one for a few bucks. Digital has nothing to offer of that kind. As the other poster wrote, how else would you expand your readership?

Hmm, what if they offered a one-week or one-month access pass that didn't auto-renew. Would you be interested in something like that?

Interesting thought. I think one week pass is similar to buying 1 newspapers that is published weekly. If prices align, it’s a reasonable solution. But it’s very important that it either does not auto-renew or it’s very easy to cancel it.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#140

Post by cgriswald »

alexmingoia wrote: post #100
hnhnsomething12 wrote: post #59

What exactly are the news publishers even providing these days? They aren't a trust authority and they aren't a distribution platform. The internet undermined the first and replaced the latter. The future could be readers having a direct relationship with authors, and necessary infrastructure "unbundled" as it were. Author pays a non-partisan fact check service to accredit what they say. With proper accreditation the…

I would go as far as to say the only thing that made newspapers relevant was distribution. The readers have a direct relationship with authors now. They follow them on Twitter, YouTube, blogs, etc. Authors of news are no longer full-time journalists, but everyone online. Everything is news and everyone is an author. Why pay the NYT to tell you what people will tell you on Twitter? Why pay a local paper to tell you ab…

A video of an event isn’t news. It’s data. News is the information that can be extracted from the video and other sources and put in context.

The Twitter user doesn’t ask questions or if he does they are the wrong questions of the wrong people. And why should he bother asking any questions? He’s not getting paid and his viewers aren’t generally seeking news.

That’s not to say Twitter couldn’t work this way, with Joe Random posting about things on his block. It just doesn’t work that way now because the incentives are just not there. My Nextdoor feed is full of news about my neighborhood, but it’s wrong as often as not. Having a setup like the GP suggests is basically necessary to develop trust between readers, authors, and sources, regardless of how the author delivers their content.

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