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Won’t Subscribe

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Re: Won’t Subscribe

#161

Post by marcus_holmes »

pjc50 wrote: post #117
marcus_holmes wrote: post #101

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 p…

> 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. > Define a journalist as someone who makes their entire living from selling articles Where does https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/oct/03/daily-teleg... fit into this model?

Good question :)

I guess he's writing an opinion column though? I don't read the Torygraph so I haven't read his column. Opinion columns, as always, are not journalism.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#162

Post by MaxBarraclough »

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…

I don't have much sympathy for this argument. If you're a very heavy consumer of the content, it makes good sense that you end up paying more.

It used to be that your only options were cable or satellite packages that included lots of content you didn't want to pay for. People complained, and wished they could only pay for the content they watched. Now we have multiple competing Internet streaming subscription services, and people are complaining it isn't all bundled together.

If you only watch a few shows, you can buy them a la carte from Google/Amazon/iTunes/etc.

What really matters is pricepoint. A couple of subscriptions still runs far cheaper than a cable package. People will keep complaining until they can get every show there is for a minimal fee, but I don't see why we should expect that to be a realistic possibility.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#163

Post by chrisdinn »

kevsim wrote: post #135
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.

Underrated idea but very complex in practice. Contextual is coming back regardless as third-party cookies go away. But, I think “traditional” in this sense means brand advertising with broad reach, not micro-targeted messages for narrow audience. Like, why don’t you see nearly as many Coke ads online as you do IRL?

Hypothetically, this kind of advertiser wants “brand safe” context (high-quality, inoffensive, not-too-weird) but is otherwise mostly looking to reach as many people as possible in its core demographics. Figuring out if something is brand safe at the margin is pretty tough and you actually can’t trust ad exchanges for this signal, so that’s what at least some of that JS from advertisers is for. Also, “the margins” on the internet are huge, likely most of the page. Internet has not done well here, traditionally.

These advertisers traditionally loved primetime TV and glossy magazines, with high production values and usually safe content. A surprising amount of this brand money is still in traditional linear TV advertising, despite the fact that most key demos have already given up on linear TV.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#164

Post by tephra »

Nextgrid wrote: post #152
flexie wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers cost a lot more than typographers and delivery boys and you need a lot of them to run a modern online media. A developer on staff is sort of like a subscription that the newspaper pays. The way to bring back advertisement to newspapers is to use antitrust rules and to start taxing search engines and social networks. When Facebook or Google runs an ad for my local gym, it is taxed in some remote tropical is…

Disagreed. Developers may cost more, but you only need a handful of them for a set period of time and you can build a very simple platform if you don't chase fads (no SPA, no Kubernetes/microservices, no overpriced cloud providers). That is a one-time cost vs ongoing cost of delivery for a physical paper. There was a submission on here recently about how Remoteok.io runs on a PHP and jQuery (and a very small server b…

This would of course be true for any software development if we programmers could do real magic and create perfect software.

I assure you (given that I used to work for one of the largest news organisations in Sweden) that there is no such thing as a simple platform when it comes to news. Sure on the front it is "just" a website.

Then of course there is the subscription backends, the systems that calculate how many print papers to send to _each_ little store in the whole country, the system that people write in (regardless if you write your own you still have to have it interface with your backend, and don't forget you need to have a way for your person on the fronline in syria to publish as well), many organisations now have video which is another whole beast. Etc, etc.

Now you might not like it and just want to have just text (I'm many ways I'm with you there) but it's a lot more to having a digital newspaper than you might imagine.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#165

Post by grumple »

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…

These prices are just crazy compared to their old model. Do these papers really think they are providing as much value as Netflix (or more)? Even ignoring journalistic quality...

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#166

Post by ako »

Nextgrid wrote: post #146
ako wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> newspapers can't live from small payments on popular articles only Printed newspapers were surviving just fine despite selling for a few bucks despite it being a physical piece of paper that needed to be printed & delivered on very tight schedules. The same model should be applied for the web - the price point is already proven to be affordable enough for the majority of the market, and the lack of logistics would…

Newspapers were not surviving from few bucks: they had subscriptions (bundling low value content with high value content) & advertisements (lower margins now, moved to other channels like craigslist). And logistics may have been expensive, but IT infrastructure and staff is not cheap either.

A few aggregation sites have tried to bundle news from different publishers for 10$/euro per month (e.g, blendle). But as can be seen from the original prices of a subscription ($250+ / year / publication), this means a much lower revenue per publication than before. For half the price, subscribers get all the publications. This is not going to be enough for the publishers to survive.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#167

Post by auggierose »

In the end, a subscription is not something you need to "manage". People moaning over having to manage too many subscriptions? This stuff is automatically booked from your account, so I am not sure what people are complaining about. It's zero work for you. Now, you think that service is not worth $5 a month? That's a whole different matter, don't subscribe then.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#168

Post by MaxBarraclough »

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…

So it trusts the client's browser to determine what they owe? If the payment is relying on goodwill that might be ok, I suppose.

Their Documentation and Explainer links are both broken.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#169

Post by flas9sd »

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.

blendle (NL) was aquired by a french publisher very recently. I'm not intimate with the numbers, but the founder wrote in dutch on medium.com about their model multiple times. The Webapp interface to browse the daily crop of Newspapers is actually pretty great, I use it on a handheld. The problem with pay-per-article is the overhead in thinking about "do I want to read this?", but from a consumer perspective it's likely that you spend the same amount on articles of multiple publications than a subscription to one of them, but you're constantly made aware of the costs, as with a subscription, it's a remote thought.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#170

Post by geuis »

auggierose wrote: post #167

In the end, a subscription is not something you need to "manage". People moaning over having to manage too many subscriptions? This stuff is automatically booked from your account, so I am not sure what people are complaining about. It's zero work for you. Now, you think that service is not worth $5 a month? That's a whole different matter, don't subscribe then.

This is a prime dictionary worthy example of not getting the point.
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