171–180 of 229 posts
Newspapers never made their money from subscriptions or from selling papers on the street. What kept newspapers in business was classified ads, which was disrupted as a revenue stream when Craigslist came around.
Why does Google not penalise them on search for this behaviour? Seems exactly against webmaster guidelines on hiding content or showing different content to a user and bot.
I would much rather pay a fair amount (more or less $15-$30 per year, which is what I pay on my landline), and then subscribe to a number of them.
This for me looks like a more sustainable model, but I guess that's not what their finance departments think.
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No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money. The problem lies squarely with hordes of credulous morons who either don’t know or don’t care that their news is fake, and aren’t willing to shell out for quality content. Whether that exposes a deeper flaw in human nature, or is just an oddity of our times, is left to you to decide.
I keep hoping that something like GNU Taler will catch on. I have having subscriptions to various services, and I think something like Taler will help because it makes payments easier. An even better service would be to have something like Netflix, but for news. I could pay $X/month and have access to a variety of news sources. Ideally, those news sources would be paid according to their popularity and accuracy, and…
You sort of described Apple News+
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.
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There was a brief golden age of newspapers that went away with industrialization. It hasn't been Ben Franklin's game for a long time and I think people need to think about what that has meant and will mean.
It's my impression that early in Benjamin Franklin's publishing career he published newspapers so he could put ads in them to sell more books. And that later in his publishing career, he used his newspapers more to promote his revolutionary agenda. The man wasn't a journalist.
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.
The problem with requiring an account to view content is doing so removes your content entirely from Google, and probably from most social media snippet generators. Google will only include your content in their search results if the user can see your content. The "metered paywall" trick is a loophole to get around that. If you put all your content behind a paywall, you're siloing yourself off from the entire rest of…
That's not true for the WSJ.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money. The problem lies squarely with hordes of credulous morons who either don’t know or don’t care that their news is fake, and aren’t willing to shell out for quality content. Whether that exposes a deeper flaw in human nature, or is just an oddity of our times, is left to you to decide.
I keep hoping that something like GNU Taler will catch on. I have having subscriptions to various services, and I think something like Taler will help because it makes payments easier. An even better service would be to have something like Netflix, but for news. I could pay $X/month and have access to a variety of news sources. Ideally, those news sources would be paid according to their popularity and accuracy, and…
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.
No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money. The problem lies squarely with hordes of credulous morons who either don’t know or don’t care that their news is fake, and aren’t willing to shell out for quality content. Whether that exposes a deeper flaw in human nature, or is just an oddity of our times, is left to you to decide.
I guess I'm a "credulous moron".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will gladly give a newspaper $25 - $50 a year for access The regional newspaper in my state is $25/6 months, which includes the physical Sunday paper and DRM-free downloadable PDFs of the newspaper every day that you can view on any device. About a year ago I looked around at papers in other states, and the pricing and benefits were similar. It's only the super-premium papers that charge much more, but even the New…
The problem is there is so much content available on the web, but there isn't yet a federated subscription service to support it all. I would pay ~ $5 a month for news access, but I'm certainly not going to pay 2 or 5 or 10 dollars a month for each random site I visit to read their couple articles that may interest me. I just will skip their content.