12ft.io Taken Down

The thing is that was status quo for a long time, the paywall being either you sitting down at a restaurant/barber/some other business that already bought papers, or you buying the paper yourself. And this was a worse arrangement for newspapers; distribution costs for a physical paper are catastrophically high compared to web hosting.

I think the major issue is two-fold:

1) Papers early adoption of the Internet, putting all their content online for free, was ridiculous and unsustainable from minute one. While this is our cultural expectation, that does not mean it is remotely good business and continuing to indulge the consumer that this can be free, for even one or three or whatever arbitrary amount of articles you're willing to "give away" each month is doing nothing but devaluing your product further.

2) In conjunction with the above, if papers are to charge for their reporting again, the quality needs to go up substantially. I don't recall the last time I read an article on even a mainstream, big news organization, and didn't find just like... completely avoidable issues. Typos. Poor grammar. Lack of cited sources or even just outright incorrect information. The pace of news must be allowed to slow because good product takes time to make, and being first if your reporting is shit needs to be derided more directly.

To put it short: News needs to be comfortable to take time to dig into issues, not simply be in a mad rush to cover everything first no matter how shitty the cited information is, and it has to be ready to stand behind a paywall and just... be real with people. If you want quality news, you need to be willing to pay for it, full stop.

The only other solution I can picture is independent news organizations that are funded by the taxpayer but not beholden to the government, as an American looking at my own government right now... I mean I think it's likelier we'll cure all forms of cancer by Thursday.

And most importantly, the notion of paying for ads based on tracking impressions and/or any other ways of tracking users needs to die. Cue laughter from the ad-tech majority on this site.

Yes, I am adamant that advertisement contracts must not involve profiling/client-side tracking the end users and their browsers in any way. Ad agencies and news site companies/sites/what have you must work out between them (and possibly a third party) the expected amount of users that are going to see the ad and decide on price based on that, without any client-side tracking.

How many sites would you end up splitting that across? For people who click a lot of links on Hacker News or other social media that could be a dozen or more, easily. Depending on your clicking patterns that could descend into sub-$1 amounts

Meanwhile sites like the New York Times charge $25/month and don’t have to split it with anyone.

I think all of the micropayment or pass-type ideas suffer from the same problem: The dollar amounts people imagine paying are an order of magnitude less than what sites are already charging their customers. There’s a secondary problem where many of the people (not you specifically, just in general) who claim they’d pay for such a pass would move the goalposts as soon as it was available: Either it’s too expensive, they just don’t feel like paying it, or they come up with another justification to continue using paywall bypasses instead of paying anything.