Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Won’t Subscribe

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 362 posts

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#341

Post by bryan_w »

boplicity wrote: post #335
ako wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a publisher maybe it is time to rethink your primary metric. As a long-time reader, i'm not interesting in being a loyal reader, i'm interested in reading the best news. I don't limit myself to the music of one band, so i really appreciate spotify, and i don't limit myself to the news of one publisher.

Why re-think what is already working? Because it will give us the ability to reach new customers? That, unfortunately, doesn't add up. Many low-value customers is not what we need. We need (and have) predictable revenue from stable base of customers we know and trust. (And who trust us.) We need (and have) reliable sources for new long-term customers. We don't need lots of (random) people paying us $1 or $2 every cou…

> We need (and have) reliable sources for new long-term customers.

You may need to elaborate on this. Where are your new long term customers coming from?

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#342

Post by johannes1234321 »

boplicity wrote: post #336
ako wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumption of media has completely changed for me. Most of what i read is through links from others: Hackernews, Flipboard, or facebook, Google news. I think most people get very shallow news information from some big names (nu.nl) that are basically reprints from AP news items. Short discription what happened, no background, nor deep diving. Most websites have the same reprinted stories, nothing worth paying for. F…

> Most of what i read is through links from others: Hackernews, Flipboard, or facebook, Google news. This is the sea-change that has happened. Newspapers used to be hugely profitable, because they owned and controlled the primary source of news for most people. Their platform – direct distribution directly to people's homes – was immensely powerful for many decades. That platform was disrupted by the internet. Newspa…

The income they had was through ads. Those revenues now go to Facebook and Google. The retail price covered maybe printing and distribution, but not the content creation.

If you go to a facebook stream: how.many different news sites do you really get? - It's few. Most your "friends" have their go-to media they share and random outliers. It feels broad, but I doubt it's broad for the typical user.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#343

Post by rapind »

ako wrote: post #126
boplicity wrote: post #19

As a long-time publisher, there is only one primary metric that matters to me: loyal readers. I don't publish for the occasional visitor. I publish for the loyal readers that I have worked hard to cultivate, engage, and enrichen. The primary work is one of building a relationship with a loyal readership, based on consistency and quality. Our websites, as they're designed, are probably a little annoying to people who…

As a publisher maybe it is time to rethink your primary metric. As a long-time reader, i'm not interesting in being a loyal reader, i'm interested in reading the best news. I don't limit myself to the music of one band, so i really appreciate spotify, and i don't limit myself to the news of one publisher.

I'm interested in reading thoughtful, truthful pieces, and I'll pay for it, and I'll keep coming back (loyal). I'm absolutely not interested in trying to verify the authenticity / authority of unfamiliar publications every day / week.

While I don't limit myself to just one band, I also prefer a real DJ to spotify, for so many reasons. I'm probably just getting old though.

Basically, I'll pay for expertise in these areas.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#344

Post by kyrers »

bialpio wrote: post #339
kyrers wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I understand that. I just think we as consumers should not accept that.

It's not like this is being advertised when you are subscribing to some service. "Subscribe now and if you ever want to cancel, we'll make you pay! PS. We know where you live." What could the consumer do apart from relying on word of mouth to avoid such services?

> It's not like this is being advertised when you are subscribing to some service. "Subscribe now and if you ever want to cancel, we'll make you pay! PS. We know where you live."

They could at least ask. But I understand your point.

> What could the consumer do apart from relying on word of mouth to avoid such services?

I'm not sure I understand you. Are you implying you can't follow the news without using these services? Only through word of mouth? If that's what you mean, there are ways to follow the news while avoiding paywalls. I do.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#345

Post by retzkek »

nobody9999 wrote: post #307
chris_f wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other nice thing about Web Monetization is that you can use it to divide earnings to content providers on your site through probabilistic revenue sharing [0]. I have been using it for the last 3 months and it is simple to implmentent and helps support an open standard. The concern on basing payment on length of the site visit are valid and something I think will need to be addressed at some point. People will try…

>I have been using it for the last 3 months and it is simple to implmentent and helps support an open standard. >The concern on basing payment on length of the site visit are valid and something I think will need to be addressed at some point. People will try to game it as it gains acceptance. Please post the name of your site so I can make sure to never visit it. Not because you're bad or evil. Not because your cont…

> But because the entire idea that just visting your site entitles you (or anyone else) to income is incredible hubris and disrespectful of the intelligence of your users.

I'm not sure your vitriol is called for here, it seems very easy to selectively enable and disable monetization [1]. I'm not OP, but if I were to monetize a search engine I'd have the tag on the results page but _not_ on the home page. Likewise if I were a content provider, I wouldn't monetize the index page. I imagine and hope that this would be standard practice, but perhaps I'm being overly optimistic.

[1] https://webmonetization.org/docs/start-stop

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#346

Post by 0-O-0 »

nobody9999 wrote: post #307
chris_f wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other nice thing about Web Monetization is that you can use it to divide earnings to content providers on your site through probabilistic revenue sharing [0]. I have been using it for the last 3 months and it is simple to implmentent and helps support an open standard. The concern on basing payment on length of the site visit are valid and something I think will need to be addressed at some point. People will try…

>I have been using it for the last 3 months and it is simple to implmentent and helps support an open standard. >The concern on basing payment on length of the site visit are valid and something I think will need to be addressed at some point. People will try to game it as it gains acceptance. Please post the name of your site so I can make sure to never visit it. Not because you're bad or evil. Not because your cont…

Can't say that I disagree with your sentiment, but it's funny that getting automatically charged each time someone wishes to browse your content is the norm and no one bats the eye.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#348

Post by ricardobeat »

flexie wrote: post #143
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.

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…

You know, since the early 2000s, every single newspaper also had an online presence while delivering their paper. It's literally text and pictures on a screen, not software applications - at least it used to be like that.

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#349

Post by ricardobeat »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #153
wodenokoto wrote: post #148

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. That's quite amazing. Then what was the whole point of going online (broadly speaking), if not to decrease delivery cost of articles?

> Then what was the whole point of going online (broadly speaking), if not to decrease delivery cost of articles? To chase the audience that had gone online. The newspapers were loosing customers to other sites that could produce articles cheaply themselves or republish newswire stories or rely on content from users and didn't have the overhead of a traditional newspaper

> didn't have the overhead of a traditional newspaper

Hm. So you are saying going online decreases costs? Can't have it both ways...

Re: Won’t Subscribe

#350

Post by maceurt »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #202
bigiain wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

In 2003 Valve determined that piracy, then rampant in PC gaming, was a service problem. They built Steam to provide a better service than piracy. Years later, after Steam has all but eliminated PC game piracy and helped create a thriving market even for the niche-est of genres, their competitors complain about their de-facto monopoly. There's a lesson in here somewhere.

The issue is that pirating games is a lot harder nowadays. Almost all multiplayer games have protections in place that make pirated games impossible to play online with people who legally bought the game, and for single player games updating means redownloading the torrent.
Post reply on HN