What a great phrase - "administratively incompetent." Gonna steal that. Just the idea of administrative competence in general.
Won’t Subscribe
41–50 of 362 posts
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#42It's so difficult to make money when everyone wants things to be free. I pay for Medium and that's all right now. I would much like to see the micropayment future - it has to be part of the browser. I would like to pay in lieu of time. If I could see page statistics of how much time it took for a page to be put together and costs of hosting - I could make a contribution based on this information. I've given random £1…
I agree about the micropayments future. The thing holding it back is some kind of central authority that can process micropayments with significantly less friction and overheads. Even better if people can accrue credit in some way that isn’t just paying fiat currency in, because we live as a privileged class to have disposable income that is essentially in escrow.
Brave browser is doing exactly what you described.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#43As 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…
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?
Word of mouth; the best advertising there is.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#44There already are services that allow one to read multiple newspapers through a single contract, similar to what most doctors' offices have set up for their waiting rooms.
I've used https://www.pressreader.com/ in the past and I'm sure there are others.
The contract that I believe my company had with them was that for a fixed monthly fee we could print out a fixed number of pages. But we could mix and match different publications as we wanted. So that's effectively like selling individual articles, but with a minimum order quantity.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#45As 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…
This is a good point. It's why I subscribe to some you tube channels but not others. I can find content I am interested in on dozens of channels, but I gravitate to those where I better relate to the channel owner's presentation or personality or problem-solving style.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#46An alternative subscription model that I've always liked is Linux Weekly News (lwn.net) which publishes all premium content openly after a week behind paywall. (In my mind I like to call it "Freshwall", ie. paying for fresh content.) News quickly gets old after all.
How successful is it as a model for cash flow compared to the others? I can wait a week to see the kernel benchmarks or whatever so I don't see why anyone would subscribe if not to suppose it rather than need it. I never used the site I'm just assuming it's like phoronix.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#47I found David Perell's podcast interview with Robert Cottrell a fascinating discussion of the economics of journalism:
https://www.perell.com/podcast/robert-cottrell
On a different topic, why don't I subscribe? Lots of reasons, I suppose, including other priorities for my income combined with a horrible value/dollar ratio. But that's not really it. Before I'd even consider paying for journalism, I'd need to trust that I'm learning things that are true.
A couple of recent examples of sloppiness that make it not worth subscribing, from my area of expertise (chosen to avoid anything controversial). There was an article in the NY Times about problems in the economics profession, focused on academic economists and similar non-academics like Fed economists. To make their point, the authors tossed in a comment by Larry Kudlow that was widely viewed as horrible. Why is that sloppy? Because Larry Kudlow is not an economist and has no connection to the economics profession. He got an undergrad degree in history, worked on Wall Street, worked in politics, and got a job as a TV commentator. Less than a minute of research would have found this. What are you paying for if they don't even do the easy fact checking?
A second example occurred in the aftermath of the first labor market report after the pandemic hit in the US. Economists were trying to resolve the numbers on the unemployment report with the unemployment claims data. A prominent individual from CNN was quick to question the integrity of the economics profession. "You have to trust the numbers even if you don't like them!" he scolded the economists. What a reasonable position. Who could argue with that? Well if he had actually read the report he would have seen that two paragraphs of the report itself talked about problems with the data. No retraction of the tweet either. Again, what exactly are you paying for if you're talking about someone that's going to tweet something like that without even reading the labor report? I can write a platitude generator in a couple hours that would be just as useful.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#48It's so difficult to make money when everyone wants things to be free. I pay for Medium and that's all right now. I would much like to see the micropayment future - it has to be part of the browser. I would like to pay in lieu of time. If I could see page statistics of how much time it took for a page to be put together and costs of hosting - I could make a contribution based on this information. I've given random £1…
I agree about the micropayments future. The thing holding it back is some kind of central authority that can process micropayments with significantly less friction and overheads. Even better if people can accrue credit in some way that isn’t just paying fiat currency in, because we live as a privileged class to have disposable income that is essentially in escrow.
We have de facto micro payments: ads. There is very little overhead for users.
There are a lot of downsides to ads, but it is the most successful micro payment mechanism we have. It is also the most successful online business model we have.
Be careful what you wish for, I guess.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#49I think if people pay for Netflix and Spotify, there's a market for a subscription to bypass paywalls.
there's definitely a market, but probably not at the revenue targets that newspapers have. I pay $12/mo for netflix, and $10/mo for spotify. i'd be happy to pay another ~$10/mo for a news service that gave me access to a similarly broad offering of newspaper articles. but the way newspaper web-access subscriptions are priced, to get the same broad bundle of content as what i get from spotify or netflix i'd be paying…
How would you feel about paying for pirated content? If someone just had publication subscriptions they could simply charge a small fee and show all the content on the sites. I could see small groups even do this and every time someone joins the monthly fee goes down.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#50Maybe you just aren't going to be able to afford everything and will just have to make a choice about what you consume.
It's not really a question of what you can afford; it's a question of who deserves your business.