461–470 of 610 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no reason why a publication can't charge more for an in-depth piece. I'd gladly pay far more for a comprehensive exposé.
How will you know it's a comprehensive exposé? How will you evaluate whether an article is going to be worth the price?
> Take my colleague Connie Loizos’ article from yesterday reporting on a new venture fund. The text itself is about 3.5 kilobytes uncompressed, but the total payload of the page if nothing is cached is more than 10 MB, or more than 3000x the data usage of the actual text itself. This pattern has become so common that it has been called the website obesity crisis. Yet, all of our research shows people want high-defini…
Over 6MB of those 10MB is just one bloated photo [1]. It can be compressed down to 1-2MB. Moreover, if it was a proper responsive image, it would not be larger than 100-200 KB for most readers because a good JPEG compressor can pull 2 bits per pixel [2].
Ironically, image optimization apps don't get that much coverage.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/vikbajaj20...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One con of the pay per article is that it siphons money into the money making kinds of stories. The sports and celebrity pages can do a lot of funding for the slow grind investigations that are important for holding those in power accountable. It’s not like an a la carte model couldn’t also fund profitless journalism, but I think it might push things even more in that direction. I think they do understand what people…
Actually I am more likely to pay for investigations than for gossip.
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I don't think that model will work, honestly. There's friction anytime you ask someone to spend anything, even if the price is de minimis. Look what happens whenever a city adopts a $0.05 plastic bag tax. When Washington DC did it, plastic bag use dropped by 50% - 70%. I'd see people that just spent $30 bucks at the store with their arms overflowing with stuff rather than pay that extra nickel. I'd expect prompting u…
Regarding bag tax, I have trouble believing this is more than your own anecdotal observations, do you have any sources to back up that claim? Most cities in Europe charge a lot more than 0.05 per bag (Austrian supermarkets generally charge between 0.25-1€) yet most people just bring their own. I buy the more expensive variant (cloth material) which survive about a year.
What are you doing with those? I have one reusable bag which is 11 years old now. I just throw it in the laundry about once a year and it's as good as new.
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That's not entirely true. You can keep any version that you've paid one year worth of subscription for. That means that if you subscribe for three years then cancel your subscription, you'll always have access to the version that was released one year before you cancelled.
I think parent’s gripe is that if you end your subscription, you can’t keep any updates that come out during your last year, so you likely need to go backwards with your installed version.
If I subscribe to a print mag, once it's delivered I have access to that content until I decide to throw it out. If I bought Photoshop, I get to use that version (sans major OS up grades of my hardware) as long as I want.
Membership is binary, or has levels.
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Slightly off topic, but semi related. My parents had a one year membership at Costco. The level where you get some percentage back. I think it was 2%. Long to short, the "rebate" was paid ~60 days prior to the end of the 12 months. The remaining 60 days' purchased will only be rebated if they renew. I presume this is in the small print somewhere. None the less, it's complete crap.
It's not "complete crap" given that (a) it's in the paperwork they are given at signup time, and (b) if they are genuinely dissatisfied, they can downgrade back to basic membership and get refunded retroactively to the start of the membership year for the difference in cost of the higher membership.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no reason why a publication can't charge more for an in-depth piece. I'd gladly pay far more for a comprehensive exposé.
How will you know it's a comprehensive exposé? How will you evaluate whether an article is going to be worth the price?
At the time of this writing, all of the comments here are focused on content, but I want to touch on the author's bit about software: > It’s not just Bloomberg and media — it’s software too. I used to write everything in Ulysses, a syncing Markdown editor for OS X and iOS. I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments ill…
A year of updates.
A lifetime of Sketch
Your license comes with a year’s worth of updates.
Once that year is up, you can keep using the last
version of Sketch you downloaded, forever.
* There is no incentive for feature creep caused by having to "sell" the next version to your current userbase every so often.
* The developer does not have to keep supporting old versions forever.
At the time of this writing, all of the comments here are focused on content, but I want to touch on the author's bit about software: > It’s not just Bloomberg and media — it’s software too. I used to write everything in Ulysses, a syncing Markdown editor for OS X and iOS. I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments ill…
True. A subscription to Office 365 comes down to 99 Euros per years. Of course you’d pay maybe 150 every three years or so for a new version back in the days, but still that’s double. Also, I wonder whether this will lead to a slower development of the software. Before you’d have to create a leap forward to impress people to buy the new version, if the old version was still good enough.
I am not sure if that would be bad, though. Often enough, I feel that software vendors either just change the UI so they can show non-technical people how "improved" their new version is (MS Office), or they introduce arbitrary incompatibilities, so you need the most recent version to edit files that have been created/modified with that new version (I'm looking at you, Autodesk!).
With a subscription model, at least these vendors could focus on changes that actually provide value to their customers rather than making arbitrary changes just to make people buy a new version they might not really need.