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

Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

whatsnewinpublishing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 229 posts

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#91

Post by kabdib »

My household still gets a physical paper (the Seattle Times), and a digital version of the same. We subscribe to the NYT and The Economist. That's about our limit for news subscriptions.

I'm not going to fork over $10/month to each of the other potential news sites for every article they publish. I have no idea why the Podunk Press and the Suburban Picayune Times even consider that as an option for out-of-area readers.

It'd be interesting to have a federated subscription model -- I'd pay an additional $X/month for all of the rest of the newspapers, and they could share that. They'll get nothing from me otherwise. Probably there is a business here (the tech to actually do it seems pretty straightforward, at first glance).

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#92

Post by rayiner »

echelon wrote: post #76

Could a startup go the Spotify/streaming music route and aggregate all of the popular news stories? I imagine bootstrapping content from NYT, WaPo, and all of the other popular news orgs, stuffing them into a common and unobtrusive web interface, and then providing them all for free to visitors. The startup could then try implementing micro transactions or minimal ads and do a revenue share with the original publishe…

Spotify worked a compulsory license provision of copyright law that applies specifically and only to music streaming. (Originally intended for radio.)

A middle man controlling the subscriber-ship would not necessarily be better for papers. The middle man entity would have enormous bargaining leverage, like Apple does with the App Store.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#93

Post by FabHK »

amelius wrote: post #58
FabHK wrote: post #33

> Without fail, the websites detected the intrusion attempt and prevented access to the content Using incognito mode in the browser to make it a bit harder to be tracked (without even blocking ads!) is "an intrusion attempt"? Excuse me? That's absurd language.

The author was deliberately trying to use incognito mode to view the paywalled content, so this is imho rightfully called an intrusion attempt. Of course, if you're just using incognito mode normally and happened to visit the same page, then it is not an intrusion attempt but just incognito browsing. The whole point is that news websites can't distinguish between the two.

I am deliberately using incognito by default (eg now), and if websites don't want to give me their content without tracking me then they should properly paywall their content and ask me to log in - then we both understand what's going on.

Frankly, considering this an intrusion attempt reveals a crazy, completely warped mindset: "We will track you, we want to know exactly who you are and what you read and how long, and if you attempt to evade this surveillance, you are an intruder!"

I use unique emails when signing up for websites - is that intrusion, too?

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#94

Post by greenburger »

vorpalhex wrote: post #82
reaperducer wrote: post #59

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…

I did my last check-through of all the newspaper plans about 3 months ago, and out of the 6 on my list, not one offered a clear cut subscription. I actually, really don't want a physical newspaper. I do want clear subscription terms. Your regional newspaper does sound super reasonable though, and I hope more newspapers follow that general model.

Not clear what newspapers you’re looking at but NYTimes has these options that seem to meet your criteria.

https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/gift

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#95

Post by dexen »

UncleMeat wrote: post #85
samirm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

youtube/patreon

Not scalable. This is like saying medical bills are under control because of GoFundMe. Some people can support themselves with patreon but the number is limited and it requires tons of work for zero pay while you build a follower base large enough. "Work for free for two years and maybe you will have a semi sustainable income" sucks. Crowdfunding also encourages extreme opinions and bubbles over neutral reporting.

>Not scalable

Yes, and that is a rather important advantage in case of news & opinion reporting.

The old system consisted [1] of small number of large, vertically integrated media outlets. Each of the outlets was pretty close to a single point of failure in our democratic processes: each had undue ability to influence popular ideas and opinions, and well understood focal points of partisanship and propaganda [2].

The new model, with distributed funding and distributed production of news content is a much healthier, much more resilient ecosystem, with no single points of failure. From my limited observation it is also less prone to creating two singular focal points of polarization ("left" vs "right"); instead people end up in loose, overlapping circles according to their varying interests, socio-political situation and the likes.

--

[1] started off as small outlets, but the more successful ones quickly accreted into large entities, and the internet era weeded out a lot of the smaller entities.

[2] to the point "FOX" and "CNN" has became pejoratives among politically active people.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#96

Post by 52-6F-62 »

kyledrake wrote: post #34

But how will we pay the NYT to try to drag the US into wars while David Brooks lectures debt-loaded millennials about work ethic and family values unless we let them continue to exploit a bug in web browsers? Monopolist news orgs are losing readership/revenue because they're terrible and refuse to change, not because of Chrome. Meanwhile other, better forms of journalism are thriving.

It appears your statement is a touch inaccurate:

https://www.statista.com/chart/3755/digital-subscribers-of-t...

I also have a hard time understanding why it should be free. If you don't want to pay for it, you don't have to pay for it. You also aren't entitled to their for free no more than the writers at the New York Times are entitled to your work for free.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#97

Post by jayd16 »

echelon wrote: post #76

Could a startup go the Spotify/streaming music route and aggregate all of the popular news stories? I imagine bootstrapping content from NYT, WaPo, and all of the other popular news orgs, stuffing them into a common and unobtrusive web interface, and then providing them all for free to visitors. The startup could then try implementing micro transactions or minimal ads and do a revenue share with the original publishe…

Like a reddit/HN that only allows scraped amp pages? Seems restrictive when most people still upvote pay walled articles.

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#98

Post by 52-6F-62 »

qmarchi wrote: post #10

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.

Publishers actually do use something of a federated service to manage subscriptions for the most part. I'd say those services have some catching up to do. Hearst runs such a service:

https://www.cds-global.com/

Re: Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30

#100

Post by basch »

FabHK wrote: post #93
amelius wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author was deliberately trying to use incognito mode to view the paywalled content, so this is imho rightfully called an intrusion attempt. Of course, if you're just using incognito mode normally and happened to visit the same page, then it is not an intrusion attempt but just incognito browsing. The whole point is that news websites can't distinguish between the two.

I am deliberately using incognito by default (eg now), and if websites don't want to give me their content without tracking me then they should properly paywall their content and ask me to log in - then we both understand what's going on. Frankly, considering this an intrusion attempt reveals a crazy, completely warped mindset: "We will track you, we want to know exactly who you are and what you read and how long, an…

I would think incognito would make it easier to track, if your session persists until you close incognito. Youd be much better off with umatrix blocking cookies and javascript.
Post reply on HN