So I get ads are terrible, obviously. I run ad-blockers all the time. But people also get angry at paywalls. So that leaves me wondering, if not through ads or subscriptions, how is a news publisher supposed to sustain itself?
Donations.
I don’t find subscriptions too offensive, however any kind of restriction of the flow of information (e.g. by paywalling it) implies its enforcement. What are you going to do about people bypassing the paywall? Even if you only responded by patching whatever allowed them to bypass the paywall, you’re either going to have to let up eventually, or get into a protracted cat-and-mouse game with paywall bypassers. And you don’t want to end up on the side of the people who want to gatekeep information.
So that leaves us with the possibility of having a subscription that’s not stringently enforced—in which case it is just a recurring donation anyway.
Of course, this discussion is limited to the scope of “what would a news outlet do without changing anything about society”—but the decent news outlets do also try to change things about society. Within capitalism, things like UBI would make it much easier for free journalism to exist. And of course this problem goes away entirely with capitalism.
Honestly if I had a “tap to pay” concept for articles or news, but only AFTER I’ve read the article, I’d do it more.
I’m not going to sign up for you substack. I don’t want a subscription. I’ll give money if that I consumed was interesting or relevant to me.
I get my access to most of my news through my local library. My library card comes with access to NYT, WaPo, and the Seattle Times, amongst others. I pay my taxes, my library pays a deal with the news site, and everyone’s happy. Seems like a good setup to me.
Hmm, I’ll have to check what my library system has available. Ty. Another one of those things you forget about if you’re not a regular user.
People need to get used to paying for things online.
If more people are willing to do it, the cheaper it can be for each of us.If your news is free, it’s trying to sell you something.
Subscripttion services for actual journalism?
Strong protections and regulations on what counts as ‘news’ and then offering subsidies paid for via taxes on Internet/cable TV/etc subscriptions to non-profit news outlets.
Of course that’s near impossible and humanity would corrupt it eventually, so I don’t know.
I agree in theory, but that makes journalism too dependent on state approval. There are too many journalists throughout time who were publicly discredited and shamed for not towing the line. Publishing something of which the state does not approve is scary enough without the news orgs funding being cut as a result.
Normalize paywall.
You had to buy the newspaper to read the newspaper, so paying for a digital newspaper isn’t any different. Plus, people will pay a reasonable fee for good content.
Even the ny times has paying subscribers. This isn’t much different from Netflix. As long as the pricing is fair, and the articles don’t double dip by including ads on top of subscription, it will work just fine.
Give people a free trial to test the content.
Aside from maybe my local paper which reports on things NOBODY else cares about, there is not one source that I would want to invest in like that.
Paywalls nudge people towards choosing one or two sources for all of their information. The more sources they pay for, the less value each one provides.
Diversity of information is better for society.
The news organizations that exist eight paywalls are things like info wars, fox and oan. People who’ve gravitated to those free sites have gotten us to the mess we’re in now.
Normalize paying like 1€ for 1 article.
I don’t want some 9€99/month*(12 months then 15€99) bullshit.
*If paid for a whole year in one go.
I’m happy to pay subscriptions, it’s just frustrating on aggregate sites like this where you see all these interesting titles and want to interact, but don’t subscribe to THAT news site. I can’t pay for all of them, and I don’t want to support a lot of them.
I mean isn’t there a world where we have unobtrusive adverts that are for products people actually want, and can sustain the reporting?
I think people would use less ad blockers if the ads were not designed / placed in a way that feels almost seizure inducing at times.
Unfortunately I think threads/twitter might be the future as a type of open source reporting, as everytime I hit a pay wall I turn around and leave.
adverts that are for products people actually want
This requires metadata fingerprinting which can be used to deanonymize people. And has been used as justification for intense surveillance of users and aggregation of user data. It is also profitable to sell this data to third party data brokers which inturn sell the data collected to other private entities which might have nefarious intent.
Basically, this means that modern advertising on the internet is inherently wrong, even if it’s ads that people might actually like.
Maybe? I think they used to advertise based on the content and expected demographics for the website, which is an alternative method that doesn’t require invasive digital fingering.
It’s not just ads. It’s ads that cover what you want to see. Popups that intentionally trick people into clicking on it when they are trying to close it. Hiding the X. Having subtle ‘click to read more’ instead of scrolling down into ad slop.
Let me read the fucking article without being harassed and bombarded. Let’s not pretend like this is a binary ads / no ads concern. When ads are predatory and take up the majority of the space, don’t act like you’re a victim trying to make a buck. There’s a long way to go from hosting ads on your site to making the experience as ad-intrusive as possible, which seems to be the goal
(The generic ‘you’ is used. I don’t know what website this post is referring to and am not calling them out specifically)
Let’s not pretend like this is a binary ads / no ads concern
It def is though… people, myself included, turn on an adblocker or install pi-hole and set it and forget it. All ads blocked. That’s binary. No one is going to a site, turning off the blocker, investigating the quality of the ads (lmfao), then deciding if they want to turn the blocker back on or not - total fiction.
So you’re kinda the problem that OP is asking about though. How are they supposed to generate income? Paywalled articles that you skirt those restrictions too? At what point does it become theft? This silent battle between a site needing revenue to exist, and users trying their hardest to block ads and take the content for free?
I pay an annual subcription 😆
Buzzfeed News used to be high quality journalism, funded by ad driven low quality Buzzfeed content. I am not sure if it was financially sustainable since they had to do layoffs, but I think partially that could be because Buzzfeed’s audience moved to Instagram and TikTok and stopped interacting with “Which Game of Thrones character are you?” quizzes.
I’m okay paying, but I won’t pay $5.99 a month each for 5000 different news websites. I think there needs to be a micropayments system where I can pay $0.10 to read an article and have that same payment system work on other news sites.
Mining crypto on visitors’ machines. (/s)
Installing ransomware on every computer that visits the site. (/s)
DDOSS ing other news sites through malicous javascript to ensure their is no competition
/s i think…
And if you want to go the non digital route, bank robbery.
Interesting ideas in this book about funding and ethics.
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
Idk but people seemed more okay with paying for a physical item… like newspapers, rather than just words on a page that they cant touch…
I remember my dad used to read newspapers, now he just scrolls WeChat…
(But then again the newspapers he used to read in China were all state-approved anyways… not really the beacon of truth…)
By turning the content into advertising.
