Comment on NYT hiding information regarding a health related food recall behind a paywall
Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 4 days agoBecause they had ads to bring in income to pay the bills, which allowed them to give the news for free to the end user.
Then everyone started using ad blockers, killing that revenue stream.
They can’t give things away for free without something else paying the bills. That ends up being the end user with a subscription now.
You’re right but damn somehwhere along the way ads got so Intrusive and turned into a privacy nightmare. Malicious ads that steal your bank info or infect your computer with viruses.
To the point where the FBI (the one from before when actual adults still ran it) even recommends to use an adblocker now.
I would never have cared about ads if they hadn’t started being targeted and the congregate data sold to government agencies so they can sidestep my rights and not need a warrant to track me.
Yup. Blame Google for that one. They built a trillion dollar empire on collecting data better than anyone else, and using that data to sell extremely targeted ads.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Not sure if it was all ads. Like how some of the biggest eras of music coincide with pirating music. Maybe you can squeeze some subscriptions by blocking people but over time it isn’t sustainable. When you provide an easily accessible platform that people want to come to, you can leverage that to other sales, not just ads.
Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Yeah it wasn’t entirely ads, but that was the major factor along with the transition from print to digital.
Things do still have to get paid for. High quality journalism means paying high prices for journalists. There’s server costs and other overhead. Early on people were still buying the paper. Ads covered being able to put it online for free and people buying the paper paid the real bills.
As print died, that killed the main revenue stream. That meant more ads to keep the online side free and make money. But more ads meant people get more turned off by them and start using ad blockers. That kills that revenue stream, so you introduce a subscription that gives access to everything ad free.
Eventually, you get to where we are. You want it, you pay for it.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 3 days ago
There is currently a subscription reversal because the model failed for now than it succeeded. NYT is in a spot where it could succeed off its established brand. But others it didn’t work. The trend is the subscription model fails. Times, WP, Atlantic and others couldn’t sustain it.
Also I’m left as fuck, I don’t care if quality is good or the model work to help some faceless group of shareholders. I’ll support whatever destroys anyone putting up pay walls online. Burn it all down. It’s the only way.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 3 days ago
If it wasn’t ads then what exactly was it? If free with ads was working, it would still be free.
You claim you can leverage that to other sales but it didn’t happen.
NYT is publicly traded. You can see their revenue, costs and everything. They made 2.5B in 1995 and 2.8B in 2025. Factoring inflation they have lost half their revenue. That means half the reporters lost their jobs.
Forcing people to pay like they used to pay for paper is working:
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Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 3 days ago
It worked for NYT because they already built a brand and had established customers. For others it failed. The model failed more than it succeeded aside from some special cases
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Ads failed and subscriptions failed too so they went out of business. The free news model was tried for many years and failed.
Someone needs to pay the journalists’ salary.