Submitted 3 hours ago by sheridan@lemmy.world to [deleted]
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?
By turning the content into advertising.
Subscripttion services for actual journalism?
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 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.
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 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.
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 see 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.
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?
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 pay for all of them, and I don’t want to support a lot of them.
Interesting ideas in this book about funding and ethics.
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
Mining crypto on visitors’ machines. (/s)
Installing ransomware on every computer that visits the site. (/s)
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…)
Most people would prefer it to be both free and ad-free and just make it work somehow. Doesn’t matter how - use magic or whatever.
Yeah, it should be tax funded and overseen by an independent oversight group.
I don’t know why this is such a difficult thing. Access to information is necessary for a healthy society. Things that are necessary for a healthy society but aren’t profitable should be tax funded, that’s the purpose of the taxes.
Arrrr
This isn’t about how the consumer can get paid content for free but about how the creator can sustain the production of that content when hardly anyone is willing to pay for it.
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.
Whatever it is they’ll just end up putting ads back in later anyway
The idealistic approach would be: all content freely available, and ask readers to donate if they value it, to fund continual production of more work. E.g. Democracy for Sale. Even better if it’s under a free content license.
The practical scenario would be: make some content freely available, and put the rest behind a paywall. But the content should still be available in open formats like RSS. E.g. LWN, Stratechery.
Non profit + partnerships (e.g. Google/Bing/whatever posting your articles on their start pages) and/or government grants (strictly with no strings attached).
I’m afraid there is no business model that can finance quality journalism. We are currently seeing the consequences of this.
Idk, for a while we paid for it with, like, mildly misogynistic razor ads, and that felt okay
Right? Like I remember a day and age when the ads were not obtrusive and awful, I would happily go back to a middle ground with normal sidebar/in video ads.
Hey, we’ve got social media and all that now. The memes and all the valuable info from whoever will surely take care of it.
People feel inundated by “the news,” so the desire to pay for a single news outlet to add more noise feels opposite to what I want, even though it would probably be helpful.
We almost need blog rings to come back - almost like spotify of news. Every publisher on the platform is verified, is fully transparent about their biases, and I pay a monthly subscription to read all of them. That monthly could get split based on my actual reading habits perhaps.
I don’t know the right answer - but just offering more “the news” isn’t the right play and will continue to be an adblocker fight. The product offering has to fundamentally change into “the news + <thing>,” where <thing> is either a lot of trust, or transparency, or something that creates the value proposition in the buyer/reader’s mind.
It would be helpful to understand fully WHO you want to subscribe to your thing - that whole “if you build for everyone you’re actually building for no one” conundrum is applicable here too.
Imo, the problem would be easier with more frictionless payment methods.
But the real issue is that fewer and fewer people are reading at all, or have the attention span for a quality newspaper article. So you are getting fucked at both ends - no one is paying for the product, and they arent using the product anymore anyway. I certainly know my personal consumption of long form writing has dropped off over the last decade.
Steve@communick.news 2 minutes ago
People need to get used to paying for things online.
The more people willing to do it the cheaper it can be for each of us.