The age of the à la carte internet

https://www.axios.com/internet-subscription-paywall-streaming-d4b7e708-14f4-4677-813b-a8dbcbe3c7ae.html

by giuliomagnifico • 5 years ago

31 51 5 years ago

axios.com

raspyberr• 5 years ago

Magazines cost money and they're still full of ads. Nothing will change online.

ksec• 5 years ago

Because not All Ads are bad, but no one seems to be interested in making ads better.

robbedpeter• 5 years ago

Most ads are bad from the user perspective. Low information enticements rarely perform any useful function. High information discussions, product placement in entertainment, informative websites and tutorials are good, but the vast majority of ads are just terrible races to the bottom.

criddell• 5 years ago

If you live in a "good" zip code, sometimes magazines just show up for free.

My theory is that publishers want to push their reader demographics in some direction, they will find a zip code that matches what they are looking for and start mailing magazines.

amalcon• 5 years ago

I had that happen once, and decided to cancel it as it was a waste of paper (and hard to recycle glossy paper at that). This was surprisingly difficult. It took two phone calls to figure out the third phone number, that would reach a person who could cancel it. I had to threaten to raise the issue with my state representative before they agreed to actually cancel it.

guilhas• 5 years ago

Online ads can see you

dgarrett• 5 years ago

The subscription fee of most magazines is only there so that they can present a "paying subscribers" number to potential advertisers. The assumption being that a paying subscriber is more likely to spend money on advertised products.

This is why popular magazines constantly have deals for a year subscription for $5 or $10.

goatforce5• 5 years ago

I think those dirt-cheap yearly subscription deals are a US thing. I'm not sure similar deals are common in the rest of the world.

orangegreen• 5 years ago

I am very happy many news sites are now behind paywalls. There is now less of an incentive to drive revenue via clickbait or "picking a fight" as many tabloid journalists are wont to do.

There appears to be some kind of concern that this will put people in their own subscription bubbles. Please. Having a subscription to your city's newspaper or subscribing to a documentary streaming service is a far healthier way of ingesting content than getting put into algorithmic engagement bubbles via social media.

To be fair, most print newspapers were subsidized not necessarily by costing money or traditional advertising, but by classified advertising. Maybe news sites can figure out classifieds next.

_moof2• 5 years ago

I worked for a few different newspapers in the early '00s, including a nationwide conglomerate. Craigslist was the end. Papers have been struggling to make ends meet ever since.

BitwiseFool• 5 years ago

Which is unfortunate because the Craigslist experience is terrible and 'Craig' doesn't want to update the site. It's chock full of spam, phone repair ads, and dozens of the same thing listed in every search. You would honestly think some employee could devise a way to detect and remove such things, but no.

I don't even care that the design of the site is 'old', I just want better listings.

tannhaeuser• 5 years ago

In principle, I'm with you. Problem, though, is that even with subscriptions Google plus a million other crap companies are getting my clicks, and I still get Taboola shite padded after articles. So I cancelled my subscription to a high-profile newspaper/site just the other day. Quality journalism is not compatible with that shit for me as a matter of principle.

rchaud• 5 years ago

Stop by the comment section of the NYTimes' Facebook page sometime. Now that people can't read the articles without paying, the fights start off of the headline alone.

I subscribe, so I see the NYT's on-site comments, which are of far better quality.

_moof2• 5 years ago

the fights start off of the headline alone

I think we have mountains of evidence that this happens whether or not there's a paywall. :)

immy• 5 years ago

Along with cable was PBS. Perhaps we will see efforts for publicly funded content, though dubious that civic engagement is high enough to swell it.

colejohnson66• 5 years ago

“State sponsored news” is generally seen as a bad thing(tm), so I don’t know how well that would work. There are good ones, for sure. Just that it’s not always a good thing.

jrimbault• 5 years ago

“State sponsored news” is generally seen as a bad thing(tm)

Very Debatable, capital D. Maybe in the US, but even there you have things like NPR and publicly funded libraries which are not seen as "bad things" as far as I can tell.

masswerk3• 5 years ago

The key to this are really online advertising prices. Mind that 2009 – not that long ago and when online news were already much a thing, but paywalls were commonly not – was the all-time high in news paper revenues. From which follows:

1) Get advertising prices up again, this may also revitalise private publishing (e.g., the nowadays mostly vacant blog sphere, which has been extradited to the walled-garden infrastructure of video portals for the better part).

2) At the same time, have restrictions on the visual distraction of those adds (preferably static images) and, whenever possible, integrate them on the originating host/server, to de-incentivise ad-blockers.

3) Voilà, free news for everyone with thriving revenues, and, as a bonus, a blooming online publishing landscape.

smhenderson• 5 years ago

have restrictions on the visual distraction of those adds (preferably static images)

My worry is that the height of the revenue you speak of in 2009 was because of stuff like this. That the invasive nature of the ads was what impressed ad-buyers so much and caused such a huge spend in the first place. That, coupled with the fact that online advertising was still fairly new and everyone thought it would be so much more effective than traditional advertising, mostly because of how flashy and unavoidable it could be.

dfxm123• 5 years ago

It looks like the decline of newspapers happened shortly after that [0].

2009 was the year after a very newsworthy presidential election, so maybe there is some hope. However, in general, there's way more competition today from cable news, video sites like YT, and non-newspaper websites, that are either ad or reader supported. People are also not really buying physical papers anymore, either.

You also can't just handwave "get advertising prices up". How are you going to convince advertisers to pay more?

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Performa...

ETA: I'm also having a hard time finding anything that suggests 2009 was a good year for newspapers. I can only find stories like this in the 2009 timeframe: US newspaper ad revenue down 27% in 2009 - https://phys.org/news/2010-03-newspaper-ad-revenue-naa.html

U.S. Newspaper Circulation Falls More Than 10% - https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/business/media/27audit.ht...

masswerk3• 5 years ago

Regarding prices: There is really no "natural" price, but the one that can sustain the entity providing the context, space and publishing reach. (Clearly, this is not the case at the moment.) In contrast, the collateral damage of not being able to afford tons of Google Adsense impact for less than a meal is probably tiny in comparison. (Especially, in a scenario, where your recipe blog may provide you with revenues worth a living, once established, which may well justify a small investment.) IMHO, the rational behind online advertising is completely off. – And, we may observe, this is partly due to newspapers outsourcing their control over prices together with their advertising departments, in favor of handing their powers over to the various ad provider networks. (We may also observe that it was then these networks, who radically devalued the context/quality and reach parts in the equation in favor of ad targeting, which was entirely in their domain of power.)

Havoc• 5 years ago

I've begrudgingly started paying for economist and FT.

And after that discovered that the feature I use the most isn't even subscriber only - their podcasts.

Oh well

divbzero3• 5 years ago

Paying for journalism is a good thing. I too have subscriptions that I don’t strictly need.

MonadIsPronad• 5 years ago

Argh, surely if we all agree that paying for journalism is a good thing, we should do what we normally do for such things - take it from taxes?

djoldman• 5 years ago

I can think of only a couple of ways that most articles published by "news" outlets are NOT entertainment:

1. Useful to inform voters 2. Useful for people who make business decisions

For 1, one can research the issues and candidates 3 weeks before an election, which will suffice to make an informed decision. For 2: it's important in many business niches to stay informed so as to make better decisions.

Therefore it seems like a more accurate description is: "media entertainment channels start charging subscription fees."

kodah3• 5 years ago

I stopped consuming the news about a year ago and my life has been dramatically better and healthier for it. It's not really worth paying for something that is designed and coached into leaving you with a feeling of dread or political allegiance. I continue to hear about social issues and events from my friends but I mostly just listen and smile along with whatever their soap box issue may be at the time. That's to say, I hardly take any of this to heart or dedicate my time to thinking critically about things that will never affect me. I'm happier and healthier for it.

minikites4• 5 years ago

That's to say, I hardly take any of this to heart or dedicate my time to thinking critically about things that will never affect me.

It must be nice to be that privileged. Most people are not lucky enough to be this insulated from society.

kodah3• 5 years ago

I always thought some of my friends would do what you did to me here, which is to dehumanize me for my choice to maintain my sanity. If you look through my posts you'll see I do belong to a protected class which has struggled for representation over decades, one which most recently saw people blowing their brains out in front of hospitals begging for the system to be better. Politics, in that way, can be perceived as life and death for my group, and of which I have very personal trials with.

For a time, I thought "educating" people on what these issues were would make them care more yet as group after group garnered national attention and my group was further deprioritized, villainized, and misrepresented I came to understand that even if people say they care, they will never care the way I care, and so the outrage to fix those issues will never come. It's an unrealistic expectation that everyone else will care about your issues as much as you do and my own experience being on the other end of this equation, where I'm being told this is life and death important, while having to ignore my own priorities and concerns tells me this is not a healthy construct.

That's to say, I was wasting time on people I don't know trying to rectify paradigms I was lucky enough to make it through when I could've spent time with my friends who are actually in them. Maybe I am privileged in your definition, in that I made it, but my life-experiences tell quite a different story.

pc86• 5 years ago

Most people in fact are this privileged, they just choose not to remain as insulated as they could be.

agumonkey• 5 years ago

let's all bike, jog, juggle in parks and leave some news every now and then

shrimp_emoji• 5 years ago

Black holes and star formation affect us way less than what's happening politically, but some people still enjoy thinking critically about those.

If you get too emotional over it, though, I guess you shouldn't.

divbzero3• 5 years ago

I remember seeing the 2,400 year old fruit baskets discovered in Egypt [1] and wondering what political machinations, public scandals, soap box issues preoccupied the fruit eaters of that time.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113085

jareklupinski• 5 years ago

"You'll never believe what we found in the last Pharoh's tomb!"

system2• 5 years ago

Internet is vast. I am not paying for every content out there. If they ask for money, I will find a free version with ads. They can do whatever they want with their subscription models.

divbzero3• 5 years ago

Are online subscriptions a bad thing? Paid newspapers support traditional journalism, paid newsletters create opportunities for independent writers, and there will still be non-paywalled content. Furthermore, subscriptions were standard in pre-internet days and news consumption has been pretty balkanized even without paywalls.

The age of the à la carte internet

Related Stories