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.
Whatever it is they’ll just end up putting ads back in later anyway
Mining crypto on visitors’ machines. (/s)
Can you elaborate why you think that your comment requires a sarcasm tag?
I’m asking because getting the reader to contribute some CPU cycles whilst they read your content seems to be a way to balance the books, they get something from you, you get something from them.
Note that I’m not a fan of Bitcoin et. al., but the idea of making the reader’s computer calculate something or process something on the authors’ behalf seems, at least at first glance, a valid and potentially unobtrusive transaction.
First, crypto is mostly a scam. But if it’s clearly said that visiting the site will use 100% of your cpu, drain the battery and make your device crawl while the fans go crazy, then sure why not. Otherwise it’s a dark pattern. And I thought mining on cpus was near useless these days, but that may depend on the specific blockchain used.
I understand your concerns and I have as little confidence in the concept of crypto as it currently exists as you’re expressing.
I had no intention to peg a user’s CPU, but if we extend the concept of CPU cycles for content, perhaps a browser could process some data or make calculations, like say data analytics, or some other distributed process that would benefit the author and in doing so would allow both to have a win-win experience.
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.
It’s called a “strategic investment into maintaining competitive advantage” in corpo talk.
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.
Non profit + partnerships (e.g. Google/Bing/whatever posting your articles on their start pages) and/or government grants (strictly with no strings attached).
By selling papers?
Worked for centuries.
What do you think a subscription is? Or do you really think people are going to go back to buying physical papers?
Subscripttion services for actual journalism?
By turning the content into advertising.
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.
Publicly funded
I’m ready to be wrong but isn’t that what the associated press is for?
No, AP isn’t publicly funded. You might be thinking of NPR and/or PBS and/or VOA.
The news article should be free to read. After all it’s only text and it was written to be read. Ads greatly detract from the whole experience.
My proposal for a new model of news would be to be able to create an account for a one time fee of $5, which allows you to comment on articles for $0.25 per comment. Users who are logged in are also allowed to tip articles they enjoy, with proceeds going at least 50% to the author. Another option would be to hide or blur all images on articles unless the user pays $0.25. I think this model could make money, and allow customers to pay as you go and support the content they want more of. A regular subscription is a blank check for them to publish anything.
Normalize product placements in reports /s
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.
A local website shows article comments to everyone, but to make one you have to subscribe. The comments are mostly boomer rage bait.
Maybe the solution is some Spotify like service for journalism. Ie. Pay $20 a month and get access to most papers, and the revenue is split by view count. Even better would be making it a tax so since everyone is paying there’s no need for login.
