I'll take "your broken business model is not my problem" for 200 points.
There are plenty of places that I can buy content that I'm interested in. I'd far rather pay for quality content than put up with ads all over the web. As a plus side, paid for content might fix the journalism crisis.
The death of content farms is not going to be a huge loss to the web ecosystem. Anything useful enough that people are willing to pay for it will survive.
I'm not the type to cling to dying business models, but I actually would consider paying a little money to get in-depth quality analysis of current events or topics I find interesting, just like I'd be willing to spend money on a good book. It's not a necessity and I would treat it as a luxury, but I do believe there is a niche market demand for that kind of content. The current advertising based model of distribution seems like a race for the most eyeballs and consequently a race to the bottom.
It would be pretty sad if the web really can't provide a working business model for quality news.
I prefer ads rather than high-cost paywalls, and then ideally a "use as-free" option for a small sum (think android apps). I want to read diverse sources and can't cough up €50-160 for 10-20 different sites that i use more or less frequently. I'd pay €5-10 for each good site that i use frequently to see it ad free and am happy to accept unobtrusive and non-malicious ads on all other sites.
We can't act as if everything must be free and painless - then we'll end up with a truly broken internet. The ad pendulum swung far too much to one extreme with horrendous intrusive and malicious ads across the web, but if we let it swing too far the other way we'll end up with a truly dead web where only exploitative (virus-spewing, manipulative (eg paid/planted "news" and propaganda a la RT & Xinhua) and commercial sites continue to exist.
My impression is that if i want the internet to remain valuable i will have to accept 'good' ads or start coughing up funds myself.
The issue is that the web-driven model of free content is unsustainable to the point these junk ads leading to junk sites are attractive to finance. The big issue is that the economics of journalistic and creative content aren't sustainable ethically any more.
I don't think anyone LIKES renting a storefront to a pawnshop, for example, but if they are the only ones who want to rent your location, you're screwed.
Essentially ethical business would wind up needing the journalism market to implode, ending up with a few state-subsidized outlets that could more or less survive with no advertising at all.
Fundamentally, we refuse to pay for content. As long as we continue to do so, they won't be profitable.
The issue is that we also complain about the dumbing down of online info, and decry the lack of quality content.
The advertising model does not work for valuable content creation. Period. Until someone figures out what its replacement is, news (and all non mass-produced content) will continue to slowly die online.
I would pay the premium for newspapers without ads. In fact, I do -- I support news organizations that aren't driven by advertisement.
If you can't find a business model that doesn't antagonize me, then you haven't found a business model that I care to support. If capitalism is failing to provide us with even basic methods of producing quality works, then that's a problem we should tackle at a larger scale.
I don't buy it because people are more addicted to content than ever. There is a huge demand for high quality content it's just a matter of figuring the business model to meet that demand. But once it's figured out there will be more journalists than ever. I can't imagine an info-starved internet future.
Your assessment isn't wrong, but the proposed solution here is to not support any business at all, which is just as bad. Anything that is plans to supplant this and doesn't immediately approach the problem of "how are we going to pay the journalists?" is going to fail.
People here won't like this, but the only realistic alternative to the advertising model where the vendor subsidizes the content, is a DRM model where the user pays to unlock the content.
I believe that ads are killing journalism. The focus is not on creating good content, but mainly create content that will be clickable and sharable. Unfortunately, in our world, there is no direct correlation between good and sharable content.
I'm definitely willing to subscribe to media outlets focused on informing and providing great content to their readers or do some micropayments, basically pay for the content I read and care about.
Moot argument. If everyone charged for their time creating content on the internet, you would buy the best quality content. Newspapers had this model for decades, worked for them.
That's a valid perspective, but remember that the quality degraded when we started having paid memberships and ads to websites.
What's a news outlet worth paying for? who actually pays for content online? who knows how to block all ads and didn't do that?
That business model really proved to be worthless, it dragged the quality down with more desperate pay-to-read prompts. Nobody will miss this and we will have again people with real world experience writing knowledge or opinions in their free time. So it goes back to that, quoting scientific papers, books and actual reputable and knowledgeable people writing blog posts.
With the news being mostly propaganda, I don't know what to quote there and how many outlets still have a reputation.
I personally write during my free time in my personal ad-free minimalistic website and have list of blogs I track for contents.
Things changes, waiting for full time "authors" to come up with a profitable plan to just progress is also not an option.
I'm of the opinion that the average consumer prefers free content.
I'm also looking at it from my perspective - I'd have to pay for certain content in each case, and I'm referring to the idea in general, not just as it relates to journalism. In Murdoch's model the money would go to the content producer rather than the ISP.
Some people, myself included, pay for some online news content. But just by virtue of being paid doesn't make news content creators more valuable. I had a NYT subscription until their OpEd board started churning out Nazi apoliga like it was their job. The world of paid content is still pretty terrible and stuck carrying water for their corporate overlords just as much as ad-supported groups. Maybe that's the future, but if all it took for quality to go up was for paid subscriptions to exist and people to want to buy them, it would have happened by now.
It's a very difficult market. I have the feeling that journalists need support and more money to provide quality content but the current price-point of subscription is too high for the majority of people. On the other hand, free content financed by ads generally does not deliver on quality.
Business models for online media are still immature, I hope they will find the right formula.
The production of knowledge needs to be funded as it isn’t “free”. Copyright and licensing is one model that has worked for a long time. It has flaws, but it has produced good things.
At this point with the quality of current web content and the collapse of journalism as an industry I think we can say online ads have utterly failed as a replacement income stream.
Unless you want all LLM to say “I’m sorry the data I was trained on ends in 2023” you still need a content funding model. Maybe not copyright, but sure as hell not ads either.
I am speaking to the broad media landscape. It’s not that there aren’t business models for some high quality journalism. But the current landscape and incentive structures lean broadly towards low quality content.
Just because it is a market outcome doesn’t mean that it is optimal.
Edit: it is also important to note that substack still hasn’t been proven out in the market. It is being subsidized but VC money, time will tell if it is actually something that would survive in the “free market”.
If something benefits McDonalds AND the fine dining places I enjoy, that's fine with me.
I don't have a problem with bad content out there, so long as there's a ton of really good content. For the great publications I read, I want them to be successful businesses so they can expand. A better ad market, or even a return to how it was before the dominance of FB/Google, would enable them to do that in a way that relying mostly on subscriptions hasn't.
Primary revenue source of journalism is exposure, which is easier to achieve by low quality, emotionally captivating, cookie-cutter garbage - so there's little incentive for changing the business model into one that would support "money buys quality". Related to that is that free-with-ads is essentially an alpha predator among business models; honest businesses can't compete with it - so it's doubly hard for a quality publisher to exit the equilibrium in which the whole industry sits.
"But what happens if it turns out that an insufficient minority are willing to pay for content to make businesses like the NYT and other publishers viable businesses (or at least viable at their current scale in their current incarnation)?"
I think about it slightly differently. If you ask the question "Will all the news organizations and publishers go out of business?" And the answer is obvious, no they won't.
The reason they won't is because there is a demand for content and the only people left standing will be the ones who can deliver content in a way that pays their own bills. Will the NYTimes go out of business? Perhaps.
This is the fallacy in a nutshell : "My current thinking is that if they were to stop writing, people would just get their news from elsewhere, and other publishers would gladly fill their shoes."
Nobody will commit finanical suicide to serve a market. They have to believe that there is a way to make money at it, so the only way "other publishers" jump into the market is if they can do so without losing their shirts.
What we're observing is the death of the "put up some content and slap some ads on it" way of making money. That it has worked this long has been very impressive as there is very little barrier to entry, but the commons is so thoroughly stomped upon with blog spam and content farms is finally killing it. Having service providers listen to their users and allow them to disable ads, puts the final nail in that coffin. Is it no wonder they scream loudly?
The vote is being called as they say, "Either put up with ads, or pay for your content."
The challenge though is how to negotiate what the content is worth? How do you make a market so that people can actually implement that choice over a wide range of pricing so that the market collectively they can arrive at a price?
It is something I thought Bitcoin like systems might help with, but any microtransaction system if it has low enough friction would work. Publishers could tweak the price of page views, readers could read or not read the content provided. Prices would float up to equilibrium and people will be able to once again reason about what an article is worth, whether it was written by a hack in a third world country or written by someone with an established reputation for quality.
The existing market is collapsing, and in its place a new market will emerge because people really do like reading stuff. And enough people like it to make it into a market. Capturing that value which was learned back in Ben Franklin's days for what became newspapers, will be relearned given the channels and technology we have today. Its cost structure will be different, I would hope more of the value would flow through to the authors but one can never predict these things. Music is in the middle of the same process. But the music industry won't cease to exist, but it could very easily transform into something we would not recognize.
There are plenty of places that I can buy content that I'm interested in. I'd far rather pay for quality content than put up with ads all over the web. As a plus side, paid for content might fix the journalism crisis.
The death of content farms is not going to be a huge loss to the web ecosystem. Anything useful enough that people are willing to pay for it will survive.
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