I’m not sure how sustainable this model is. Especially when a reader browses via a link aggregator and therefore reads news articles on many different websites. I doubt most people want/can afford a subscription on dozens of different news outlets, as that’ll quickly add up to a triple-digit monthly bill.
Something like Flattr, but maybe non-optional, would be better. Pay a fixed monthly fee and split the payment between all sites you read articles on (maybe based on how many, or reading time or whatever).
$1-$2 month maybe: they want $7 which is close enough to a Hulu/Netflix subscription fee that you immediately realize it’s not tenable to subscribe to all the major news sites you read, so then you start needing to build a “top 5” in your head because that’s all you can reasonably budget and that’s either too much of a PITA for whatever article you’re trying to read or you realize Verge isn’t in that top 5 and move on
Even $1 is probably too much. I read articles from dozens of different sources and managing that would royally suck. Got a new credit card? Have a fun next hour of your life logging in everywhere…
No, just give me an add-on so I can pay to bypass a paywall. I don’t want an account everywhere, I just want to read your article, and I’m willing to pay a few cents to do so (way more than they’d get with ads).
That price is way too much. My wife and I use Netflix for hours each day on average. I get significantly more use out of netflix. There is no way I’m paying a website like the verge $7/month when I can get the same new for free from some YouTuber.
I would do this with one caveat: sometimes people link really garbage articles. There was one here yesterday written so poorly I feel less informed for having read it. I would like the option to take my money back for reading such a bad article.
I do want to pay for news, but I can’t subscribe to everyone, or even just “the good ones”, because I do use aggregator sites.
I also wonder if that would lead to a model of paying every website for content because if Reddit is good enough to train AI on and good enough that many people include it in their Google searches, who is to say the comments aren’t “articles”?
or reading time or whatever
Could result in badly written, overly long articles and poor UI to force people to take longer. I know you’re just spitballing, but thought I’d point out how easy it is to induce unintended consequences.
Exactly. Give me an add-on to pay to bypass paywalls for a few cents and they’ll get my money. I’m not making an account or paying a subscription, but I’m happy to leave some change in the donation box.
There was one here yesterday written so poorly I feel less informed for having read it. I would like the option to take my money back for reading such a bad article.
That’s hilarious.
Can you share the post?
Flattr was such a good concept, it’s so disappointing it never caught on
This is what scroll did, before they got bought by Twitter. Same for coil, who shut down, by the people behind then still seem to be working on something. See https://webmonetization.org/
Isn’t this EXACTLY how it worked before publishers started using the internet? You had to pay either a subscription, or per issue for every magazine or newspaper you wanted to read. Instead of having subscriptions to “dozens of different news outlets”, people only paid for a few. The ones that interested you most, you paid a subscription for, and if you were interested in anything else, you just bought single issues.
Pretty sure that’s the model Apple News+ uses, but the price has always seemed pretty steep to me compared to other subscription services.
Here comes cable TV, but for written news.
Watch as sites allow other sites to resell their content, so users can subscribe one place to get all the news they want!
Wait 10 years.
Here cones streaming, but for written news.
Watch as sites separate, and recreate their own DTC models!
Wait 10 years.
Oops, planet is fire now.
God forbid we read a few sources and avoid clicking on 60 links for the same story.
Sounds like a Reddit/Twitter/Lemmy addiction more than anything.
The official announcement says they did because people have been asking for a way to support the site, but it’s not at all clear those people had a paywall in mind. Ars Technica has had subscriptions for years, and they paywall extra site functionality like topic filtering and a full-text RSS feed, not content.
This is the way.
Same with mobile apps. And give me a way to support a dev without using Google Play (I realize iOS is more problematic).
If it is behind a paywall, it isnt news, it is an asset.
So physical newspapers aren’t news?
“Can I have that once you’re finished with it?” Physical newspapers are subject to being given away by the original purchaser (or getting picked up from cafe tables or pulled from trashcans—people used to leave the damned things lying around everywhere), if you can’t afford to pay for them. It’s a bit more difficult to do that with digital content.
I guess gift links are a bit similar but obviously at a much smaller scale. I’m not sure how a fully similar digital system to sharing newspapers could be setup while still funding decent journalism.
I don’t hate paywalls though because I get it but I can’t say I’ve ever subscribed to get around one.
News papers are a physical item, not bits hidden behind a boolean set to true. Plus, I can go read a newspaper at the store if I want to.
You pay for information and not paper or pixels.
Information should be free. Putting it behind a paywall makes it so the less fortunate suffer by being kept out of the loop.
Information is free, it’s the transmission medium (paper printing or webservers) and the journalist’s wages that you should pay for.
That doesn’t really address their point, that’s simply a motte and bailey. Limiting access to information (knowledge/education) on a basis of payment is a hindrance of lower classes not upper classes. We especially see this with academic publishing and the people writing those papers aren’t even paid for it usually.
You shouldn’t have to pay for the journalist or the transmission, similarly to education it is best for a society (especially a democracy) if information is freely accessible regardless of one’s finances.
We especially see this with academic publishing and the people writing those papers aren’t even paid for it usually.
I’m not in academia, but I’m pretty sure research papers are usually part of the job for many professors, and they are paid for those jobs. Research students get stipends (money) to live off of while doing research and publishing their work. So, money is supporting those efforts as well, right?
I’m not in support of having to pay for quality information being the way, but it is the way right now. There are people that refuse to pay for journalism, some saying because it restricts access to quality information to those that can’t afford it, but I posit boycotting paying for journalism is having a net negative effect on quality information getting into anyone’s hands, including those that don’t have the means to pay for it.
This is a systemic issue. Attacking the symptom isn’t helping. It’s just killing journalism as a whole.
Sounds like an impractical philosophy to me.
Focusing on the information we want, presented at the standard we expect, do you think we’re supposed to get all of that from hobbyists and volunteers? In our current, prevailing economic system, gathering and presenting information (reporting) takes time and effort. Entities that put their time and effort into the task, are going to need financial support. Everybody’s gotta eat.
In our present paradigm, if journalism is not supported financially, quality information would be less available. We already have to sift through a ton of bullshit on the web. Nobody paying for quality will drop the overall quality further. The emotional appeal for the less fortunate doesn’t change that.
I’m not trying to antagonize, but I wholeheartedly disagree with your sentiment. Though it would be ideal; it’s not realistic at the moment. I do hope we get there.
I also hope we get there which is why I said it should be free.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t live in a utopia that works like this. Journalists have wages, web servers cost a lot of money to run. Printing presses and physical distribution channels also cost a lot of money. If information should be free, how should publishers pay for all of these labor and infrastructure costs?
Everything you said is true and I never implied it wasn’t I was just saying that information should be free. If I had an idea on how to make it work I’d be working on it
You might. 🏴☠️
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Ironically, it’s news that’s free, and garbage is behind the paywall. Verge is not what people remember it being from years ago
The verge I remember from a few years ago tried to make a video on how to build a pc and look how that turned out
That’s current Verge for you. It only got worse since then
TBF that incident gave me hours of amazing content :D
Yeah the free stuff is probably something that has been reported in multiple places, with a bit of added context.
Meanwhile the paid stuff are all either glorified progressive opinion pieces or in-depth analysis written by someone wholly and completely unqualified to perform said analysis.
I don’t know when you think the verge was ever good though. Even during its best years it was putting out shit like that build a PC video.
Supposedly The Verge is behind a dynamic paywall, metered based on high use, but I got a block in the first article I clicked on this week. I don’t mind a paywall but be clear on what is behind a paywall and what isn’t. I will stop visiting the site at all if I can’t figure it out.
I wish these sites had an option to pay 50cents or whatever for articles I want to read so i can still support them without having to commit to another fucking subscription.
And that’s $7/month for fewer, better ads.
The Verge loved shitting on streaming services pushing paid subscriptions that still have ads. I wonder how critical they’ll be of that now…
Wow this is a great article, thanks for sharing. This quote in particular has a lot to unpack:
We are not chasing platform traffic, we’re not chasing social video views, we’re not doing sponsored content to make our business go like everyone else is forced to do. If you want to go play in those games, you have no choice but to do sponsor integrations. That’s just how those businesses work. We won’t do it, we sell our ethics policy.
The Verge’s decision to raise a paywall comes at a moment when many news media companies are grappling with the dilemma of an emerging gulf between the information ecosystems of free and paid news. As more media companies lean into subscriptions to drive revenue, the reach and impact of their news stories is often limited, or targeted more toward an affluent, educated audience willing to pay for news.>
That must be really challenging if you run an ethical journalism organization. Gone are the days of paying for newspapers, people now expect it for free, and that’s not sustainable for a regular business. So it creates a moral dilemma for ethical journalists, who naturally want to continue to reach a large audience and worry about alienating people who can’t afford subscriptions.
The free news sites don’t have that same quandary. They make money by selling your data, so they remain free. Since it’s what the people want, they don’t think about the fact that this is achieved by unethical means. These people are already predisposed to be less educated due to income levels alone, meaning they’re less likely to perform the critical thinking necessary to realize that journalism - ethics = fake news. Talk about a vicious cycle.
I know I’m not saying anything that people who’ve been paying attention the past 8 years don’t already know, but when you really think about all the implications it’s kind of astounding. >
Hot take: Journalism is a public service and as such should be paid from our taxes, with checks and balances in place to prevent takeover by persons in power.
I mean, that’s why BBC, NPR, NHK, etc. exist. And the result is that in a lot of ways it is more reliable than for profit news, but at the same time they’ll never really bite the hand that feeds (aka government, more specifically the Dems in NPR’s case.)
Tough to do, and do right, but I’m down. Still, until that day…
I subscribe to more periodicals than most, I think probably almost twenty of them. I just cut out NYTimes, Washington Post, LA Times, Atlantic. I was growing disillusioned with some of their coverage- NYTimes desperately triangulating to the comfortable, safe, meaningless center, WaPo and LAT owned by oligarchs kissing Trump’s ring. Atlantic just bores me lately- lots of opinion and not a lot of investigative coverage. But happy to add The Verge. I’ve read them daily since they were This Is My Next and don’t intend to stop.
Yeah I finally killed my Atlantic subscription. Lots of doom and gloom or pro-isreal opinions, very little substance compared to the magazine they used to be. I miss when they had writers like Ta Nehesi Coates doing real journalism.
Well how do you expect people to both make money and provide stuff for free?
Its a tragedy but not an unavoidable one. It’s a direct result of choosing to fund information via the same scarcity based model that we use for physical goods (capitalism).
We don’t need to, unlike physical goods, in the digital age it is virtually free to copy and distribute information, but because we still fund it via a model that only gives it value when it’s scarce, paywalls or advertising end up being the only way to pay for it.
We should instead have the equivalent of government run subscription services that allow us to provide all information to everyone while still rewarding creators, without using advertising as a middleman / drain on society.
Sounds a bit like the UK TV License.
I hadn’t thought about it that way, thanks for sharing that perspective. I agree, but isn’t that what NPR was supposed to be? Or am I confusing it with PBS?
Not really, both are more like traditional cable channels, that are limited to specific programming and amounts of time.
I’m imagining more like modern streaming services where a any item from a massive catalog can be streamed / delivered to anyone. So any work could.be put into it and it would be fre to use, but the author would get a cut each time it was used.
‘It’s a tragedy that garbage is free and news is behind paywalls’
Boy, you summed up The Verge beautifully.
They’re trying to kill us all with financial bug bites.
Cue dipshit statement: It’s just one more little subscription, what’s the big deal…
I think the Verge messed up: the announcement said there would be a full-text RSS feed for subscribers, but they’ve actually added full article text to the existing feed, where normally I’d only get 2 or 3 paragraphs.
Their sister site Vox made a similar mistake; their RSS feed already had full text, but once they added the paywall I got the full text of articles that were paywalled if I tried to click through to the site. It’s like Vox Media doesn’t fully understand how its RSS feeds work.
They always had everything as full text but now some articles require going to their website. Or request full text via Readability / Postlight parser in your RSS client of choice.
Oh no, if only I had a 12 ft ladder… 12ft.io
I think the “garbage is free” narrative needs to change. AI generated garbage sure isn’t free, you pay for it with your attention and your data. Publishers need to make money somehow, and they can either do that with tracking cookies that harvest your data and sell it to the highest bidder, or in reality, both. If average consumers had any idea of how much data they give up for “free” content or services on the internet, I think more people would be okay with paywalls, and I think there would be a lot more pressure on paid subscription/service providers to use paywall revenue as an alternative to, instead of in addition to, the surveillance capitalism method that’s so pervasive right now
It also needs to be easy to pay for content. If you have to make an account and create a subscription, that’s a non-starter for many people. If you can just click a button in your browser, you’ll get a lot more engagement. If I pay, get rid of the ads and show me the article.
