Comment by _rpd
3 years ago
Counterpoint: high quality journalism must be well funded, and funding based on advertising and 'clickbait' undermines quality. So paywalls it is.
3 years ago
Counterpoint: high quality journalism must be well funded, and funding based on advertising and 'clickbait' undermines quality. So paywalls it is.
Counter-counterpoint: Culture, art and science only exist if its accessible. It not much point to a discussion about such topics if the participants does not have access to the material.
High quality comments on HN get undermined if only a small selection of people has access to the topic of discussion. Comments based only on the title is usually a sign of low quality.
"accessible" doesn't necessarily needs to mean "free".
The existing funding mechanisms for journalism exacerbate the problem.
The highest-quality generally-accessible journalism is virtually uniformly some form of national or public media, usually broadcast: BBC, DW, CBC, ABC (Australia), Al Jazeera, PBS, NPR. These treat journalism as the public good it is.
For Internet media, I'm increasingly of the view that news costs should be bundled into primary connectivity whether wired or wireless.
The total budget for journalism in the US amounts to less than $200/person. The cost of managing subscription-management systems often greatly exceeds this. (There's no such thing as a free lunch-monetisation system.)
At the 2005 advertising peak, ads income (a cost born by the public through product purchases) was $50 billion. Subscription expense in 2020 was another $11 billion. Pro-rated per person among the 330 million population of the US:
- Advertising: $50 billion -- $150/person ($12.60/person-month)
- Subscription: $11 billion -- $33/person ($2.75/person-month)
- Combined: $61 billion -- $183/person ($15.40/person-month)
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers...
An advertising-free subscription assuming 2.5 persons per household on average would run less than $40/mo. With advertising, the cost would be less than $8/mo. This would fund journalism at the levels of 2005, whilst making the work product available to every household in the US.
My suggestion would be to further index ISP fees to the typical household wealth of an area. Richer locations would pay more, poorer locations would have their news source somewhat subsidised. Businesses could be similarly assessed.
It turns out that either paying directly for news, or indirectly through advertising, creates tremendous distortions.
That's a problem for an aggregator site like HN. Dozens of paywalled sites are likely to show up here. Even if the average reader wanted to subscribe to them, he or she might not have the money and time to do so.
Is funding based on annoying prospective readers really better?
You are only annoyed because you haven't paid. Therefore your annoyance is irrelevant to them.
I must say I have more sympathy for the people creating and selling the content than those trying to get it for free.
For me it's not paying that's the issue, but rather having to sign up to an individual service and pay a monthly fee for every piece you read on every different website.
There really needs to be a Spotify for journalism and similar content. I know there are some attempts (apple news for example) but they haven't cracked it yet.
The average person skips paywalls for the same reason the average person used to pirate movies. It isn't about cost, but about the most convenient means of access
1 reply →
Counterpoint accepted. But what they mostly do is some clickbait title and/or teasertext and when you visit that link and start reading ... please pay.
That is waisting time, because there is no obvious hint to the pay wall given upfront.
I would support, but not if they play tricks on me, or, if they're out of the legislation area I live in.
And then, wanting 2.5$ for one article is just transferring the real world to the online. But online is not working on the same principles like the real world.. my thoughts.