No Advertising journalism

[Berkut]

I was thinking about the fact that the advertising model for journalism sucks.


Among the many way it sucks, is that the user experience is terrible. The ads are annoying.


Also, it sucks that there is content out there I would like to see, but that I cannot because I don't subscribe to that particular source. For example, I don't have a WSJ subscription, so I hit their paywall all the time. But I do have a NYT subscription. I would like to see WSJ content, but I am not going to subscribe to them, because I don't want to pay for a bunch of different providers.


So my idea is this:


Create a content aggregation site that is add free. You can subscribe to this single service, and the service will then serve you content without ads. I am thinking there could be two different subscription models:


1. You pay a flat monthly fee, similar to Apple Music. We track what articles you read in a given month, then take your fee and pay each of the sources of content based on how much you sourced from that provider. If the monthly fee is $19.99, then we take a cut (say 20%), then the remainder ($16) gets divided among all the content providers you accessed, based on how many times you accessed each of them.


2. There is no monthly fee, but you have to register, and each time we serve you content, you are charged a nominal fee. We take a cut of that, and send the rest on to the content provider.


The deal however, is that you will never, ever, see an ad. This is straight up you paying for content - the consumer is the customer, rather than the consumer being the content for the advertisters as the customer.


You could even get the "free" content providers involved. You want to see CNN without any ads? No problem, subscribe to our service, and you can have CNN ad free - you just have to be willing to pay CNN some nominal fee that they would have gotten from an advertiser rather than from you.


We could setup maximum monthly charges for the ala carte service.


Thoughts?


One key, of course, would be getting enough content providers to buy in to make it a reasonable source of news and information.


But thiningk about this, this is how *I* wish I could get my news. Some service that at a reasonable price can charge ME for the content, rather than using me as a product to sell the advertisers.

[Monoriu]

I will never pay for news.  Full stop.  Advertisements are ok. 

[HVC]

I think this method would just lead to more clickbate. Especially since their cut is reliant on you clicking their article. Normal internet ads already add to this problem, but at least with a dedicated subscription to a news site the revenue is more or less guaranteed.

[DGuller]

I think this method would just lead to more clickbate. Especially since their cut is reliant on you clicking their article. Normal internet ads already add to this problem, but at least with a dedicated subscription to a news site the revenue is more or less guaranteed.

Either ads or master subscription encourage clickbaits, but there is one big difference:  people are going to be a lot more pissed off when they're taken by clickbait on the service they pay for.

[Oexmelin]

Curating news/content is a valuable service. What you are suggesting has the advantage of corresponding to the ongoing disaggregation that is already happening, i.e., that people would rather read one article about a topic that pops up - regardless of the source - rather than a full publication. Such curation already happens, however, if inadvertently, as people get their news from FB and others, that are curated to their browsing history and clicks, without much conscientious input. Or as is happening through Apple News. I don't know how individual publications would answer such a model, nor if it could work across the existing sharing platforms. Whether or not this service would attract customers, I don't know.

[Berkut]

Who here would to a service that worked like this?

Say the pay monthly model is $24.99, and that got you pretty much unlimited access to all the major publications, ad free.

Or you could pay $.49 per article read, but you would be billed monthly on a pre-confirmed credit card.

[Zoupa]

That's too much. People won't pay more than 15$/month, tops.

[viper37]

I will never pay for news.  Full stop.  Advertisements are ok.

You never pay for anything but hard drives for your animes

[Eddie Teach]

I will never pay for news.  Full stop.  Advertisements are ok.

[Goblin voice] "Time is money, friend."

[Monoriu]

I will never pay for news.  Full stop.  Advertisements are ok.

You never pay for anything but hard drives for your animes

That's not really true    But there is no way I am going to pay for news post internet.  The majority of news sites are free, and they aren't too bad as far as advertisements go.  If some sites have advertisements that are too annoying, I can easily switch to other free sites. 

[Berkut]

Mono is not the tArget audience

[Oexmelin]

But who is the target audience?

If it's people who consume the news casually, i.e., people who see articles being advertised on their social media, 30$ is much, much too high. The value of curation is probably too murky and the annoyance of the ads is probably too low, to justify such a price.

If it is people who really enjoy the news, enough to pay, my sense is that Zoupa is right: 30$ a month is still too high, much higher than the price of a single subscription to a full newspaper. And while you may argue it gives full access to hundreds of newspapers, my sense is that people will behave with such a service like they do with news now: reading, more or less, the equivalent of a single newspaper, albeit spread out over dozens of different publications.

[Zoupa]

Exactly. And 15 USD is about the cost of subscription to a daily paper. Here, at least.

Mon abonnement à Libération me coute bien plus, mais ca vaut le cout

[Maximus]

I've thought about something similar to this. I think the solution is to either have ads or a subscription. User's choice. That's a pretty common model.  I share your aversion to ads but it appears most people do not.

The bigger value, IMO is to have all your subscriptions in one place. Also I think a curation service would be of value to a significant audience.

[Admiral Yi]

If they charged per article you'd still need to click an authorization to get to the article (after the fixed time cost of setting up the payment information).  How is that any better than clicking out of a pop-up?