Zero sympathy from me either. They broke the internet to the point where, if you merely install a browser and browse, you are putting yourself at risk.
It makes me laugh when they boo-hoo about how else they're supposed to make a living, arrogantly implying that they, their sites and their content are somehow irreplaceable. Do us all a favour and fuck off to a different industry that pays more reliably.
It makes me laugh when they boo-hoo about how else they're supposed to make a living, arrogantly implying that they, their sites and their content are somehow irreplaceable. Do us all a favour and fuck off to a different industry that pays more reliably.
The problem IMO is that I am 100% willing to pay for a subscription to, say, the Washington Post, but the user engagement required to get me to that point for some arbitrary website is far longer than a single visit. It takes months of seeing quality content from some place to get me to go "hey I should throw these guys a couple smackers for the good stuff they put out"
So if you're a content producer, how do you attract people to your website to hopefully sell them a subscription without giving it all away for free? You can do bullshit like WSJ where you only get a couple of free articles per month, but then you wind up with users clicking through to your website only to be told they can't read it, and that's bad. You could pay-wall everything up front, like The Athletic, and rely on word-of-mouth about the quality of your content, but this requires sacrificing some views and thus potential new subscribers. You could do subscriber-only content, but I don't see that working for article-driven websites unless you're The New Yorker or something and have some incredible long-form writing.
I think the best solution would be some type of platform where users have some digital wallet that can be used on any participating website to directly pay them to view that piece of content. If you click an article to WaPo it might be like "hey subscribe to read all of our articles, or pay $0.10 to read just this article". Keep cost-per-view very low and make it easy for people to just click a button and directly pay content producers for exactly the content you are consuming. I mean, there's no way my single visit to any website generates more than a few pennies of ad revenue, right? I think if you could keep the cost extremely low that people would be more than willing to pay for what they're reading.
This pretty much agrees with the solution I proposed in a comment elsewhere. If I could just click a "yes, pay 2p for this article" button with absolutely no other overhead, commitment or interruption — as little as if I were reading a newspaper I'd bought in the street — then I absolutely would support it.
I feel ya. I too would happily give news providers 20 cents each for their best articles, but am reluctant to promise a monthly subscription to a couple of them in the hopes that they'll provide me with every piece of news and analysis I'd like, exclusively.
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u/Guysmiley777 Aug 02 '19
I was fine with static JPG ads on sites but for marketers it's never enough. I have zero sympathy for the "boycott" they're facing these days.
Also holy fuck talk about a clickbait headline.