My household still gets a physical paper (the Seattle Times), and a digital version of the same. We subscribe to the NYT and The Economist. That's about our limit for news subscriptions.
I'm not going to fork over $10/month to each of the other potential news sites for every article they publish. I have no idea why the Podunk Press and the Suburban Picayune Times even consider that as an option for out-of-area readers.
It'd be interesting to have a federated subscription model -- I'd pay an additional $X/month for all of the rest of the newspapers, and they could share that. They'll get nothing from me otherwise. Probably there is a business here (the tech to actually do it seems pretty straightforward, at first glance).
My problem with apple news is that it still doesn't really resolve the gamified nature of news and the misaligned incentives between a concise but high quality and information dense content that the user wants and the click-bait, flame bait, low density, attention stealing articles news companies are incentive to write when their compensation is proportional to impressions and time engagement irrespective of the quality of that interaction.
I want to be able to have a non trivial level of discretion as to which writers/groups to starve and which to support. For example, being able to pick a handful of sites or articles where my subscription/views/view-time don't count towards their bottom line. Or we could set aside 30-40% of subscription cost to distribute based on the the proportion of some active user action for like Medium's claps or some other rating.
At present the economist/ft are the only publications that haven't let me down in a big way and I'm weary of supporting anything else.
I wish there were simple bundles that subscribers could adjust periodically (don’t know that a balanced period might be, perhaps a week?) and allow them to pick from X number of reputable and worthwhile publications.
This subscription would do minimal metrics of tracking and allow people to adjust their feed. And also go back to traditional headlines (with all the fun puns and occasional hyperbole, but much less click-bait because that turns subscribers off.
No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money. The problem lies squarely with hordes of credulous morons who either don’t know or don’t care that their news is fake, and aren’t willing to shell out for quality content. Whether that exposes a deeper flaw in human nature, or is just an oddity of our times, is left to you to decide.
> No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money.
The product of good journalism is investigation, reporting, and insight. What news organizations sell is a writeup. This is a mismatch. I'm interested in paying for the ideas, not the prose.
When, say, the Wall Street Journal reported on the Stormy Daniels hush money last year, everyone else re-reported it soon after. If you had a Journal subscription you got the news slightly sooner; otherwise, wait a tiny bit and every news organization from VICE to Breitbart has their own story about it too. Paying for the original source makes you feel good about supporting journalism, but that's it.
It's rather like the companies who produce a high-quality open-source product with a medium-quality cloud-hosted offering and then blame open source when Amazon also offers their high-quality product in the cloud. If the interesting and valuable part of your work is freely copiable and you're only charging for a delivery channel that anyone can provide, I feel bad for you but I'm entirely unsurprised your business model isn't working out.
Perhaps one answer, as with some open source code, is to see journalism as a social good in itself, worth supporting as an activity even if we don't have a way to turn its output into a profitable product. Perhaps another is, like other open source, to find people who have a commercial need for good journalism and have them subsidize it in the process in some way.
I keep hoping that something like GNU Taler will catch on. I have having subscriptions to various services, and I think something like Taler will help because it makes payments easier.
An even better service would be to have something like Netflix, but for news. I could pay $X/month and have access to a variety of news sources. Ideally, those news sources would be paid according to their popularity and accuracy, and I would have a simple bill every month to pay instead of several.
I had a subscription to The Economist for a little while, but I found that I still read other news sources and only read a handful of Economist articles. I want quality journalism, but having subscriptions to every source I trust is cost prohibitive and no single source has everything I want. I want a curated set of high quality articles for a constant price.
> An even better service would be to have something like Netflix, but for news. I could pay $X/month and have access to a variety of news sources. Ideally, those news sources would be paid according to their popularity and accuracy, and I would have a simple bill every month to pay instead of several.
Taler from what I understand does not require full details to be shared with the tax man, only agregates. That being said I don't think taler is anonymous at all.
If the end product of this is that society collapses because of the eventual effects of only fake news succeeding, then I'd say their model isn't "fine" at all.
> No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money.
The problem is how much of their model is built on giving away their product for free, they want all the benefits of being open and free to access (in googles index, shared on sites like HN) but they also want to be closed to non-subscribers, the two are mutually exclusive and they need to pick one.
Either way I consider this a solved problem with the BBC and/or PBS model, news is an important public service and shouldn't be left up to commercial behemoths.
If your Plan for Saving the World requires on changing human nature, overall intelligence,[1] or mass social behaviour, you're going to be Having a Bad Time.
Markets and information play poorly. Always have, always will.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Also known as the Lake Wobegon Fallacy. All the children aren't above average.
People, through their actions, have proven they want free and easy sensationalism. Not in-depth investigative reporting. You can't really just sell into that.
The popularity of investigative journalism podcasts from NPR, Gimlet, ProPublica, Center for Investigative Reporting, etc. seem to disprove this theory.
Outside of a few exceptional pieces the typical content on print "news" sites is utter garbage. The pressure to have a bunch of different columns publishing multiple stories a day seems like it really drives the quality down. All the super cool long-form investigative journalism gets totally buried by "stories" or "updates" that are basically just a headline and a sentence or two of actual content.
So? Tabloids have always been popular because they're entertaining. Movies are probably more popular than news too.
And BuzzFeed is a no different than NYT it WaPo at the macro scale. They just have a different idea about what the filler content should look like. Print news is really behind and have been fruitlessly playing catch-up due to a prestigious culture that holds reporting the most boring least relevant news as the highest ideal. The paper should be pushing a handful of super in-depth issues and putting the 'reporting' straight in the archive for news nerds.
NYT's Wirecutter is the most interesting innovation from an old guard news org I've seen in a while and is a good candidate to be some of that filler -- relevant, useful, and sometimes genuinely interesting.
Other than a few long-form pieces from investigative journalists that show up in my Twitter feed I would never actually read a newspaper. Print news 'content' is uninteresting, unimportant, irrelevant to anything that actually matters most of the time, just as sensationalist as the tabloids, mostly rage bait, and disempowering.
Podcasts where the format is they have to pick a single story to tell for the whole week gets this right. A daily book where on a typical day you can shread the whole thing without looking and not feel like you missed anything is only being kept alive by feaux prestige.
If those were the only two options, sure, NYT wins. But there are plenty of free options better than Breitbart. BBC News, NPR, and The Guardian are all decent, on par with NYT in my opinion. For local news, I've mostly found small sites that follow specific local issues to be better than the newspapers, e.g. in Houston the best weather news is Space City Weather [1], and in DC the best source for transit/urbanist news is Greater Greater Washington [2]. There are pretty good smaller news sites and blogs for specific issues too, e.g. I read SCOTUSblog for Supreme Court news, and FiveThirtyEight for stats-oriented sports and US politics coverage. For "ongoing" world-news events, I usually just read what Wikipedia has synthesized. None of these have paywalls, though some do ask for donations.
(I do subscribe to a few magazines though, just not newspapers.)
I don't think anyone argues that journalism is in a healthy place today, but what is the alternative? The problem is that real news costs real money to produce. Newspapers could be not-for-profit but their reporters would still need a salary to do their jobs.
Democracy Now Productions, the independent nonprofit
organization which produces Democracy Now!, is funded
entirely through contributions from listeners, viewers,
and foundations such as the Ford Foundation,[failed
verification] Lannan Foundation, J.M. Kaplan Fund,[4]
[5][6][unreliable source?] and does not accept
advertisers, corporate underwriting or government
funding.[7]
The remark from Bill Clinton is a fun bit:
Clinton defended his administration's policies and charged
Goodman with being "hostile and combative".[51]
While your question isn't wrong, how is that fundamentally different from how things were before? How can news be free if it relies upon paying readership for its sustained production?
There was a brief golden age of newspapers that went away with industrialization. It hasn't been Ben Franklin's game for a long time and I think people need to think about what that has meant and will mean.
It's my impression that early in Benjamin Franklin's publishing career he published newspapers so he could put ads in them to sell more books. And that later in his publishing career, he used his newspapers more to promote his revolutionary agenda. The man wasn't a journalist.
I'm curious as to when this mythical age of widespread access to "real news" existed. George Orwell dated it to at least 80 years ago ("History stopped in 1936")...
A sea change began with Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, seen as birthing modern, generally impartial, journalism. Not absolutely, but relative to earlier periods, quite.
Ironically, widespread national advertising assisted in much of. this, at least for stories not adversely concerning national advertisers. But local squelching of critical news was limited, and occasional nationally critical stories could appear. Watergate was arguably the high-water mark. Corporate ownership massively diluted effectiveness, especially after 1980, though exceptions remain.
Bookending Orwell and Lippmann, I'd suggest I.F. Stone (who calls the 1970s as a high-water mark) and Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909).
There's a huge difference between biased or inaccurate coverage and flat out made up stories. The NYT publishes very few of the latter. Fake news sites publish 100% of the latter. That's a pretty significant difference.
My point is that people have been making the same complaint for a very long time, even back when people paid for news printed on sheets of paper.
"This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. [...] I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable."
I agree... not only did the internet enable access to all the information, but it also provided the most convenient interface (removing the possibility of collecting a profit margin from the production of physical goods). I'm not sure how a corporation can compete with that; they are simply not lean enough, but I feel like individuals still can. Become a good writer, do solid research, offer unique insights, and build a fanbase. Then sell T-shirts.
The whole thing uses weird language to try to paint the practice of serving one thing to google and another to people coming from google as some kind of feature.
Could a startup go the Spotify/streaming music route and aggregate all of the popular news stories? I imagine bootstrapping content from NYT, WaPo, and all of the other popular news orgs, stuffing them into a common and unobtrusive web interface, and then providing them all for free to visitors.
The startup could then try implementing micro transactions or minimal ads and do a revenue share with the original publishers.
The problem would be surviving without being sued long enough to gain the traction and acceptance that Spotify has.
The real problem, of course, is that there are a billion different news organizations with independent paywalls and gateways. It's a hassle to sign up for them all and completely unreasonable to expect that we should subscribe to all of them. Because they don't have a federated micro transaction model in place, the solution is to come up with one for them and get them to adopt it. It's better for both us and them, they just don't know it yet.
Spotify worked a compulsory license provision of copyright law that applies specifically and only to music streaming. (Originally intended for radio.)
A middle man controlling the subscriber-ship would not necessarily be better for papers. The middle man entity would have enormous bargaining leverage, like Apple does with the App Store.
> The middle man entity would have enormous bargaining leverage, like Apple does with the App Store.
That's a great point and speaks to a true danger with this model.
I imagine content publishers could distribute their content across multiple distributors if they existed, though I imagine the market would only support a handful of competitors.
> Spotify worked a compulsory license provision of copyright law that applies specifically and only to music streaming. (Originally intended for radio.)
Could you speak more to this point? I'm incredibly interested. How was this provision created, and did they start their business with a law team? How were they able to get this accepted? What about other, earlier entrants in this space? Grooveshark obviously failed (they walked a slightly shadier path), but had they tried to get on proper legal footing they might have made it.
Could a news aggregator start out as a Grooveshark, then pivot into a Spotify without getting sued into oblivion?
There is no compulsory license for on demand music streaming where you can choose what songs you want to listen to and when. The compulsory license was for streaming radio stations where you can’t choose the exact songs you want to listen to like Pandora.
Proof? A radio can play any music it wants to and an artist/record label can’t stop them as long as they have a license. An artist can stop Spotify from including them in their music library.
Blendle has been doing something similar and I happily send some dollars their way from time to time although I'd admit it would probably be more if they hosted more linux magazines etc.
Also I hear they are changing their business model to monthly payments. If this is true I guess I'm out unless they suddely - like Spotify - will give me access to everything I'm interested in.
There are going to be people complaining about the new requirement to have an account to view content.
To the publishers, you should _really_ use some kind of federated login. Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. but don't forget those who are willing to have a unique account.
At this point, publishers should probably just accept that any tracking is unacceptable, so if they want people to pay (and therefore login), then they need to stop funneling data to ad networks and other PII aggregators.
I doubt that even 1% of internet users understand the extent of the PII that is collected. I would guess if the general public understood how all this worked, there would be many more people who objected to the practice.
Many of them probably also didn't set the ad blocker up themselves - they have tech-savvy relatives handle their computer stuff, and those tech-savvy relatives have realized that fewer ads means fewer malicious social engineering ads means less malware to remove during the next visit.
It's only my personal opinion, but I don't care at all about tracking. They can track me all they like. I block ads because they make my browsing slow, cause my CPU to turbo boost, interrupt my browsing, clutter the web pages excessively. I suspect a huge majority of that 26% is similar to me in this.
As a user, there's absolutely no way I'm going to give you a real name and email address if you roll your own authentication. I probably won't use your service at all.
Why not? Saves you the trouble of building and maintaining a secure access system. You likely gain more users because of network effects, which doesn’t cut your advertising budget so much as supplements it. If your trying to preserve user privacy, there’s a good chance you’re too late there - they most likely already gave that up a long time ago.
My relationship with my readers is our most valuable asset, and I don't want it mediated by companies who compete with me for ad dollars. It's the same reason I publish content on our own domain and not Medium or Facebook or LinkedIn.
When you use a federated login, you still can assign an email address to the federated user. Most of them will even pass one to you.
But, do you really want your users to have the added friction and probably just move on to another site, and do you really want the responsibility of providing your own authorization? I work for a B2B SASS company and we highly encourage users to use their company’s AD account that we federate with.
Publishers actually do use something of a federated service to manage subscriptions for the most part. I'd say those services have some catching up to do. Hearst runs such a service:
The problem with requiring an account to view content is doing so removes your content entirely from Google, and probably from most social media snippet generators.
Google will only include your content in their search results if the user can see your content. The "metered paywall" trick is a loophole to get around that.
If you put all your content behind a paywall, you're siloing yourself off from the entire rest of the internet, at least as far as discoverability goes.
They seem to allow enough of their pages to appear to enable Google to see it. I can always see the first few sentences and the titles of WSJ articles, that's probably what google can see too.
I don't think it's that -- the amount shown to Google isn't enough to provide any kind of meaningful SEO. My guess is WSJ has something worked out with Google.
> The "metered paywall" trick is a loophole to get around that.
Do keep in mind that this isn't so much a loophole, but an agreement that Google made with publishers so that they could stay ranked on Google. In the wake of this they might reach a different agreement.
If Google had a setting for "I am a subscriber to x,y,z -- please include them in my results" I would be so happy. I want to tell Google that I'm a Red Hat subscriber and want their KB articles first.
God, the tone of that article was nauseating. Google isn't "unlocking" anything. They're just fixing a loophole in incognito mode that shouldn't have been there in the first place. And it's not like that was the only option for this. When these 'incognito detectors' first became viable, I just set up firefox where when you quit out it automatically cleared your entire history. So I would normally browse in Chrome, but then when I wanted to see paywalled contact I would just right click and open in Firefox.
Hopefully publishers will understand at some point that "Only show a couple articles free" is not a 100% technologically viable option. It will always be a cat-and-mouse game if that's the behavior you're going for.
I don't see myself subscribing to any newspaper and paying $15+ per month for having a single source of news, usually with a single point of view and/or bias.
I would much rather pay a fair amount (more or less $15-$30 per year, which is what I pay on my landline), and then subscribe to a number of them.
This for me looks like a more sustainable model, but I guess that's not what their finance departments think.
I'm always shocked when I consider the cost of these things. Each newspaper provides a relatively tiny amount of differentiated content and then each of them want more than a netflix subscription a month? How in the hell do those costs compare?
News publishers should get their asses together in one building and build a "netflix for news". No I don't want to register or put my CC info at your US 10k town TV station with a single overworked dude managing IT just to follow a reddit link, but link yourself with a central ID provider that manages payment and does not disclose my personal data, and I'd be in for it.
We had this in Slovakia (https://piano.io/ ), but it was not very successful, and all media companies now have their own systems. But they seems to expand to other markets.
I think that their main problem was that at the same time, the subscription was low (so didn't bring much revenue) and at the same time people hated it because now they had to pay for something that was free before. So I guess once we get used to pay for journalism, then something like netflix for media might work.
I think none of this will work in the long run. There is too much content available for free. I have a digital magazine subscription (access to 1000s of magazines) but I hardly ever use it because there is so much alternative content. I might cancel in the future.
Your local library probably provides content for free if they subscribe to news services, paid for with your tax dollars. Paywalls are just a tax on those too stupid to go to one.
Newspapers never made their money from subscriptions or from selling papers on the street. What kept newspapers in business was classified ads, which was disrupted as a revenue stream when Craigslist came around.
Why does Google not penalise them on search for this behaviour? Seems exactly against webmaster guidelines on hiding content or showing different content to a user and bot.
You can still offer people content for free and also not be defeated by incognito. Offer regular news articles for free, and make premium editorials and analysis require a (reasonably priced) subscription.
But anecdotally, news orgs will never get my money while their subscription terms continue to be asinine. I will gladly give a newspaper $25 - $50 a year for access. I will not play these $X/week for odd week increment games.
I will gladly give a newspaper $25 - $50 a year for access
The regional newspaper in my state is $25/6 months, which includes the physical Sunday paper and DRM-free downloadable PDFs of the newspaper every day that you can view on any device.
About a year ago I looked around at papers in other states, and the pricing and benefits were similar. It's only the super-premium papers that charge much more, but even the New York Times maxes out at $40/month for physical Sunday + digital. I'm OK paying a premium for the New York Times because I understand it's expensive to pay reporters and editors and photographers to travel to and live in cities around the world.
I think if the people who whine about "I'd pay $xx if the newspaper only did $yy" actually put their money where their mouths are, journalism (especially local) would be in a better place.
The problem is there is so much content available on the web, but there isn't yet a federated subscription service to support it all. I would pay ~ $5 a month for news access, but I'm certainly not going to pay 2 or 5 or 10 dollars a month for each random site I visit to read their couple articles that may interest me. I just will skip their content.
As Maciej Cegłowski pointed out some years ago, we already have a working micropayment system for content.[1] Unfortunately, the payments are going to carriers/service providers to pay for the page bloat that comes from not having another micropayment system.
I go the other direction. I am way too fast a reader and read too widely to handle per-article microtransactions well. I do have a subscription to a couple of my top magazines and news sources, but end up reading up to the free allotment on many, many more every month. I'd happily pay $30-50/mo for unlimited access to many sources, but it'd have to have 10+ of my favorites on board to make it worthwhile. I read 20-50 serious articles a day, across free and paywalled and subscription content. I'm unwilling to pay $10-25/mo for each source individually. But if the average could get down around $5/mo for each major source (that I'll read 15-50 articles/mo from, given the access), and leftover change to the ones I read only occasionally, I'd be delighted. Basically, yeah, I want Spotify for journalism, even if it's a good bit more expensive.
I did my last check-through of all the newspaper plans about 3 months ago, and out of the 6 on my list, not one offered a clear cut subscription. I actually, really don't want a physical newspaper. I do want clear subscription terms.
Your regional newspaper does sound super reasonable though, and I hope more newspapers follow that general model.
That's $200 a year for a newspaper I read about once a week
Seems reasonable to me. Important journalism isn't free. If you want free trash, Buzzfeed is your friend.
that doesn't even get me their cooking section.
Lucky you! From that same link someone else posted above you can subscribe to the cooking section for $40 for a whole year ($3/month). And then you don't have to have the newspaper that you're not going to read anyway!
But go ahead and move the goalposts again. We'll wait.
I'm confused, where did you get the impression that he only wants to read the cooking section and nothing from the regular newspaper?
Or do you want him to pay $200 for the general contents + $40 a year for recipes? Is it the same kind of deal for getting business breaking news or yoga tutorials? That seems crazy to me.
It's a reasonable request that I concur with. This sort of piecemeal subscription model is really annoying. The main reason all other streaming services took off was because people didn't want piecemeal cable bundles. Once you pay for a subscription, you should get everything under that banner. No more paywalls. That's a reasonable expectation when seen in the context of other streaming services. Second, if you are pretending to be a tech company offering soft services on the internet, act like one. nytimes is the slowest and most bloated ad/tracking infested site that I visit. It brings firefox mobile to a crawl. This may be one of the reasons why a middleman like apple news may actually work, simply by reducing the friction. If you can make nytimes.com behave like lwn.net, I would pay.
Isn't it? It seems that most journalism these days consists of taking things from a news agency feed and polluting them with garbage opinions. Might as well read the source.
With the Economist you can at least do it via email, or if you’re doing digital only you can use a subscription via Apple’s in app purchases etc and manage it that way.
And I had to call to Croatia to cancel mine. There are definitely dark patterns these guys using. Which was very surprising to see from true-journalism-northern-star
Not 100% sure but I think it is something to do with being able to write to localstorage (e.g. if the site figures it can't write there then it is in Incognito). I read it was something like that.
This might be a dumb question as someone who isn't a pro on this topic but isn't it really simple to just log the IP of the request for the article and meter it based on IP instead of cookies, browser fingerprinting, or however they are doing it now? Won't that solve like 99.9% of the problem? I would imagine the amount of people that will rotate IPs just to read free articles is exceptionally small.
I suppose that might pose an issue with shared IPs at offices, for example. Also might cause a minor issue with people in the same household trying to read articles on the same site. But seems like a vast improvement over nothing at all, no?
If your entire industry is only barely viable through the use of user-hostile tracking, I find it hard to feel bad when the ad tech loopholes are closed.
Is this update preventing publishers from identifying if a reader is accessing its site using Incognito mode, or is it preventing publishers from identifying who the reader is and whether they've reached their article limit? If the former, why is knowing whether an unidentifiable reader is accessing a website via Incognito mode a privacy issue? If the latter, why wouldn't publishers just block all access to their site that is reached via Incognito mode?
> why is knowing whether an unidentifiable reader is accessing a website via Incognito mode a privacy issue?
Because it makes Incognito less useful, and Incognito is a tool for people to control their privacy.
Anyway, Incognito isn't only used for anonymous browsing. For example, a user might use an Incognito window to register on a shopping site, providing all their personal details, just because they don't want Facebook to see their activity on this third party site (and they don't want to bother signing out of Facebook in their main browser context). So it's reasonable to consider "is using Incognito mode" to be private information.
If we're talking about Chrome I'm guessing most of the target audience is on Android phones. Is it really not possible to use javascript on those phones to sufficiently fingerprint them for the purpose of metering? Webaudio, HTML5 Canvas, webgl, various timings, and probably a thousand other data points I don't know about...
And doesn't the clone army of iphones all essentially use Safari where the cookies still work?
This is not the big deal that they are making it out to be, and I don't expect it to have a huge impact on publishers.
The simple truth is that the people who will circumvent paywalls are usually the kind of people who would never subscribe anyhow.
If you are a publisher relying on detecting private mode to compel people to subscribe then you have a content problem - or a lack of marketing talent.
I say this as someone who has worked in 15+ years in publishing (web/digital) and also with publishers and digital subscriptions (NYTimes and The New Yorker).
Large scale NAT is one reason that would fail. Some mobile carriers have most of their customers behind a handful of IPs. Wikipedia has dealt with this a lot, and has a page explaining why conflating an IP address to a person isn't usually the way to go.
Not really. Problems arise when you have many people behind the same IP. You can hand-wave this problem away for family units behind a router, but you'll soon find out there are entire institutions (schools, office buildings with lots of unrelated companies in them, etc) that will share an IP.
Yes, but with a significant false positive rate due to IP address sharing, and you can get more articles by switching IP’s (unless someone else exhausted the new IP before you got it).
One of my problems is that even with the publications I subscribe to, I still get plenty of ads served up to me. This problem is especially acute with the NY Times, where their Android app seems to have an issue loading both ads and content efficiently.
I guess that this situation is a result of trying to find the right balance in pricing.
That said, if I was guaranteed ad-free content, I would subscribe to more publications than use incognito mode to get around soft paywalls.
> We tried to breach the paywalls of the publishers listed using Chrome’s current browser (v. 75), in Incognito Mode. Without fail, the websites detected the intrusion attempt and prevented access to the content.
Most of them (at least on mobile of what I know) already have a "Click here to see full article" button. This is where the paywall should be.
You start to read the article, it seems interesting ? You click (and then have to login, pay , or whatever).
Of course it might result of some sort of redacting bait, but why not try that ?
There's a french tech website [0] that does that, some article are free to read (mostly brief content), but those where journalist have spent time on it, you can only see the begining, and if you are a paying customer, you see the whole content.
You can pay from 0.99€ for a 48h test, so you can see if the content is worthy for you.
(not affiliated at all, I just think they do this the good way)
> As an unintended consequence of Google’s browser update, it is a very real possibility that a lot of publisher content would eventually disappear behind hard paywalls, and the open web would grow dark for many news consumers, with even darker consequences for publisher revenue streams.
Kind of disingenuous to talk of the open web in this context as what the publishers are trying to do it rather the opposite to putting the content on the open web (to the extent the term isn't already taken for meaning building on public technologies).
The journalists and publishers need to get paid for their work of course, and running a proprietary, closed, pay-for-access service at the periphery of the open web can be justifiable. But I find the rhetoric here has a tinge of hypocrisy.
More content disappearing behind hard paywalls will expose a lot of publishers to the truth that very few people are interested in their content specifically, their link was just the first thing to come up about the subject in some aggregator.
The only reason I bypass paywalls is so I don't have to be annoyed by them, go back to the page I came from, and choose the next option. If the aggregators I use stopped linking paywalled content entirely (or gave me a checkbox option), I wouldn't even bother.
edit: there are outlets I donate to, and they don't even have paywalls. This may sound weird, but I donate to orgs so they produce content that other people can read. People who want me to read their takes should really be paying me.
I don’t get it, this stuff is already behind a paywall already. There’s no darkening of the internet of news if news is already paywalled.
Looks like false controversy to me. All publishers have to do is demand a login and that’s it. Articles that are now behind a paywall will continue to do so.
There’s no difference that I can understand outside of a slight adjustment in paywall protection. Seriously can anyone explain what he’s going on about?
I think the author is upset because publishers want to have their cake and eat it too: It has long been google’s (and all other successful search engines’) policy that sites should present the same content to the web crawler and to human beings.
Soft paywalls are essentially a loophole in that (at least superficially) pro-consumer rule, and incognito blockers are apparently taking that loophole one step too far. This move will fix the issue by changing the browser instead of page ranks.
Here is an unfounded conspiracy theory: People noticed that regularly clearing cookies works better than incognito mode, so they were switching to that because of incognito blockers, and that presents an existential threat to Google’s cash cow.
I don’t believe the previous paragraph, but I really want an extension that nukes all browser state if my computer / device is idle for more than 4 hours. The only exceptions would be bookmarks and password management.
They've been using soft paywalls which allow people to read a certain number of articles per month for free. To prevent users from simply using incognito mode to pretend every visit is their first visit, publishers started detecting incognito mode and blocking them from reading articles using it (without signing in).
Which was quite frustrating for us that only ever surf in incognito.
Now we'll see what their response is, probably something moronic as 5 views per IP.
Better to just require an account straight up. Then there is no point for anyone to link to them and we will get rid of the whole "will I be able to read this link mess".
Purely anecdotally, I never remember seeing the "Incognito walls" before a year or so ago; paywalls are clearly able to function even if they can't stop the use of private modes.
Many/most paywalls can be bypassed by blocking or wiping cookies. I wonder if news sites are going to come for cookie blocking next.
I understand this is publisher-centric newspaper, but it's not like it was that hard to bypass it.
If I remember right, Chrome had "open guest window" functionality forever, which bypasses the detectors as wll -- and it only took 4 clicks (select all, copy, open guest window, paste-and-go)
Sure 4 click -> 1 click reduction is a big change, but it is hardly "death of metered firewall"
But how will we pay the NYT to try to drag the US into wars while David Brooks lectures debt-loaded millennials about work ethic and family values unless we let them continue to exploit a bug in web browsers?
Monopolist news orgs are losing readership/revenue because they're terrible and refuse to change, not because of Chrome. Meanwhile other, better forms of journalism are thriving.
Not scalable. This is like saying medical bills are under control because of GoFundMe. Some people can support themselves with patreon but the number is limited and it requires tons of work for zero pay while you build a follower base large enough.
"Work for free for two years and maybe you will have a semi sustainable income" sucks.
Crowdfunding also encourages extreme opinions and bubbles over neutral reporting.
Yes, and that is a rather important advantage in case of news & opinion reporting.
The old system consisted [1] of small number of large, vertically integrated media outlets. Each of the outlets was pretty close to a single point of failure in our democratic processes: each had undue ability to influence popular ideas and opinions, and well understood focal points of partisanship and propaganda [2].
The new model, with distributed funding and distributed production of news content is a much healthier, much more resilient ecosystem, with no single points of failure. From my limited observation it is also less prone to creating two singular focal points of polarization ("left" vs "right"); instead people end up in loose, overlapping circles according to their varying interests, socio-political situation and the likes.
--
[1] started off as small outlets, but the more successful ones quickly accreted into large entities, and the internet era weeded out a lot of the smaller entities.
[2] to the point "FOX" and "CNN" has became pejoratives among politically active people.
The NYT has like 4,000 employees. There are 40,000 journalists in the US (just journalists). All of patreon has 100,000 creators.
The number of sustainable journalists is much more limited using crowdfunding than other monetization models.
How many patrons are giving to high quality neutral journalism? How many are giving to people that they personally like and agree with? Look at somebody like Jordan Peterson for an example of how on can leverage culture wars (instead of quality analysis) into cash.
I also have a hard time understanding why it should be free. If you don't want to pay for it, you don't have to pay for it. You also aren't entitled to their for free no more than the writers at the New York Times are entitled to your work for free.
I don't have a problem with the content not being available for free. But the publishers want the best of both worlds. They could easily, for example, make all content require a login, but they know that would kill their readership. This idea that they are somehow entitled to know how many times a non-logged in user has visited their site is absurd.
As that article points out, that is far more related to Trump being elected (something they played a major role in by helping squash a progressive reform candidate in favor of an institutionalist neoliberal) than to their browser paywall strategy. It says far more about how online media is rewarded for making things worse, a scary lesson I hope not too many people learn.
I don't get news from the NYT and am quite happy continuing to do that regardless of their monetary strategy (and by the way, Google is extremely profitable with free + ads).
The starting date is in 2011 when they introduced a metered paywall and has seen an increase yearly. The "Trump effect" was a substantial boost in 2016, but only a part of the overall trend.
It would be interesting to discover the stagnating effects of closing your doors to all but those willing to pay. Perhaps naively, I assume the majority of paying customers were dedicated readers before the paywalls went up. How are new users brought into the funnel of such an exclusive system?
Haven’t we done this experiment enough times? When the publishers switch to hard paywalls their viewership tanks, their advertisers freak out, and they immediately roll it back. We’ve seen this in Europe we’ve seen this in the US when newspapers tried to force Google to stop indexing their content - turns out it is much better to allow Google to index. I expect to see a repeat here. All the paywalls do is send more revenue to the other guys. As long as their is one single source for content that’s not behind a paywall, no paywall will ever work. Furthermore most news outlets today focus on soft news and opinion pieces, and I really don’t care what tantrum some star or starlet is throwing, what else Donald Trump said that offended someone, who isn’t going to the Hamptons this summer, etc. It is news to someone but I’ll never spend a penny on it.
No. This isn't about Google unlocking paywalls. This is about Google fixing a bug where the presence of Icognito Mode could be detected with JS which is totally against the premise of Incognito Mode whose purpose it is to be undetected, not to be detected as somebody wanting to be undetected.
Publishers can everybody to be logged in in order to read their content. Then none of this applies.
“Intrusion attempt” as alleged in the article is more like an “intrusion attempt” by the publishers to exploit a bug in the user’s web browser.
Publishers have every ability to use some DRMed iOS app and bypass the web completely. Instead they want their cake (free SE & sharing traffic) and eat it too (paid or demographically tracked and ad targeted visitors.)
They should think hard about their next move because all that these paywalls have done is make it so I don't read their articles, and I don't feel like I'm missing anything. Maybe I'm the only one? I'm definitely not signing up to read them either.
Keeping up with day-to-day or even week-to-week news is very, very nearly worthless to almost everyone. It's just entertainment, barely—if at all—more laudable or improving than watching soap operas or reading airport novels.
real hard paywalls should block crawlers, and no one would index and find these articles, leading to even greater loss, because no one will reach these sites in the first place
> Without fail, the websites detected the intrusion attempt and prevented access to the content
Using incognito mode in the browser to make it a bit harder to be tracked (without even blocking ads!) is "an intrusion attempt"? Excuse me? That's absurd language.
I would argue they are intruding in that they are accessing information from my browser that they shouldn't have access to. If their website allows me to read an article they don't want me to by going to "www.nytimes.com" that's not an intrusion, that's poor gating on their part.
Couldn't you say the same thing about any security hole? If Equifax didn't want people reading their databases then they shouldn't have allowed anyone with an internet connection to remotely execute code on their systems via https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework/issues/8064
There's an enormous difference between accessing a public endpoint, and accessing one that isn't intended to be public. To use addresses as an analogy:
Going to www.nytimes.com is roughly the equivalent to driving in front of someones house. It's certainly not my fault if they leave their blinds open while they are naked. Now maybe they thought I was someone else due to the car I drove, but that sure as shit isn't my problem.
Equifax is an entirely different issue. If you leave the door open to your house, that sure as hell doesn't give me the right to go into it. I can look at it, I can even tell everyone "Hey, that door is wide open." But I can't go in do shit without permission to be there.
It's the language of someone married to a business model. The publishers can't exist without search engine indexing and user tracking, but can't make money without paywalling.
We have the technology to subsidize media creation appropriately, in the manner of performance royalties organizations. However, since there's no equivalent of radio station middlemen, it's not a problem that can be solved by an unregulated market.
The author was deliberately trying to use incognito mode to view the paywalled content, so this is imho rightfully called an intrusion attempt.
Of course, if you're just using incognito mode normally and happened to visit the same page, then it is not an intrusion attempt but just incognito browsing.
The whole point is that news websites can't distinguish between the two.
I am deliberately using incognito by default (eg now), and if websites don't want to give me their content without tracking me then they should properly paywall their content and ask me to log in - then we both understand what's going on.
Frankly, considering this an intrusion attempt reveals a crazy, completely warped mindset: "We will track you, we want to know exactly who you are and what you read and how long, and if you attempt to evade this surveillance, you are an intruder!"
I use unique emails when signing up for websites - is that intrusion, too?
I would think incognito would make it easier to track, if your session persists until you close incognito. Youd be much better off with umatrix blocking cookies and javascript.
This entire system is just borked. And part of it, is why fake-news spread so easily, since people can't read on newspapers without having to pay for it (which should be fine) but in poor countries, people are not paying for this and end up relying on low quality news sites, which are filled with fake and click bait stuff that gets shared on whatsapp all the time.
Hard paywalls will just make even less people to read sites like nyt, wp, wsj and their revenue will probably go even down.
subscribe to read? no way. my modus operandi is that if I get to a link and it asks for a login or to subscribe, I just close the tab. there's a few websites that I don't even click anymore because of that.. and the list just keeps growing to me.
Is this not anti-competitve? I don't know Google's share of the browser market but this action feels like tearing down a merchant stand at the farmers market. These firewalls are how publishers display their prices and establish a good faith "sample" of the work. If this goes to trial I can see myself on the side of publishers.
I'm amazed that an article about a tracking loophole being closed is posted on HN and the top comment is "is this not anti-competitive". This is not Google subverting advertiser networks for their benefit this is Google fixing a flaw in Incognito mode that has been lazily applied to prevent users from working around article limits.
The browser is an agent of the user, don't expect it to reliably hold information that determines what content they have rights to on your server.
Your analogy just doesn't work in the digital world, just like so many other analogies with physical things.
The publishers are happily sending their entire articles to people whether they pay or not. Then they add in some Javascript code to cover up the article if they don't pay up. Google has done nothing more than prevent this code from running, which is what the users want. The users own the computers, and they have every right to choose what code to run on it.
Nothing is forcing the publishers to send the entire article to non-paying users. They only do it because it's convenient for them. If they don't like Google's actions, they're free to come up with a different technical method of hiding their articles from non-paying users. Most other subscription-based sites don't do these things: they force you to login to access premium content, so the only way to get that data is to either have a valid login, or to hack the site somehow (which is obviously illegal).
no. the users are allowed to use incognito mode. that there was a flaw in it that made it less effective is not google promoting competition, and fixing said security flaw is not about competition again.
Is windows fixing security flaws anti competition? Sounds like anti virus companies should sue.
I'm not going to fork over $10/month to each of the other potential news sites for every article they publish. I have no idea why the Podunk Press and the Suburban Picayune Times even consider that as an option for out-of-area readers.
It'd be interesting to have a federated subscription model -- I'd pay an additional $X/month for all of the rest of the newspapers, and they could share that. They'll get nothing from me otherwise. Probably there is a business here (the tech to actually do it seems pretty straightforward, at first glance).