I have a hard time seeing how the statistic that the Times receives twice as much money from readers as from advertisers is evidence that the NYT "serves advertisers rather than readers". I think that probably puts them in the top 10% of media outlets in terms of how financially independent of advertising they are.
I take the point about subscribers being hard to count to mean that even though most of the money comes from subscribers, each individual subscriber doesn't have much leverage or bandwidth to communicate their desires to NYT. On the flip side, each individual advertiser commands some sizeable chunk of NYT's revenue as leverage.
The NYTs is also known to hassle subscribers who want to unsubscribe. The only reason a company would do that is because they know some people will give up, effectively disenfranchising them.
Anecdotally, it took ten minutes to unsusbscribe this morning (going through an online chat service rather than calling them), which is much longer than it should take, but worth it. It may be worse now due to this incident.
I think it's beyond the pale that they require you to chat with a sales representative to cancel a subscription. To reiterate, the only reason a company would do this is because they know it will suppress the number of people successfully unsubscribing. The NYTs is using the same sort of strategy commercial gyms are infamous for, albeit in a less extreme form.
Contrast it with Netflix's model of unsubscription, which you can do at any time with a single click. They've even gone as far as automatically cancelling inactive accounts. Netflix is obviously a company with confidence in their own product, so they don't resort to any dark patterns in their unsubscription process like the NYTs does.
I’ve developed a habit of canceling things via email. It tends to get a fast response. Any run around is dealt with easily by keeping responses short. And if they charge my credit card again I’ve got a record of exactly when I contacted them so I can pretty easily issue a chargeback. It can also be helpful to make it clear that if they ever want my business in the future they ought to be showing me good service now by canceling without wasting my time.
Netflix is obsessed with data. Easy cancellation lets them define a much more accurate loss function for the AI they eventually want to run their whole business for them.
Strongly agree. My original plan on unsubscribing was to come back if they blinked on SlateStarCodex (everyone makes mistakes), but after being made to jump through these extra hoops, I'm through with this company.
I got through their virtual agent and reached a human agent who decided to transfer me once she got to know I'm asking for cancellation. I got this response "Please wait one moment while I transfer you to an account specialist." Now I'm just waiting after another automated response "Sorry our wait times are longer than expected. Thank you for your patience." This really sucks.
I think any amount of money from advertisers is toxic.
There's a fundamental disconnect between the mission of a news organization and getting paid to lie (which is, fundamentally, what advertising is). You cannot accept ad dollars and be an effective purveyor of truth.
> getting paid to lie (which is, fundamentally, what advertising is).
Not fundamentally. A lot of advertising may be well be outright lying, or close enough as makes no difference.
But... I used to go by a shop named "Cards Galore", it had its name in reasonably sized letters hanging over the sidewalk, and then when I wanted to buy a card I knew where I could get one. Nothing lying about that. I think there's a lot of advertising which is like that.
Something weaker might be true, like "large-scale advertising will inevitably lead to large-scale lying". But "advertising is fundamentally lying" is not true.
While there's a good amount of advertising that's truthful, I think it's safe to label all (or at least nearly all) advertising as emotional manipulation, and on those grounds I try to avoid advertising.
Companies toying with my psychology in order to get me to buy something from them... well, that doesn't sit well with me.
I don't really consider labeling a business to be advertising, though. That's like if I go to Wikipedia and see the Wikipedia logo--it's just showing me where I am.
Internet advertising is pretty much all lying. Even when what an ad says is factual, they're not telling you the whole truth, they're telling you a partial truth that leaves out pieces of information which they know would be relevant to you--that's a lie because their intent is to deceive you.
And by the way, I do get it: in a lot of businesses you have to advertise because your competitors are advertising. Advertising is a blight on society that infects everyone: opting out of advertising isn't a viable option without major sacrifice. I'd like to see a future where we all agree to stop advertising and rely on consumer-reports-style reviewers to obtain unbiased product information.
SlateStarCodex itself used to have advertisers on it, and the adverts seemed pretty much fine - just banners and descriptions from a bunch of sponsors, which were pretty relevant to the blog and, I guess, the people likely to visit it. Advertisement doesn't have to lie, it can just provide useful information you haven't seen yet. Although it generally does.
Advertising is like a stopped clock: even when they present some part of the truth, it's not information, because you don't know if it's true or not. You have to obtain information via other means.
And even when they make statements of fact, it's still lying because they leave things out with the intent to deceive.
> Advertisement doesn't have to lie, it can just provide useful information you haven't seen yet. Although it generally does.
That's the crux, though. It technically doesn't have to be like this, but it almost always is - so "advertising is a bunch of consumer-hostile lies" is a more accurate generalization than "advertising informs people".
