They did it to themselves by starting out with free journalism everywhere on the net. And then it took them far too long to finally realize that ads alone weren't going to pay the bills. If they had stuck with the magazine rack style from the get go (pay for it + ads) it wouldn't be an issue.
If you give everything away for free for thirty years, Then make it worse, and then suddenly charge for it, you're going to have a hard time getting money.
You miss the bigger picture. The shit journalism and propaganda are still free - funded by … other means . That is why magazine have tried to be free in the internet.
You’re also operating with the wisdom of hindsight. No one knew how to handle internet publishing. We all learned together.
I pretty much agree, but I really wish we could move away from ads being literally everywhere in our lives. I'd rather them just charge a little bit more and have a better experience. It's probably falling on deaf ears, though, because nobody ever wants to pay for anything on the internet.
nobody ever wants to pay for anything on the internet
To your point, maybe if what we got in return were worth a shit, people would be more willing to pay. But it gets shittier and shittier, more and more inundated with ads, worse journalism with more clickbait and AI, all for prices that go up every year to multiple times per year.
It was more reasonable when you could go to the store and pay for one newspaper or one issue of a magazine. Then if you really liked it you could subscribe. Now there's no other option but to subscribe. Not everyone wants to be paying a bunch of separate subscription fees per month just to get decent news, and not everyone wants one hundred percent of a news outlets content. But we're charged for it regardless. Fuck no, no one wants to pay for that.
Maybe if it were one of the only things that required a subscription. Like it used to be. But now, almost every single thing we use comes with a subscription charge and there's usually no other way to pay for it. It's all or nothing. And it gets totally exhausting, aggravating, and ridiculously expensive, especially when they force you to pay for a bunch of shit you don't need, or they charge you cancellation fees on top of an extra month, or raise the monthly price without telling you, or tack on extra charges for shit that should just come with it in the first place, etc etc.
My point is, no one should defend the subscription model. If an outlet does good journalism, they'll have donors. PBS Newshour, NPR, Democracy Now, they're some of the best souces and they're all nonprofit. And, what do you know, none of them have actual ads.
And shoutout to local libraries to loaning current magazine issues online. I get a Libby notification every time the New Yorker comes out. And I'm sure they're losing a ton of money because I don't personally pay for a subscription /s
You make good points. I do think maybe if we never went down this road of everything being ad supported, then it wouldn't be this bad. It is the world we live in now, though, and I doubt there is any going back to what could have been
I think the real problem is enshittification. Ads are gross and annoying, but ads are sold through ad networks. The networks started by enticing sites, who built their revenue model around it.
And with news in particular, guess which ad networks both sold ads and drove most of their traffic? Facebook and Google. And then they used this power to come up with the embedded standard that let's them show articles without using the site, and threatened them with cutting off the user stream entirely if they fought back…
Then toss in ISPs and later csps killing off local hosting, and hosting a website is no longer something you just do with your old computer in the basement…
I think it's time to make a more decentralized Internet not run for corporate profit. It's not going to save news sites, but the main Internet seems doomed from where we are…
Doesn't matter how it happened, only that it is happening and everyone is disinterested in saving quality journalism.
The fact that yellow journalism is free and quality journalism is hidden behind a paywall, and the fact that many internet people are indignant about both journalism in general and paying for it while also guzzling down exclusively headlines and third hand information in comment sections through a firehose, are what will be studied in future decades about why there was suddenly a strange and convoluted anti-intellectual movement in this era.
I agree, but
They did it to themselves by starting out with free journalism everywhere on the net. And then it took them far too long to finally realize that ads alone weren't going to pay the bills. If they had stuck with the magazine rack style from the get go (pay for it + ads) it wouldn't be an issue.
If you give everything away for free for thirty years, Then make it worse, and then suddenly charge for it, you're going to have a hard time getting money.
You miss the bigger picture. The shit journalism and propaganda are still free - funded by … other means . That is why magazine have tried to be free in the internet.
You’re also operating with the wisdom of hindsight. No one knew how to handle internet publishing. We all learned together.
I'm just saying what happened. History is inherently hindsight.
I pretty much agree, but I really wish we could move away from ads being literally everywhere in our lives. I'd rather them just charge a little bit more and have a better experience. It's probably falling on deaf ears, though, because nobody ever wants to pay for anything on the internet.
To your point, maybe if what we got in return were worth a shit, people would be more willing to pay. But it gets shittier and shittier, more and more inundated with ads, worse journalism with more clickbait and AI, all for prices that go up every year to multiple times per year.
It was more reasonable when you could go to the store and pay for one newspaper or one issue of a magazine. Then if you really liked it you could subscribe. Now there's no other option but to subscribe. Not everyone wants to be paying a bunch of separate subscription fees per month just to get decent news, and not everyone wants one hundred percent of a news outlets content. But we're charged for it regardless. Fuck no, no one wants to pay for that.
Maybe if it were one of the only things that required a subscription. Like it used to be. But now, almost every single thing we use comes with a subscription charge and there's usually no other way to pay for it. It's all or nothing. And it gets totally exhausting, aggravating, and ridiculously expensive, especially when they force you to pay for a bunch of shit you don't need, or they charge you cancellation fees on top of an extra month, or raise the monthly price without telling you, or tack on extra charges for shit that should just come with it in the first place, etc etc.
My point is, no one should defend the subscription model. If an outlet does good journalism, they'll have donors. PBS Newshour, NPR, Democracy Now, they're some of the best souces and they're all nonprofit. And, what do you know, none of them have actual ads.
And shoutout to local libraries to loaning current magazine issues online. I get a Libby notification every time the New Yorker comes out. And I'm sure they're losing a ton of money because I don't personally pay for a subscription /s
You make good points. I do think maybe if we never went down this road of everything being ad supported, then it wouldn't be this bad. It is the world we live in now, though, and I doubt there is any going back to what could have been
I think the real problem is enshittification. Ads are gross and annoying, but ads are sold through ad networks. The networks started by enticing sites, who built their revenue model around it.
And with news in particular, guess which ad networks both sold ads and drove most of their traffic? Facebook and Google. And then they used this power to come up with the embedded standard that let's them show articles without using the site, and threatened them with cutting off the user stream entirely if they fought back…
Then toss in ISPs and later csps killing off local hosting, and hosting a website is no longer something you just do with your old computer in the basement…
I think it's time to make a more decentralized Internet not run for corporate profit. It's not going to save news sites, but the main Internet seems doomed from where we are…
I can't stand when companies double dip. I won't pay if I still get ads.
What if it comes with one of those cologne insert peel back samples?
Then I must've stolen the wrong magazine by mistake.
Doesn't matter how it happened, only that it is happening and everyone is disinterested in saving quality journalism.
The fact that yellow journalism is free and quality journalism is hidden behind a paywall, and the fact that many internet people are indignant about both journalism in general and paying for it while also guzzling down exclusively headlines and third hand information in comment sections through a firehose, are what will be studied in future decades about why there was suddenly a strange and convoluted anti-intellectual movement in this era.