Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Good idea, but they are not tech companies, so they likely lack the ability to do so.

I guess they could upscale in tech, but how would they pay for it when they can barely earn enough money to fulfill their primary function?

I don’t think publishers have a problem. I think users do. I hate online news as much as everyone, but I still want deep, intelligent and critical journalism, so I subscribed to a paper which sells it.

It’s one of the most successful news papers of my country, financially, and up until April this year they didn’t have a website. They do now, but it’s basically just a digital version (also available in audio from apps) that you can still only access if you subscribe.

I couldn’t be happier, and they earn money. So maybe the whole free content thing isn’t really a good way to go for either the user or the publisher?

Good idea, but they are not tech companies, so they likely lack the ability to do so.

They'd best gain the ability, then, or fade into irrelevance and die.

And honestly, we're talking about serving a few images from their own webserver. It's not rocket science.

Technically, serving few images is not a problem.

The question arises, what images to serve. Someone has to sell advertisement, find clients, persuade them to advertise with the given site, etc. That's something they are getting with ad networks for free.

You could easily outsource ad sales while still serving the images unobtrusively from your own server.

Who owns a server today? Even publishing platforms are outsourced or behind nicely packaged SaaS today, not to mention infrastructure services. There is no more "FTP your site to XYZ".

> That's something they are getting with ad networks for free.

Its also not a new problem. Newspapers have always had to have their own add sales department or outsource add sales.

Yes, but you can implement all the parent's suggestions without giving that up. Route all the ad requests through trusted intermediate provider on the same .xyz.com domain, where you have all the what-to-serve logic and analytics. Advertisers can then be sure that the numbers of views are legit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com