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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

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> Even high quality publications like the New York Times have been struggling for a decade-plus now to figure out a way just to break even online.

False. "New York Times Co. Reports $24 Million Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers" [1]. 3/4 of NYTimes subscribers are online-only. They take in $100mm in online subscriptions and $50mm in online ads per quarter.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/business/media/new-york-t...

NYTimes is also actively fighting against the use of the adblockers.

Because they can pocket additional money at the low, low cost of other peoples' mental health and integrity. Why wouldn't they fight against Ad Blockers?

Ads are mental warfare and take on various different forms of manipulation. Many ads are often based on emotional manipulation rather than trying to improve your life by informing you about a good or service, they attempt to belittle you or make it seem like you'd be happy if you just bought their product.

Your life is miserable without this product. This product will make you happy. I'm lovin' it.

Tell me what useful information about MetLife this very emotionally manipulative commercial conveys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bdm4NBYxII

Their website URL? That's it. A 3 minute advertisement to emotionally manipulate you and provide you with a website URL.

Wouldn't publishers rather prefer if people paid for a subscription rather than shoving ads onto them? I think the real issue is that most users are not willing to pay for quality content. Instead, journalists are forced to produce click-bait junk that would give them lots of clicks and ad revenue. Am I missing some part of the picture here?

What’s your whole idea? You completely ignore the comment you reply to, in order to apologise for ads. It’s terrible discourse.

New York Times makes most of their money through subscriptions (you ignored this). They make additional money through ads (you pretend like that’s their only revenue).

fwiw nytimes is much easier to read with my adblocker on than washingtonpost or wsj.

as long as you're OK with all the news you get being subject to the whims of a few billionaires

This as always been true for the big news / media companies.

Independents have always struggled, and their struggle hasn't gotten particularly worse in the online age - in fact, it's probably better because they were able to use 'digital' to decrease costs whilst increasing readership (although not necessarily increasing revenue).

This is a classic case of the Internet making a more level playing field, and the old monopolies being unable to react.

The problem is that "popular news" is so accessible that anyone who can type can become a publisher. Clickbait. Which is worthless anyway. People can get their clickbait "news" fix online for free, so they don't need a subscription to a newspaper anymore. People, in general, don't care about real issues, they care about "puppy saved from storm drain" or "fat person needed crane to be taken to hospital" stories. Find a stock photo, write a fictional story to match photo, publish. There's one more newspaper subscription not renewed - and if that's the case, then it was a subscription the newspaper was lucky to have in the first place.

If monetizing with ads is obviously not working, why do it at all then?

Shut off all deeper articles behind a paywall, have just a few free articles of the full content to show people what they would get if they pay, and don't bother with the ads (and by extension, ad blockers).

Would this work? If it doesn't, then isn't the real problem the articles themselves? Their value to the intended audience is not high enough.

I mean, if the articles are so uninteresting that people do not want to pay, with ads or whatever else, and the NYT (or any other news site) cannot make the articles more interesting, then they simply scale down, or go out of business completely. A business is not entitled to a revenue stream just because they happen to exist or happen to prefer a certain delivery channel over another, or some form of monetization over other, and so on.

So... how to make the articles more interesting to people?

Everything competes with people's time. Articles aimed primarily at entertaining its readers compete not only with other news sites which do the same, but also with Netflix, Youtube, games, movies, books. There is too much competition.

I say: bring back good old fashioned investigative journalism, make high impact articles which expose corruption, dig deep into things, and so on.

In short make the articles worth people's time, and they will surely pay for those, too.

And ditch the ads. (Yes, I am actually pro paywall, as long as there is a high quality freebie or two every week)

The problem with subscription models is that unlike with ad revenue and donation models, you cannot subsidize your circulation by extracting more revenue from wealthier people more for the same service.

I assume you mean this sarcastically, as that sounds like a feature to me, not a bug

I absolutely don't mean it sarcastically. If you want to make money as a media service in today's extreme wealth inequality, you need to find a way to do this. There are no exceptions.

I might be misunderstanding you then; it sounds to me like you're saying that companies need to make more money without making any changes to their service. This doesn't seem to make any sense to me; if the service remains exactly the same, then the costs remain the same, so if you keep increasing how much money you make, eventually you'll become profitable and shouldn't need to continue to increase the cost of your product. Am I missing something?

if I can charge different people different amounts for the same service, then I can maximize my circulation at the same time as maximizing my profit per person.

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