We’re taking down the paywall on qz.com
qz.com
qz.com
I read hundreds of articles per week from dozens of journals from various backgrounds. I have three or four local newspapers I'm interested in, two or three in my mother tongue and dozens of international publications I like to read from. I tried subscribing to one of the local papers and it got boring pretty fast. I tried to subscribe to the Economist, but apart from two or three great articles per week I found them very dogmatic and I missed on all local events.
As long as there is not a serious Spotify like entrant journalism will keep dying.
It makes it sound as if Apple News+ has more but not necessarily everything. In any case, I should probably give it a try.
Apple News+ has two dozen local newspapers, and hundreds of magazines from around the world for $10/month.
Browsing through random magazines was how I found out I have an interest in bird watching.
Today I learned that Toronto and Winnipeg are in the US.
Pay $0.05 to read an article.
The relative recent popularity of all-you-can-eat streaming of music and video vs. a la carte purchases would seem to support this view--although one could also argue that digital music and video purchases aren't really "micro."
But you can have automatic payments without crypto too. Hiding payments from the UX is what's actually solving the problem
ADDED: That said, it's not unrealistic to imagine a "hidden" micropayments scheme that deducts automatically and lets you know and/or just turns off if you hit some monthly threshold.
- pay a variable amount to the website you visit, based on how many visits and time you spent on;
- pay a fixed amount to a website of your choice;
Both options can be enabled at the same time, and the minimum number of visit, or the minimum length of the same, is adjustable;
Flattr[0] should be similar with fiat currency.
Being able to unsubscribe without any friction is also a bit of an issue.
given how crappy the ads ecosystem has become to browsers, if I'm paying for something, I want out of all of that
legislation should make a bright line here. I don't want to see an ad in a taxi, on an airplane, in the dentist's office, and certainly not if I've paid for nyt
maybe carve out limited 1st party tracking, maybe not
It should be illegal to ad / track users, period. Oh hello GDPR, I didn’t see you there.
For a while I was known amongst coworkers and friends as "that guy who will cancel or reduce your Boston Globe subscription fee for 10 bucks." They make you call during business hours and go through a whole guilt routine where a human tells you statements implying you'd be a bad person for missing out on important news and not supporting local journalism, followed by questions prompting you to justify why you want to exhibit these antisocial traits by canceling your subscription. Then, if you didn't yield to that tactic, they beg to reduce your cost to a promotional rate of first half off, then 90% off, for 6 months. Then, finally, you can cancel and the agent says goodbye in such a way as like you just stepped on a puppy. I never found a way to get the call center to go off this script. My 'clients', empathic and intellectual Bostonians, simply could not bear to partake in this shame and/or degradement of the Globe.
This single-mindedness unwillingness to engage in their dialog might be interpreted as rude. But then again, their scripting is absolutely exploiting your unwillingness to be rude. Screw that.
I am aware of Trim, [1,2] which has an interesting proposition. You give it your comcast type login and it pretends to be you in a support chat window. Then it repeatedly attempts to secure a reduced rate. If it succeeds, you pay Trim a portion of the long term cost savings.
[1]: https://www.asktrim.com/blog/trim-a-money-saving-chatbot-rai...
From their terms [0]: "Unless otherwise stipulated in the Special Conditions, the cancellation of a Subscription must be sent by registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt to the Customer Service department.
"A Customer who wishes to terminate their contract must print out (or copy on plain paper):
- For a digital subscription, the cancellation form is available here
- For a paper subscription or a mixed subscription (paper + digital), the form is available here
Cancellations received by Le Monde before the 15th of the month will take effect at the end of that month. Cancellations received after the 15th of the month will take effect at the end of the following month.:"
Back when the UK was in the EU, I also had to call long-distance to British newspapers to unsubscribe.
It's the same for many Canadian and US subscriptions. It's not cultural, it's common practice by newspapers. The best way to protect oneself consumer is to carefully read cancellation terms before subscribing to any newspaper or periodical and purchase subscriptions through Apple's App Store if you own an Apple device (as it lets you cancel without hassle) when you can.
Though I guess that isn’tEU anymore either
DAUs === money. And the fact that management in the legacy media companies can't comprehend this is mindblowing.
> random internet posters
This is solipsism. Just because people are random to you doesn't mean they're random to themselves. You could literally be arguing with an executive of the company that was overruled, but you're seeing the world as full of NPCs.
>> DAUs === money.
DAUs may equal money but usually not enough.
It's not smart for any business to have only a single source of revenue (ads). The dependency on ad revenue as the primary source of income has been highly damaging for news orgs in the past. Even with steady traffic your ad revenue can fluctuate based on so many factors (health of external ad budgets in a given year or with big clients, recessions, changes in CPMs in programatic advertising, and host of others).
Subscriptions was the way to build a steady and reliable revenue stream while weathering the unpredictable ad side.
Users complain of crappy ads covering the content, and auto-playing video, and crap Taboola/Outbrain modules everywhere. Thats what usually happens when a media org depends on wholly ads.
It is not a simple as you think it is.
If there are any QZ fans, can you recommend any great articles by them in the past year or two? It feels like a missed opportunity on this promo page here. I get what they're trying to do, and they soft-sell you into "joining their mission" but it assumes a level of familiarity with QZ. If their page gets shared (like here) because of the meta-story about dropping the paywall, it would behoove them to list a few of their top stories to try to attract new readers.
I visited QZ daily and stopped ever since the paywall. Ars Technica and The Verge have had the privilege of my eyeballs since then.
Because they are not in charge.
The product/ad/business team could "fix" this, and then what would happen is they'd layoff some folks (usually editorial side) a few months later as the revenue drop hits home.
I'm kidding, but that was the mentality a few years ago when everyone suddenly paywalled. "We can't sustain free!!"
If you want my money, give me clear terms and make it easy to cancel. If I have to call you to cancel or guess how much I am paying every month, I will not sign up.
You need to be priced slightly less than Netflix or Amazon Prime.
The article is literally them announcing that you don't have to pay anything.
Your moan is outdated.
If that's not timely, what do you suggest is?
From the article.
If you are going to antagonistically correct me, please actually not be wrong. Correcting someone and being wrong is a special kind of annoying.
From the article.
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If you are going to antagonistically correct me, please actually not be wrong. Correcting someone and being wrong is a special kind of annoying.
I can only write what I mean. I can't fix your mental model of what I write.