Moot argument. If everyone charged for their time creating content on the internet, you would buy the best quality content. Newspapers had this model for decades, worked for them.

Not really. It's a change in model that the internet has created, and one that's going to be nigh impossible to undo. If everyone charged for their work, you'd be right, but it's basically impossible to end up in that situation now. Because for everyone charging money there's ten who realise they can out compete them by offering it for free (either out of the 'kindness' of their heart or funded by venture capital).

It's the same situation with smartphone apps about now. Yes, it's an absolute mire of low quality, exploitative crap at the moment, but when developers try and avoid this by just charging full price (like Nintendo with Super Mario Run), they find their apps are significantly less popular/profitable than if they'd be 'freemium' all along and end up getting a virtual tongue lashing from audiences who expect 'mobile app' to equal 'free with ads/microtransactions'.

Unless everyone charges money for content (which is likely happening because of business reasons) or some service genuinely manage to repair the media's reputation enough people will pay for it and also offers a better, more usable product than everyone else, things aren't changing.

When the Washington Post offered me an online subscription (I live in Boston now but grew up and started my family in the Washington DC area) for $20 it was a no-brainer. The next year they wanted $100 and I worked them down to $50 so I took it. This year they wanted $100 so they got $0. If they charged $20 or $30 a year I bet they would get subscribers if the ad-revenue model died. But it's a winner-take-all operation. WaPo will dominate (along with the NY Times and WS Journal) because of their reputations. The El Paso whatever will be out of luck.

One way to get the charge-for-content back might be to demonstrate how much privacy people are losing and to make some noise about it.

Or news outlets could adopt the academic publishers / netflix / steam(?) model, and aggregate their subscriptions. I too would not pay $100 / year for WaPo. But I would pay $100/year for access to a quality selection of international news organizations. It is a blindingly obvious solution which I suspect is only hindered by pride and unrealistic expectations. There are a myriad of ways the profit could be split internally - it does not even require great creativity to find something that works fairly well, since it has all been done before numerous times.

Interesting isn't it. Upthread there's someone saying to just use the newspaper model as it worked for decades, and here are two people saying they won't pay a fraction of the newspaper model (~27c/day).

Instead you want an immense pool of content generation for that 27c per day. Good journalism isn't cheap - that's why paper newspapers cost what they do and are full of adverts - but you want to pay rock-bottom prices to individual sources whilst still pretending that you're paying a 'reasonable amount'.

The entire newspaper is not of value to me, and I read a newspaper worth of articles total, so I think it is fair to pay a newspaper's worth of subscription prices and have that revenue spread around to the business whose articles I read. Any subscription model can have a quantified limit to my access. Like I said, this isn't hard to think about or do.

There are movies that cost hundreds of millions to make which make up just one more item in the Netflix catalogue, and Hollywood is far from hurting. It may cost enormous amounts to produce good news, but this is true of the business model I am pointing out as well.

Almost. I should point out that I do subscribe to the Boston Globe since that's where I live. The WaPo would be in addition- for that I would only want to pay a delta. This is a new revenue channel for them, not taking away the old one.

> If everyone charged for their time creating content on the internet, you would buy the best quality content.

Interesting, the ones who tried to charge seem to be dying.

Yeah, and that says more about the perceived value of their content more than their business model. Paying for news is something that basically every household in the US did up until recently so it's a tough argument to make that people are unwilling. But the honest truth is that their content isn't that much better than the ad supported alternatives.

Moot argument. It stopped working for them.

In what way? They are still publishing.

Plenty of newspapers have shuttered their shops, and editing quality has gone way down. It used to be that seeing a single typo in a competitor's paper was cause for jubilation. These days mistakes are everywhere. In the past couple of years the most egregious ones I've seen were 'mruder' and 'hgihway' - these words don't even pass a spell-checker.

> Experience has proven time and time again that putting up paywalls just makes people go elsewhere.

Isn't Spotify and Netflix evidence that suggest otherwise. All the music on Spotify is available for free on the so called dodgy sites. Torrents and whatnot. Heck, you can even listen to it for free on FM radio! However, literally millions of people choose to pay for Spotify - because it's worth it.

The news is no different. If news content providers provide a useful service, millions of people WILL pay.

My analysis is that millions of people avoid paying because news content providers don't sell news, they sell people. They sell their readers as fodder to the ad men. When that business model changes, people will pay for news.

Publishers that have come to the web from old-school media are still failing to understand the medium. They take their print content, slap it up on a website (designed to replicate the look of a print newspaper!), surround it with ads, and expect it to behave in exactly the same way as hardcopy newspapers. It doesn't, for a myriad of reasons.

I have experience of this world, having worked with old-school book publishers and old-media print journalists. They are way too entrenched in their understanding of publishing/journalism to make the change. The closest I've seen anyone get to something that might work, and they're still a long, long way off, is the Guardian. At least they understand that a) they need to provide additional content, suited to the medium (e.g. quality infographics, interactive data, etc.) and b) online advertising is not enough, but current paywall implementations are a poor substitute.

Spotify is a great example to compare. If Spotify worked the same way as online news, you'd go to Spotify, browse through some skeuomorphic representation of a CD rack, get interrupted, find an album you like the look of, listen to the album with an obnoxious advert between each song, put it back in the rack, repeat. Is there a single newspaper that will allow me to even, for example, do something useful with their content by collecting it / tagging it / whatever for future reference? Will they let my contacts, or famous people, recommend content on a particular subject? Will they offer any kind of api for other publishers wishing to reference their material?

Thought this would just be a rant against old media but the last paragraph surprised me. Yes, that would be interesting. Not sure if spotify for news would work but a single db where you could read up on most major publications content around a specific subject or search term, standard interface, could be amazing.

This existed (kind of) in an App called Pulse. It was a feed reader, not a database, but it was brilliant for organizing news articles and searching by title.

Then LinkedIn bought it and promptly ruined, then shuttered it. Still waiting for someone to release a new newsreader app with the same scrolling format. I would have absolutely paid to keep and improve that app.

NYT's digital arm has a paywall and their digital revenue is something over a half-billion dollars per year. The group that WSJ is part of, NewsCorp's "news and information services" unit, has annual revenues well over a billion dollars.

I'm pretty sure that should cover their server bills.

The point is that it is winners-take-all now. There are a few winners with strong businesses, like the ones you mentioned, but it is not a broadly strong industry. That was not the case with print, where the local paper had some advantages in their home market.

This seems to be kind of just how technology industries work (at least right now): you don't have a broadly strong market for "social news feed", you have Facebook.

I don't believe that was the point of the thread I replied to.

But sure, when you reduce distribution cost to zero, you remove a lot of local advantage. And this isn't new. Improvements in music distribution, starting with the wax cylinder, have been slowly killing the local market for musicians. Why wait until the evening go a few blocks and pay to hear a so-so local band when you can play an amazing one in your house right now?

A summary of the thread, from my perspective: 1. Advertising is the wrong way to monetize, paywalls are the right way, 2. Paywalls don't work because they make people go elsewhere and sites still have expenses, 3. (you) Paywalls do work, NYT and WSJ make lots of money on digital, 4. (me) Yes but that's only because they are the winners in a winners-take-all market.

I don't really disagree with you, my point was just that the fact that paywalls can work for an extremely small set of publishers does not resolve the tension in comments #1 and #2.

Ah, got it. Yes, I agree entirely. I was only disagreeing with #2's notion that paywalls never work. Thanks for clarifying.

Free market, right?

Depends very much on the audience. LWN's paywall seems to be working for them!