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.