Like the old adage goes, they won't do this because their livelihood depends on it.

A single user can be exposed to 3-4 (or more) ads per page. Each ad can earn them some money depending on the relevance of the ad to the viewer. In this case, the price they charge the advertiser is more guesswork/auction than science. They don't have to/can't prove to anyone that the ad truly worked. Advertisers tweak and A/B test ads to achieve higher engagements and better results.

A fixed rate model like you're suggesting limits the scalability of selling the same pair of eyeballs to 3-4+ advertisers. It forces google and content creators to attach a hard number to each visitor which is essentially upper bound by people's spending habits - if people are feeling poor, they can simply stop visiting websites to make ends meet!

Fir these reasons, I don't believe any advertising based company is ever truly going to get behind pay-as-you-go content. I've made my bet (see my profile for deets aka FD) and I'm in the process of quitting my job to put my money where my mouth is.

I don't think these two approaches are diametrically opposed. In the traditional print journalism model, I pay for my copy of the newspaper/magazine, and I get a lot of ads -- most magazines are > 50% ad content by area. Even online, I am a subscriber to the NYTimes and WaPo -- I still get ads when I view the site. Paying does not turn off ads.

I am sure I'm in the majority on this site, but I believe that it's possible to do advertising-supported content in a tasteful way where the ads add to the experience, or at least do not detract from it.

Print has a natural limit - you cannot expect to print and deliver unlimited sheets interspersed with ads. Websites can show you content from a decade ago with ads thrown in if the content is relevant to you. Print ads can be skipped far more easily that web ads.

With NYT and WaPo, your subscription is supposed to support quality journalism. The tradeoff that you're agreeing to - pay but also see ads - is not going to work for say a music subscription service or a stock tips service. My argument holds for those businesses. I'd say that WaPo, WSJ, and NYT are outliers, not the mainstream.

Tasteful ads:

Web advertising is so democratic that even the smallest company or startup can spend a few hundred dollars and get in front of you. Demanding tastefulness from such advertisers puts us as the risk of "corporatising" ads again, imho.

Anyway, I don't want to commandeer this conversation. I'd love to hear other opinions from HN.

Likewise cable TV. You pay for a subscription and you also see a lot of ads (more than on OTA TV, which is one of many reasons I cut the cord.) In the early days of cable networks, many had no ads because it was thought they could survive on subscription revenue. That idea didn't last long.

As a whole, broadcast and cable TV is (used to be) a captive market. It was very possible for channels to synchronize or nearly synchronize their commercial breaks which meant that they could get away with charging for content AND showing ads.

The proof is that the minute add-ons like DVRs and set top boxes like Roku came along, the first thing people did was to bail on the old TV model.

Today's newspaper wraps tomorrow's fish.

Internet ads don't

Thurs is why it shouldn't be an advertising company, but a brand-new company that should do this!

Amen! And this is what we are trying to do with Datajoy.

Nothing is keeping them from doing it. They (and others, e.g. the Brave browser and Optimal) have been doing that for a while. Here are a few related links:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/21/google-co... http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/google-relaunches-co...

https://blog.brave.com/introducing-brave-payments/

https://medium.com/@robleathern/why-we-sold-optimals-technol...

See https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

I think they've tried this before but recently re-launched.

I think that's the wrong approach. I don't want to pay to remove ads (there are adblockers for that). I would gladly pay for articles that I can otherwise not access. The requirements are:

- simple button

- no hassle; only one subscription, which can be used on all websites

- low cost per article (on the order of tens of cents)

And perhaps:

- a free preview of the first couple of paragraphs of the article

- discount when I use the service a lot

Adblockers have their limits, too. Some news providers take images embedded in the article and ads from the same server, making the two rather hard to distinguish. You either end up with false positives or false negatives.

Quite a few pages will not show you anything if they detect your adblocker, too. And don’t even get me started on all those scandals in which certain adblockers have been shown not to block ads because they were paid to do so... I don’t see adblockers as the answer. Also because the consumer-provider interaction should not feel like an arms race but as a trade at the end of which both sides should be happy.

Perhaps a crowdsourced approach could help here, where the raw text and relevant images are identified/extracted by the first few readers.

Sign up for Blendle. It's exactly what they do and all the big publishers are on board.

I wouldn't say it's exactly what they do. First of all, you end up reading the news through Blendle, where you have to see all kinds of news you don't want to see (in particular giving Blendle the opportunity to become a gigantic tracker); then (it's only available in a few countries so far) by far not all big publishers are on board, and finally it's not transparent how much of what you pay on Blendle makes it back to the original newspaper.

edit: Having to go through the Blendle site also means if you're looking at an article on wsj.com from a few months ago you won't be able to jump to the Blendle version to the best of my knowledge. Archives aren't Blendle's thing.

edit: Basically, I'd like to say: Don't sign up for Blendle.

Yes, also I'd highly prefer a universal solution by a big company like Google (who already tracks everything anyway, but can be trusted to a high degree).

I think we're still very far from peak tracking if there is such a thing. Imagine I know all the books you've bought within the last 10 years, how scary is that? Certainly a bit scary if I know the shopping habits of millions of customers to which I can then relate you and (maybe because they've filled out surveys that you haven't?) learn the approximate income of your household (so that maybe I'll start showing you higher prices?).

It gets quite a bit scarier if I have the computing power and access to the full texts of all those books (like Amazon and Google Books do) to search for patterns in those texts that tell me about your fears, political affiliation, sexual desires, etc.

edit: I'm not sure what you mean by trusting Google. I trust Google to get the technical side of things right.

> I'm not sure what you mean by trusting Google. I trust Google to get the technical side of things right.

Yes, that's what I mean. They are less likely to get hacked.