I mean, the guy who solves this is going to be rich, but you only have to see about the complaints to Flattr, Patreon, etc. and you know no one else wants to touch this. The audience's Revealed Preferences are significantly different from their Stated Preferences.
If I had access to multiple a la cart choices (NYT, WaPo, Baltimore Sun (local), Politico, WSJ... etc. In any different formats (audio podcast, digital). If there was a nice app for curating a playlist of stories, bookmarking, playback controls. I would definitely pay for such a news service.
The jury is still out for businesses that depend on people paying for digital music. Both digital streaming services of Spotify and Pandora have been losing money since their inception. Apple's iTunes digital downloads of music declined 14% in 2015. Its peak sales was 2012. There are even some industry whispers that Apple may someday drop iTunes music sales altogether since the shrinking revenues won't be worth their attention.
Nobody knows the future but the above trends may mean that digital music sales could eventually go the same way as encyclopedias: free. Not enough people are willing to pay for digital music. They still pay for live concerts though. If that's the remaining sustainable business, musicians would have to earn income from performances ... or licensing deals.
>I would definitely pay for such a news service.
Yes, but there may not be enough people like you. When people say, "no one" will pay, they don't literally mean "zero" payers. Instead, they mean "not enough" will pay.
The market for music is correcting from a time when publishers acted as artificial hit-makers and rent-seekers and imposed a monopoly on the distribution of music, and a small select group of artists got rich in the process (and we all paid many times over for the same content as formats changed).
It "corrected" too far for a while with piracy, that exploded as a reaction to a bad market, but now with Apple Music, Spotify and other subscription services, we have achieved "better than free" for those of us who are willing to pay a fair price for a good service.
Today's system may pay less at the top (and in the middle) but it pays out to way more people overall who can now more realistically make a living as musicians.
Speaking only anecdotally, I personally know of 3 bands who now make enough money with digital royalties + occasional touring to live a "typically middle-class lifestyle".
They would never have been able to do this back in the major labels + physical distribution days..
I guess to bring this back on-topic, I think there would be a market for someone to provide intuitive, personalized and multi-source access to high-quality news articles and investigative journalism..
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/05/26/band-1-million-s...
"If you’re trying to live off your Spotify spins, stop it right now.
Taylor Swift makes $400,000 off Spotify in a weekend. But nearly everyone else making bubkes. Which means if you’re hoping to making streaming your breadwinner, you’re probably snacking on crumbs."
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/06/21/spotify-million-...
I would hazard that, for the corporations that manufacture Taylor Swift, $400k is bubkes too.
Over the past 5 years, I paid ~$500 for streaming subscriptions. It is incredibly unlikely that I would have bought $500 worth of albums in this time period. This is money that would have been left on the table.
What does half a cent per stream mean in this context? Half a cent per single song play? Per album play? How many cents do you pay per play to the artist for a song that you bought, instead of streamed?
After $100 registration per album, on CDBaby, the artist receives 100% of the receipt. Bandcamp takes 15%. So, yes, there are ways to buy music in which an artist receives the money: we just don't choose to buy albums because streaming is cheaper and more convenient. But don't fool yourself: virtually none of the $500 you paid went to support the artists or further their work.
Over the course of 3 months (the last month had a whole 30 streams, so mostly ignoring it):
2 albums and 42 songs sold - $57.42
4.3 million songs streamed - $5077.87
The real take-away: All that streaming isn't translating into digital album/song sales.
Music works well, because you can preview a song, even hear it three or four times, but still want to own it. TV and movies you can have trailers and ongoing series and online reviews to decide which to buy.
But news will always be a leap of faith, and click-bait will always be an excellent (short-term) strategy. If I previewed a song on iTunes, and then bought it, and the remaining ~2 minutes of the song was just static, I would be furious; I would be on the phone with Apple to yell at them.
I think the question then becomes, how much are you willing to pay vs how much does such a service cost. Does the economy of scale factor in here? Right now most of those services ask for ~$10 a month. Expecting all of it for $10/month seems unlikely.
I could see a full service on-demand news service like that would (with the current pricing structure) run at least $50/month, which most people won't pay.
I think the music industry transitioned to streaming so well, because the recording companies were already dicking over the artists from the get-go.
I see economy of scale as the key hold up here. A multi-source subscription that costs $10/month would be a no-brainer for a good number of subscribers but such an offering would immediately destroy the current subscriber base for publications like the NYT, Washington Post, Atlantic, etc. No one would continue to pay $10/month for one, when they could pay $10/month for all.
That would then mean that the $10/month all-you-can-eat plan would need to gain enough subscribers to offset the lost revenue from the old plan. Realistically it would have to result a 5 to 1 increase in new subscribers.
So you'd have to go back to an all-inclusive plan that is a discount over the individual plans but not a HUGE discount (let's say 20-35%). But then would that be compelling enough?
I'm sure that didn't hurt, but it was also helped by the fact that each song retains it's value long after creation - that's less true with news.
It took about 10 years longer than it should have. I'm also pretty sure that if piracy was something that could be effectively stopped - they'd raise their rates a thousand-fold.
Yes. Current pricing is based on the number of people paying for the provided service. The marginal cost per subscriber is negligible so it's fair to assume the price would go down if those services could attract more subscribers. It's also fair to assume subscriptions would increase if customers got access to more publications for the same price.
There's also a big difference between a 1-time reading of news in comparison to music which is often repeated, timeless and can have a deep impact on your life and memories.
Even if an easy news bundle service existed, the cost isnt the problem, it's the fact that society has become used to digital news being free - turning that around will be a massive effort.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/ad-industry-deep...
That's been an option in Firefox for years.[1]
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-and-disable-cook...
I think I have a right not to spend money on advertised products as a rule. Some people are happy to spend money on advertised products. So many people, in fact, that the value I add by simply viewing your content and sharing it with society at large, that you still benefit from my interaction with your product with adblock active. Or it used to be before middlemen started sucking an ever increasing percentage of ad revenue away from content producers.
Ultimately your complaint is analogous to "some people go see free concerts, but don't buy 8 dollar beers". And, yeah, that's built into the business model.
I get a lot the crypto hate you see around here, there are some real problems in the space right now. But facilitating micropayments for online content is extremely low hanging fruit with the tech, especially if the US tax exemption for txs under $600 goes through and browser integration happens.
Brave Browser / Basic Attention Token is one of the few groups in ICO-mania-land that is trying to solve a real problem, and they're focused on this one. It's led by Brendan Eich, former Mozilla CEO and original Netscape dev. Worth checking out if you are in publishing.
If not then cripto currency's don't actually solve this problem.
> Once a user enables Brave Payments, the Brave browser automatically and anonymously keeps track of the publisher sites each user visits. The more times that a user visits a site, the larger the proportion of the user’s monthly contribution is “ear-marked” for that publisher. These funds grow as new micropayments are added. When contributions for a publisher exceed $100.00 USD, an email is sent to both the webmaster of the site and the registered domain owner from your WHOIS information. The email explains how to verify the ownership of your website with Brave Software.
(See https://brave.com/publishers/)
I really like this implementation, because it avoids the chicken-egg problem that other solutions like Google Contributor have by not requiring the publisher's cooperation in order to work properly. Visitors on Brave don't see ads, period. Publishers can choose to collect money from Brave users if they want, but that doesn't change the experience from the user's point of view.
It's super fast and very modern. Much faster than the live release of FF
This is great if everything is balanced and fair (this is of course all relative and must use reason), however I believe companies and people aren't given the opportunity to share their side of the story - or their counterargument.
Usually you may see a quote of someone's response in to being questioned about something, or perhaps a company will say "no comment at this time" - neither of these are good IMHO.
I feel pre-publishing, a person should be given the opportunity to respond - and at least part of that response be included in the publication - and always there should be a permanent link clearly highlighted to a third-party platform allowing the person's full response (or really all people and organizations mentioned in an article), which a link/response that can be added to/edited later (with version control to view the previous versions - leaving the purpose of editing to expand upon or clarify).
Who pays for the wheels to get going on this kind of system? Is it safe to be government supported? This is an important system I believe we must implement as soon as possible. Getting it adopted is possible, it just takes effort which includes needing enough resources for a longer runway. It feels like it would be a similar type of service of importance as Wikipedia.
However, it can very difficult to get any sort of comment out of any party that has acted less than admirably, and many see staying tight-lipped as a strategy that can make a bad story go away. Of course, it doesn't work like this.
Additionally, some publishers have deep enough pockets that they are prepared to risk a defamation action if the story is strong enough, or they actively don't want to tip off the subject to upcoming coverage because they may put countermeasures in place (either legal or a pre-emptive "My drugs hell"-type confessional in a rival publication)
The difficulty with quoting full responses anywhere is that, just for example, anyone ever asked for comment by one of our more popular UK papers would be well advised to work in something about their past support of the Nazis or indeed the tax arrangements of their proprietor. I'd expect many such responses to be defamatory in themselves, and thus unpublishable.
Micropayments don't work for journalism, because there's too much of a difference between the set of articles that people are likely to press the "pay 10cents" button on (or even read) and the set of articles that are necessary for civil society to function.
That's why journalists were almost disgusted by buzzfeed's "big board", the screen showing current traffic numbers for all articles: it encourages the sort of cat content that drives traffic for the least amount of effort.
As one example, there was the widely-shared frustration of one journalist on Twitter who had been investigating that Trump Jr. meeting with the russians for months, only to be scooped by Jr. making it public himself when he got wind of the investigation. It's not just that this journalist's work wouldn't be rewarded under a micropayment model. It also shows that some stories take an amount of work that I think people don't know about. Even if his article had become a hit, could it ever pull in as much money as the dozens of listicles you could pump out in those months of work?
Editors at high-quality publishers still tend to want to do the right thing. Subscriptions give them a bit of cover to send someone on an assignment that they deem important. Once every articles' costs and revenue become explicit data points on a colourful chart, even those owners that are currently willing to look the other way as long as the overall numbers make some sense will find it hard to resist the temptation to point at the outliers and ask if it's really necessary to spend a six-digit sum on that investigation of bribery at the Backwater County (MI) Department of Public Health when it only got 10,000 microflatters of 5 cents each, all from residents of East Nowhere (MI), especially since advertisers stopped being interested in readers from East Nowhere once they all started spending their money on Heroin.
Also, I would recommend following journalists rather than news outlets.
But I really can't see WSJ or NYT creating clickbait personality quizzes just to fund their business.
The NYT site The Wirecutter makes it's money from affiliate codes. Before that happened, I would have doubted that the NYT would ever look for money by linking product reviews back to Amazon.
If the NYT doesn't stabilize and Buzzfeed continues to grow, I could see Buzzfeed buying the Times as a more respected place to publish serious stories.
That probably won't happen because I think the NYT is in decent shape today.
What I'd like is a federated system, where say 90% goes to the paper I'm subscribed to, but 10% goes into a pool of other participating papers, allowing me to view a few articles a month at other papers. 2 factors at play: I can't reasonably have multiple subscriptions and I don't have enough time to take advantage of content from more than 1 large paper. But I'd like a way to support good articles from other papers on a more occasional basis.
Disclaimer: I haven't fully thought this through and I'm sure there are pitfalls in this approach… happy to hear about them!
I was looking for that also, and have been happy with Blendle[1]. Pretty good selection, recommendations and "return" policy.
Why do sites do this? Flattr has been around for almost a decade.
The other $15 it took to produce that day's single copy (that's everything combined, editorial costs, and 30% print costs) came from advertising sources, of which something like 10% is digital, including subscriptions. And that's after years of massive layoffs and reductions in cost.
This is a simplified view, but it should illustrate the scale of operations. The headlining stories that people would pay for are currently loss leaders in a sense, so turning them into sole breadwinners is dooming rest of the stories produced for that day (I'm not paying for a police blotter story, unless it features a stolen tomato). And under that model there's the feedback risk of majority stories becoming tailored to their patrons, becoming images of darling kittens and pet goats.
Sideline to show I'm not just being my usual cynical self: for a brief time, AP tried to syndicate lolcats (yes, the i Can Has Cheezburger blog one) but then someone asked about the issue of image rights. Had this happened, it would have resulted in pretty much all of US newspapers ending up with kitten pictures in print, because readers would love it and it's no work at all to produce it.
These cost breakdown numbers are changing and vary greatly from newspaper to newspaper, but I hope it illustrates a dark and complicated reality of news decline. I don't know what's the solution, but you can't dismiss brick and mortar news agencies and think they can either instantly convert to digital media and revenue, or that independent online-online agencies can come replace it.
The non-syndicated stories you see in today's newspaper (go pick one up wherever you are) have been worked on for days, weeks, even months. And tomorrow's stories will have a similar breakdown of labor. Isn't it mind boggling? AP, AFP, Reuters will not concentrate in towns and fact check the local authorities and governance because they'd get stretched too thin, so newspapers mix and match local coverage with national as best they can. The kicker is that all that hard work spanning days, weeks, months gets used by local TV stations that very morning and (if the story is that unusual), by online-only agencies and aggregators, because they don't have all those boots on the ground.
It's complicated.
Reward for reading any of this rant, Dick Irwin's tomato blotter story: "Someone entered the rear yard of a house in the 5900 block of Johnson St. on Saturday morning and removed a tomato from a tomato plant. The tomato was valued at $3, police said."
A long time ago I did an internship at a marketing firm that did work for Subway Sandwiches. As such, it was considered a fireable offence to bring any other branded "sub" into the office.
Ugh. That's just so stupid. What if they do work for a bank, automobile manufacturer, clothing designer, etc? Are the employees obliged to then buy new clothes, cars, hide their branded debit cards in the cafeteria?
Edit - to answer my own question I searched Google and found this: http://jalopnik.com/dear-car-companies-stop-punishing-employ...
I doubt that the majority of people that work for Mercedes drive their cars.
[0] http://www.expo.be/en/jahreswagen/index_nl.phtml, lots more info if you read German.
Well, to be fair, there is a decent, widely supported payment system for journalism. It's called subscribing to your local newspaper (or the Times, or a magazine). And, depending on your income, this may be a micro payment. The NY Times costs something like 33 cents a day, for example.
It does have the virtue of already existing.
This won't support, or get you access to, the overwhelming majority of articles, though. It's as if each musician required their own, independent monthly subscription.
"The NY Times costs something like 33 cents a day, for example."
Newspapers can, and will, quietly double their prices without telling you and then make it very hard for you to cancel. See my article on the Boston Globe, for example: https://rationalconspiracy.com/2016/04/24/dark-patterns-by-t....
Fair enough. Sounds like "Spotify, but for news" is what you're looking for. I see your point.
> Newspapers can, and will, quietly double their prices without telling you
And that's just plain old bad customer service.
People, including you and me, don't want to have access to everything, they want choice access to the "best", chosen by a reputable entity.
In other words, there must be an objective I am seeking and I somehow find this jouranlist or this group of jouranlist align with my objectives and beliefs. So how does a micropayment system can help promote free and honest journalism?
I wouldn't pay journalist working for Breitbart (Steve Bannon's news outlet) because I don't agree with them.
This is the problem.
If journalism is broken down into a market problem, (which will happen regularly on an American board for entrepreneurship) then the product will always be cat pics and scandal.
Because thats what people want. As someone said above, revealed behaviors of news consumers are different from stated behaviors.
If someone actually wanted objective information, they already pay for it - they go buy the wsj/bb for finance. If they want political analysis - they pay for those magazines.
I don't think Journalism works in a free market model.
The problem really boils down to 5-7 slots of short term attention span a human being has.
For all the desire to want good news, people will still dump that attention on junk food for the brain.
Since Good journalism is expensive, takes time to process, and may not be well received - its extremely time and attention intensive.
In a world where we're blowing that resource regularly, good journalism dies. It has to be capable of going toe to toe with attention seeking feel good material.
In a Market system - journalism end up being about hacking human attention. Otherwise not enough people reads it to support the paper.
This is generally a solved problem -
You pay the govt to make a single news agency - give it operating money, independence and stick an oversight group on top of it.
And you call it the BBC, and spend the rest of your days trying to defund it, while a majority of groups call it biased in one direction or the other.
Google hasn't created a robot to do indepth scans of lets say all the Wikipedia tennis tournament pages even if they can afford to do so technically and financially. Why? Cause its results returned are good enough for the waste majority of ppl. If I ask who last years 4 US open semifinalists were Google isn't able to produce just the 4 names. I can rant about how dumb that is. And why more in depth scanning/parsing is required.
But if Google can't find any great reason to upgrade its crawlers why should a news org do so. Maybe we are past the point where there is any great value.
The audience for news isn't as big as I think lots of people wish it were. For the micropayment system to work, I bet the payments wouldn't be very micro.
Also, I'd pay for a service that got me free access to a dozen original news providers (I don't want a dozen copies of the wire story) with different points of view, I'd pay for that.
But that's not the landscape right now.
One thing that might work is really lean organizations surviving on donations for original reporting. I know Michael Yon made that work in Iraq, and there were a bunch of people trying to do that (somewhat successfully, I believe) on youtube before the ad money dried up.
A pattern-like donations system has biases of its own. Where big national dailies tend to have centrist-conservative leanings, donor supported journalism would tend to favour political wings and fringes as they play to their supporter silo. In both cases, there’s a big incentive to do opinion, talking heads, and less incentive to do first hand investigations.
The OP is discussing "the power of Jeff Bezos". To illustrate, he has anecdotal evidence of an attorney bowing out due to concern for his daughter's upcoming book.
He is talking about a network effect with scope far beyond the matter of a specific publication and its relationship with a key advertiser.
https://qz.com/84961/this-is-how-much-a-bloomberg-terminal-c... ($24K per year per head)
Not holding my breath on micropayments...
The sad fact is that real journalism doesn't provide that much value directly to the purchaser: much of the value of an informed citizen accrues as a positive externality to the rest of society. The latter by definition doesn't affect willingness-to-pay, however, so newspapers in general have had to rely on their customers' willingness to pay coming from a vague need to sound informed in front of their friends. This is obviously a lot less sensitive to the _quality_ of journalism, so you end up with a situation where there's no real channel for providing quality journalism to the average person.
Even back then, they were still businesses. Their customers were still the advertisers, not the subscribers. If there was dirt to dig up on a politician, they'd probably cover it. If there was dirt to air on the local car dealership, grocery store, or real estate brokerage--silence!
To be an actual public service, the agency relationship has to be right. It was never right for the mainstream media. Bloomberg terminals do have it right (I'm the customer, not the product), but expensive!
A lot of what they write is too focused on whitehall and fleet street to be terribly interesting to a wider public. I've often wished they'd expand to do serious journalism too.
Always funny when you see part of an eye page clipped from a photo to post on twitter - the one time that having an image instead of text seems actually suitable ;)
what actually matters is the ideology of the journalists involved. do they have a mission or are they primarily interested in wealth and fame.
So long as journalists' jobs depend on the ad money coming in, companies can use that leverage to get negative stories spiked. Amazon is one example in this article; HSBC with The Telegraph (and other newspapers) is another [1].
If we want to avoid this disease spreading, we really need some way to pay journalists that doesn't rely on corporate largess.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-t...