No they don't. They really don't need to know any of that. They don't even get a pass on tracking because they're providing a free whatever - I pay for a subscription to the NYT. The business, or a meaningfully substantial core of it, is viable without tracking.
It would be nice if the things I pay for didn't start stuffing their content with bullshit. What and who do I have to pay to get single second page loads? It's not a given that advertising has to be so bloated and privacy-invasive. Various podcasts and blogs (like Daring Fireball) plug the same ad to their entire audience each post/episode for set periods of time. If you're going to cry about needing advertising then take your geographic and demographic based targeting. But no war of attrition will get me to concede you need user-by-user tracking.
You want me to pay for your content? Fine, I like it well enough. You want to present ads as well? Okay sure, the writing and perspectives are worth that too I suppose. But in addition to all of this you want to track my behavior and correlate it to my online activity that has nothing to do with your content? No, that's ridiculous.
Clearly they disagree. Or maybe you should let them know that they don't need that.
To say it without sarcasm, what you feel you are entitled as a paying customer and what they feel they need/want to understand their customers are clearly at odds. Ultimately, what you think matters nothing in isolation and what they think matters nothing in isolation. What you two agree upon, is the only thing that matters. That is to say, if you think they shouldn't track you but you use their tracking product anyway, you've compromised and agreed to new terms.
I imagine you could come up with a subscription that would adequately compensate them for a truly no tracking experience. But I doubt you two would agree on a price to pay for said UX.
Would they be as profitable? Maybe, maybe not. Would they become unprofitable? No, strictly speaking. I'm confident in that because the NYT weathered the decline of traditional news media before the rise or hyper-targeted ads, and because I've maintained a free website in the Alexa top 100,000 on my own, with well over 500,000 unique visitors per day. That doesn't come close to the online audience of a major newspaper, but it's illustrative. There is a phenomenal amount of advertising optimization you can do using basic analytics based on page requests and basic demographic data that still respects privacy and doesn't track individual users. I outlined a few methods, such as Daring Fireball's.
Maybe instead of this being a philosophical issue of perspective between a user and an organization, it's an issue of an organization that hasn't examined how else it can exist. Does the NYT need over 10,000 employees? Is there a long tail of unpopular and generally underperforming content that nevertheless sticks around, sucking up money and forcing ever more privacy-invasive targeting? If the NYT doesn't know its audience well enough to present demographic-targeted ads on particular articles and sections, what the hell is it doing tracking users individually? It's just taking the easy way out and giving advertising partners the enhanced tracking they want. But they don't need to do that, and whether or not they think they need to do it is orthogonal to the problem itself.
It most definitely is. But so is the word need, in this context. How would we define what they need to do, and what they don't need to do?
My argument is simply such that, of course they don't need to (by my definition), but nothing will change that unless they see a different, more lucrative offer. Ie, "oh hey, here's 2 million readers who will only read the page in plain html and will pay an extra $20/m". It just seems like a needless argument, as I don't believe there's anything that can change their behavior without us changing ours. Without the market changing.
Rather, I think the solution lies not in them, but in you. In us. To use blockers and filters to such an extreme degree that it's made clear that UX wins here, and they need to provide the UX to retain the customers.
Thus far, we've not done enough to change their "need". If a day comes that they do need to stop tracking us, well, they'll either live or die. But the problem, and solution, lies in us. My 2c.
That's precisely why many of us use (and promote the use of) adblockers and filtering extensions.
Statista claims 2.3 million digital subscribers. NYT is trying to milk that 2.3M for everything they got, squeeze the last drops of blood from the stone while they still can.
That's a great way to go out of business, when 99.97% of the world population is not your customer and your squeezing labors are not going to encourage them to sign up.
If you hyperoptimize to squeeze every drop out of a small customer base, eventually you end up with something like legacy TV networks where 99% of the population won't watch a show even for free, and the tighter the target focus on an ever shrinking legacy audience, the smaller the audience gets, until the whole house of cards collapses.
Its similar to the slice of pie argument; there are many business strategies that make a pie slice "better" at the price of shrinking it, and eventually the paper-thin slice disappears from the market because the enormous number of the employees can't eat anymore, but that certainly will be the most hyperoptimized slice of pie ever made, right before it entirely disappears.
NYT is going to have a truly amazing spy product right before it closes.
Many reasons, one of which you said. What would the price tag be for them to admit all they are tracking?
You misunderstood me. I mean, what would they like you to pay them, for them to be 100% transparent about what they're doing for tracking, what their advertisers are doing and who they are, and possibly stopping all that entirely. Ie, what is it worth to them.
In contrast if you never sign up, disable JS, and periodically clear your cookies, then the entire site works fine and none of the third party trackers work. At best they can link your browser user agent and IP to a hit on the server side.
The idea that tracking is purely or primarily there to support a business model of selling user data is a strawman invented by self-righteous HNers. You need to know what parts of your product are effective to make it competitive in today’s marketplace.
> The idea that tracking is purely or primarily there to support a business model of selling user data
Purely, no. Primarily? You can bet your sweet ass.
Like I said, serve me an ad. I'm not an idealist, I understand why advertising exists. But don't justify collecting data about which articles I read to serve to some inscrutable network of advertisers by saying that it has to be this way. We don't need this version of advertising.
Majority, not all. Why should they leave money on the table, exactly?
Most companies are not achieving the platonic maximalization of profit or shareholder value. They leave money on the table for a variety of reasons. It's not beyond the pale that this would be one of them. If you don't agree, then frankly it's probably an axiomatic disagreement and I don't think we can reason one another to a synthesis.
You've just described the status quo, where businesses have to sacrifice their lifeblood to achieve your ideals. Those businesses tend to be beaten by more focused competitors, which results in the industry you see today, filled with winners that don't achieve your ideals.
But good luck trying to champion an efficient web industry by essentially moralizing.
But more to the point, you're presenting an argument which implies the NYT is a business which will be beaten by its competitors if it doesn't track users through their unrelated web history. I don't think that kind of tracking is an existential necessity for the NYT. It's not their core competency. Their core competency is journalism - if they are beaten by a competitor it won't be because the competitor has superior tracking, for several reasons:
1. Journalism is not a winner take all environment,
2. Newspapers were surviving in online media well before this tracking was around,
3. The NYT already has sufficiently many inefficiencies that if they actually cared about user privacy, they could trim the fat elsewhere so they wouldn't have to know to within 0.001% precision whether or not a user will read an entire article just to be profitable.
I really don't think this is too idealistic. It's not like I'm saying they need to abandon advertising altogether. I don't even have a problem with the majority of advertising. It's the poor quality control and data collection that I take issue with. All I'm saying is that they don't need to do what they're doing to be profitable.
So? I'm not sure how this means that news orgs won't suffer from losing business to competitors with superior tracking.
> Newspapers were surviving in online media well before this tracking was around
Markets change. Advertisers have different expectations. Readers have more news to choose from. This is a silly argument.
> The NYT already has sufficiently many inefficiencies that if they actually cared about user privacy, they could trim the fat elsewhere
Sure, but why? Why would they do that? Why wouldn't they trim the fat elsewhere AND keep the tracking to make more money?
The point you make doesn't really make sense. Yeah, it's theoretically possible for news orgs to stop tracking in the same way that it's theoretically possible for me to take out a knife right now and cut off my legs. News orgs can make up their losses elsewhere and survive in the same way that I can still get around with a wheelchair.
But why on earth would I or the NYT do that?
I respond to you with these questions because it seems to me that both you and the OP speak out against these practices because you feel they are unnecessary. My point is that they are necessary. You just don't acknowledge the forces that make them so.
It may be that they are, in fact, driving users away. Tracking user behaviour can become a distraction.
While it may give some insight does it give anything of meaning to know most people skim into the first few paragraphs before clicking away? Does it improve the writing quality or fact checking? Is it worth the risk of alienating customers over? To give a deliberately extreme and absurd example Victoria's Secret could hire people to stalk their customers to find out more about product failure conditions in the field but that would be a horrifying and stupid idea.
"Everybody is doing it." is a poor rationale for implementing a business practice.
They can't do UX anaylsis, nothing.
For the second, I never got explained to me how UX analysis really works for news sites. Isn't it enough to put 2 or 3 people in a room and show them a few variations of the UI? There isn't really much to publishing text, images, and a few graphs. Graphs are a very well explored field, I don't think you can learn more about them by just watching hot maps and click through rates.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
However the result will usually be a lot of dark patterns. For instance, that's why you get popup to ask you to register.
You'd expect ux to be a small unit, but that includes everyone who works on revenue-generating ads. Moving one tiny thing has a direct impact on revenue, which affects every person employed by nyt.
And it could easily be enough. Having 1/3 of a quantity of something doesn't mean you barely had enough before.
What happens when the proxy goes down? What happens when there are bugs? Do you think publishers can really trust advertisers to be good stewards of the publisher's business? Think for a moment about publishers that are not as big as the NYT.
Okay, maybe they do trust an advertiser-controlled proxy server. This means that both tracking scripts and NYT scripts are served from the same domain, meaning they no longer have cross origin security tampering protection. What's stopping the NYT from serving a script that tampers with an advertiser's tracking script?
They can use a trusted third party to run the proxy and use industry standards/SLAs for site reliability/uptime. And they can still use different subdomains with no obvious pattern (web1.nytimes.com vs web2.nytimes.com -- which is the ad server?) or audit the scripts sent through the proxy for malice.
- It externalizes resource usage - the waste happens on users' machines. Who cares that it adds up to meaningful electricity consumption anyway?
- It makes it easier for marketing people and developers to independently work on the site. Developers can optimize, marketers can waste all that effort by including yet another third-party JS.
- It supports ad auctions and other services in the whole adtech economy.
- You don't have to do much analytics yourself, as the third party provides cute graphs ideal for presenting to management.
The open source version has been renamed "Revive Adserver", and it looks maintained, but I don't think it's used nearly as much as the openx [open source version] of old.
If you use Revive Adserver or you design a server-local ad system in-house, it won't be as sophisticated as gigantic ad-providers who can do all sorts of segmentation and analysis (producing pretty reports which execs and stakeholders love even if that knowledge adds no value to the business).
They could, but that would require paying people and firms like Nielsen to gather data. Instead they engage in the same freeloading that the industry derides users for.
Are you honestly saying that the landscape of the internet and/or the staffing needs of the NY Times has changed so drastically that they actually needed a 22x increase in size to deliver fundamentally text-based reporting?
Not that that is the case.
It’s a big problem on mobile and the reason I read HN comments before the article.
> NYT employs 1,300 people
Totally irrelevant. Why should the number of employees in the company have any bearing on the size or cost of the product? Ford has 5x as many employees as Tesla. Should their cars be 5x as big or 5x more expensive?
> NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product
They may want this but they don’t need it. They successfully produced their product in the past without it.
> If Moby Dick was being rewritten and optimized every single day it would be a few mb.
Irrelevant and likely false. If anything, books and other text media tend to get smaller after subsequent editing and revising.
> A better comparison would by Moby Dick to the physical NYT newspaper.
Comparing a digital text product (Moby Dick) with a digital text product (a NYT article) is as close as it gets.
If the cost or the size wasn't a constraint, for sure Ford would build a car 5x as big or 5x as expensive.
The website size isn't a constraint here, if it was, they would works on it and make it smaller. It's only a constraint for highly technical people here. Currently at my job I'm optimizing some queries that takes way too long. It has been like that for years but we hit a wall recently, our SQL Server can't take it anymore. I always found it stupid that it took so long to optimize it... but at the end of the day, the clients just didn't care that it took 3 seconds to load the page. I could be working on more features right now, something that the client actually care about.
What makes the number of employees relevant to the size? Well if you were the only one building that website, you would know everything about it right? You would always use the exact same component, reuse everything you can, you already know every single part of the code. Add a second employee, now you don't know exactly what he does, you do know some of it but some time you forget and you may duplicate something or do it badly or whatever. At one point, something is just too big to be understood by a any single employee and you get code badly reused, stuff that serve no direct purpose too but make maintenance easier, etc... You never decrease the size simply because it's never worth it to but each and every single one of the employee add stuff to it.
This is a bad example. Tesla is a failing/failed car company that cant produce 200k cars per year. Ford has their truck program that sells that in a few months.
>Comparing a digital text product (Moby Dick) with a digital text product (a NYT article) is as close as it gets.
Comparing a book vs a timely article is unfair. NYT produces content daily to encourage shares and people clicking on various links on the website. Links, Images, Videos, comments, etc... None of those are available in dumb text.
Nonsense. I subscribe to the NYT so that I can read the news. Nothing about that necessitates tracking which users read which articles.
If the NYT uses page view data for anything other than statistics for their advertising partners, it's a shame. I don't want the NYT to tailor write their articles to maximize page views, time spent, or any other vanity statistic; if I felt like reading rage bait fed to me by an algorithm personally customized for all my rage buttons, there is plenty of that elsewhere.
NYT's differentiating factor is that they are one of the few businesses left that pays people to conduct actual journalism. If they give up on that, then I imagine their customers will just go to buzzfeed or wherever.
If the NYT cut their paper down to just the style section, horoscopes, and other garbage, they would be just another Buzzfeed and are probably not equipped to compete.
On the other hand, Info Wars, Mother Jones and friends offer publications with basically no journalism at all. That's the space the NYT, WSJ, Miami Herland, Chicago Tribune, and so on fill. They do Pulitzer prize worthy reporting. If these papers become run-of-the-mill click farms, I'm sure silicon valley will run them out of business, as rage bait is not really their core competency.
This just seems like such an abuse of what the web was meant to be. I can imagine the horror people in the 90s would have experienced if they new what JS was going to be used for when perusing news sites.
Sometimes I wonder if it would have been better keeping the web as a document platform without any scripting, and creating a separate one for apps.
Anyway, an alternative model news sites could use is to let users choose which content they want to pay for. That's a way to track which content users prefer.
We understood the horror no less than we do now. Javascript in the 90s gave us infinite pop-ups, pop-unders, evasive controls, drive-by downloads and otherwise hijacked your browser and/or computer. There's a reason Proxomitron and other content blockers hit the scene by the early 2000s-- the need to shut that shit off was clear.
There was no youtube, wikipedia, itunes or reddit. No instagram, twitter or google earth. The internet was basically geocities where most webpages were fan pages or pages/forums about niche interests.
I think people want to believe that because they believe that if ads were to disappear off the internet tomorrow, nothing would change. They don't realize that ads subsidize the content they consume, whether it's a youtube video they're watching or a reddit thread, ads are paying for that content. Nothing is free.
I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. You cannot say what the web was intended to be because you had no hand in inventing it. You do not know the mind of Tim Berners-Lee.
In fact, I argue the opposite - he had a vision of a global hyperlinked information system. While he wanted the protocol itself to be free (a move away from gopher), the information itself had no such protections. And that is precisely what we have today; it doesn't cost anything to use the WWW protocol. His vision has been fulfilled.
Now, the information (the content) itself is another matter. IP laws exist for a reason, people want to be paid for the content they create. They have ownership of that content. Whether it's the latest episode of game of thrones, a video game IP, or a book I wrote, the law protects my intellectual property. If I want to charge for access to that content, I'm more than within my legal right. Whether it's accessed over WWW, a cable box, or purchased from a book store, it makes no difference to my legal protections.
I think it's quite possible to know what TBL thinks about privacy-invasive javascript, given that he's very much alive and writing about such things to this day.
The app platform would consume the document platform because it is easier to enforce DRM requirements in an app platform than in a document platform.
I'm just thankful that I can still Print to PDF nearly anything. I don't think it will last much longer though because "web" "designers" are driven to destroy anything and everything that was actually good about the web in their quest to monetize every pixel on my screen.
I disagree. They need journalists, and they need to find some way to monetize. Your argument implies there is no other way than to add user tracking. Sure, images take up space, but I refuse to believe the current way of the web is the only viable option.
That's analytics. The marketing stuff that is causing the bloat isn't doing that much in comparison. Trackers are often coded very wasteful and are redundant by nature. You can have easily dozens to hundreds of them all doing the same stuff just with different APIs. It is insane and out of control and has absolutely nothing to do with gathering insights about your app and improving. It is pure external 3rd party marketing.
[citation needed]
There's no reason they need to use Javascript to track user behavior down to "how long have they read this article".
See 2 in the article. A sample:
“As Graeber observed in his essay and book, bullshit jobs tend to spawn other bullshit jobs for which the sole function is a dependence on the existence of more senior bullshit jobs:“
I work for one of the vacation rentals
No reason private owners couldn’t be doing the work over email. But certain fetishized models of doing, in this case cloud and web apps, get the focus.
It’s all for eyeballs and buy in at scale to justify the bullshit. “Look everyone is watching us talk up this shit! Better keep justifying it, bringing them into our flock!”
It’s turned us all into corporate sycophants. Religious conviction isn’t limited to belief in sky wizards
Anything sufficiently magical to the layman will instill blind allegiance
And despite all the smart people here, life as is seems magical and there’s a lot of blind buy-in
When you read a book all you get is the text. NYT has text, images, related articles, analytics, etc. Moby Dick doesn't have to know what pages you read. NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough).
If Moby Dick was being rewritten and optimized every single day it would be a few mb. Its not, so you can't compare the two.
Yes NYT should be lighter, no your comparison is not meaningful. A better comparison would by Moby Dick to the physical NYT newspaper.