They're calculating with EUR 0.1 per user per month for targeted advertising. The "Pur Abo" (EUR 4-5 per month per site) are thus 40 times more profitable. The advertising has become mostly a mechanism to pressure readers into paying.
The question is, can you convince roughly 1/40 of your readers to pay 5 bucks a month if you don't use targeted advertising as the "threat"? Maybe, just maybe, non-targeted advertising would already be enough? Many people pay to get rid of ads, not of surveillance, after all...
Seen recently few sites which blocked access unless you agreed for vicious tracking - so much for convincing readers, I guess.
I'm afraid that it's a new trend to paywall everything and give user a quite harmful choice of being tracked if it won't pay.
Few years ago there was an agreement in Poland between major media outlets to put an unified paywall system but it was abandoned quite fast. That was still before these vicious tracking techniques and cookie banners. People simply didn't want to pay for the access. Their tagline was "Do you value good journalism?" and it was memed out because the quality of these paid materials was considered as low. Many people complained that it's not that much different from stuff available for free. Others raised an argument that access to the information on the Internet should be free and they didn't want to spend money on this. Discussion happen, taking on paid content in general but whole thing fizzled out just like that paywall system.
Well that's exactly what we've been seeing these recent years right?
And it's also the subject of the article whether that's even legal. Nobody disputes the legality of an actual paywall. But whether the "consent" given in face of an "aggressive tracking vs payment" choice is actual legally considered consent in the sense of the GDPR, that's exactly what's being sorted out in court now.
But as I've always said, the staunchly "anti-advertising"/"information should be free"/"the web would have far more high-quality information if it was fully free" people, not you specifically, but most people in this thread, just feel entitled to other people's labor, for free. Content creators know. Most of the people bitchin' about ads are willing to pay you zilch. They still very much want your content, though. Story as old as time. Just strictly regulate any data-collection and data-selling, that's the real problem.
It might be one of those things that are extremely painful at first, but becomes better when things have settled down.
All that sites that have turned to clickbait and scammy ads, wouldn't we be better of without them? If the ad market where to collapse the real newspapers, who still have actual subscribers would still be around, things like the BBC and other local and tax/license funded media would still be around and assuming that the free market is actually a thing, companies would emerge to plug the holes left be the clickbait sites, at a price.
As it stands we're seeing those with the means paying for actual content and everyone else is just getting absolute garbage.
msn.com is my favorite example, why is that still around? Most of the ads are actual scams, all article link to other sites, which are equally scammy. Why? Because it makes Microsoft money and they do not care about their users getting scammed, as long as they get their cut.
I don't think ads should be the main way we fund content online, it's clearly not working anymore. The ad space has become the product and whatever content remains is just enough to trick people to going to the site and clicking a link or two. The content is no longer about enlightening or even entertaining, it's about trapping people in some twisted hedonic treadmill.
I see very few ads, my daughter sees even less, but when I see how easily an ad can manipulate a child I question why that's even legal to create that ad and what kind of sick people thought that it would be an acceptable business strategy. Adults doesn't fair much better, the only way to see how awful it truly is, is to block out all ad funded media for an extended period of time, then come back and feel the assault.
The ad based economy is making the world worse. It promote scams, pollution, gambling, pushes people into debt, hurts the mental well being of young and old and creates division between people.
I don't like online ads and the web they've created.
I'm not sure "you should stop caring about other people" is the right message to take from...anything, really.
We’re a minority. See: every comment complaining about paywalls.
Just as most musicians or artists have to have a day job, so do most authors when they start. That's been true even for "political" speech: for about as long as people have had things to say, forms of self-subsidized pamphleteering have existed. In the 1990s, hobbyists were most of the web, enough to be able to kickstart a wikipedia.
Self-publishing still works today, thanks to platforms like ghost.org at $9/month that also give an onramp from free to patronage.
I'm saying it sucks that the majority of periodical writing has succumbed to race-to-the-bottom clickbait and adflooding.
Newspapers and magazines from three decades ago certainly weren't perfect, but on average they were a whole lot better than modern news sites, and I don't see how we can ever get back to that situation. I don't know what the solution is, but I can see a problem when it's punching me in the face.
The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can.
Lots of sites turned to shitty ads and clickbait because it makes lots of money, but I've followed some passionate writers and journalists who decided to stick to their guns and focus on quality content with a reasonable subscription price.
I don't follow any of them anymore, because they all either want out of business or gave up and switched to advertising hell.