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Newspapers have an extremely expensive product. They have to pay for it somehow! You can’t give away an expensive product for free forever! No one on the int

Newspapers have an extremely expensive product. They have to pay for it somehow! You can’t give away an expensive product for free forever! No one on the internet likes paying for access to content. After 35 years we have not found a way to monetize except ad tech. Is that so hard to understand? Every time someone links an article on this website from an expensive print publication, there is immediately a link in the comments to a paywall-evading site! The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low quality, highly focused on costs and with no attention at all paid to benefits.

ramon156 6mo ago
I feel like this is relatively short-sighted. I don't enjoy reading global news articles as often times it just makes me upset. I like reading local news because I can relate to it. I pay for one, and I read the other one in a frustrated mood. I'm sure there are people who enjoy reading global newspapers daily, and I'm sure a good quantity pays for it. That just doesn't include me.
llm_nerd 6mo ago
>The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low quality This is kind of an ironic comment given that this whole discussion is about visiting the sites as a paying subscriber. I pay for the NYT. If I visit without adblockers, the site is absolutely stuffed with obnoxious amounts of advertising. I mean, of course I use adblockers normally, and it's basically a requirement no matter how much you're willing to pay for every product you use. Because everyone wants to double (and triple- and quadruple- and...) dip. Buy a $2000 TV and you'll likely discover ads on the homescreen, ContentID to sell your viewing habits, etc. They figured "why not?" because someone will always rationalize it.
- Sander_Marechal 6mo ago
  > It's like buy a $2000 TV and discovering ads on the homescreen, ContentID to sell your viewing habits, etc. Have you bought a TV recently? This is exactly what is happening already. I had to pi-hole my entire network to get rid of the ads in my "switch source" menu on my Samsung TV that did not have ads when I bought it and for the first 3 years after that.
  - StilesCrisis 6mo ago
    I only hooked up my Samsung TV to the internet to install one update when I first acquired it, then kept it disconnected. Thanks for the tip--I'll make sure to keep it offline forever now! Can you roll back to an older firmware?
weedhopper 6mo ago
Exactly, paying for quality content should be normalised. Even a trivial amount - 10-50c. And the reality is that it is unheard of.
- intrasight 6mo ago
  I would gladly pay a few cents to read an article. Isn't the problem that no one figured out the business or technical model to accomplish that? I think I remember reading, 10 years ago, that bitcoin would solve that problem.
  - someguyorother 6mo ago
    The mental transaction cost is the hard part. The effort required to decide whether to pay at all is significant enough that payments don't scale down to the micro- level.
  - Phemist 6mo ago
    Well, the largest ad tech company on the planet owning the largest platform to view content on (Chrome) certainly may or may not have something to do with the viability of alternative payment models.
digitalsushi 6mo ago
after 30 years of waiting for standard micropayments, I have stopped wondering if it's solvable. I perfectly believe we could have had it working 20 years ago but there's a reason someone doesn't desire it to be. i also dont know how economics work so maybe paying 2/3 of a cent for a page view is not helpful. Maybe that's why it doesnt work. Maybe I'm in the 1% of people who would pay for ad-free content on a non-subscription model. I'd rather everything have a price, nothing has a subscription, and everything is a decision to purchase per view instead of funneling into walled garden access per month
- jjice 6mo ago
  Al a carte content via a good standardized micro payment option sounds wonderful. Not sure if we as a society would pull it off well, but I can dream. Define micropayments, but we kind of do it with television and movies if you rent from something like Apple, Sony, or Amazon. Would love if that model could apply to the written word as well.

ramon156 6mo ago

I feel like this is relatively short-sighted. I don't enjoy reading global news articles as often times it just makes me upset. I like reading local news because I can relate to it. I pay for one, and I read the other one in a frustrated mood. I'm sure there are people who enjoy reading global newspapers daily, and I'm sure a good quantity pays for it. That just doesn't include me.

llm_nerd 6mo ago

>The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low quality This is kind of an ironic comment given that this whole discussion is about visiting the sites as a paying subscriber. I pay for the NYT. If I visit without adblockers, the site is absolutely stuffed with obnoxious amounts of advertising. I mean, of course I use adblockers normally, and it's basically a requirement no matter how much you're willing to pay for every product you use. Because everyone wants to double (and triple- and quadruple- and...) dip. Buy a $2000 TV and you'll likely discover ads on the homescreen, ContentID to sell your viewing habits, etc. They figured "why not?" because someone will always rationalize it.

Sander_Marechal 6mo ago
> It's like buy a $2000 TV and discovering ads on the homescreen, ContentID to sell your viewing habits, etc. Have you bought a TV recently? This is exactly what is happening already. I had to pi-hole my entire network to get rid of the ads in my "switch source" menu on my Samsung TV that did not have ads when I bought it and for the first 3 years after that.
- StilesCrisis 6mo ago
  I only hooked up my Samsung TV to the internet to install one update when I first acquired it, then kept it disconnected. Thanks for the tip--I'll make sure to keep it offline forever now! Can you roll back to an older firmware?

weedhopper 6mo ago

Exactly, paying for quality content should be normalised. Even a trivial amount - 10-50c. And the reality is that it is unheard of.

intrasight 6mo ago
I would gladly pay a few cents to read an article. Isn't the problem that no one figured out the business or technical model to accomplish that? I think I remember reading, 10 years ago, that bitcoin would solve that problem.
- someguyorother 6mo ago
  The mental transaction cost is the hard part. The effort required to decide whether to pay at all is significant enough that payments don't scale down to the micro- level.
- Phemist 6mo ago
  Well, the largest ad tech company on the planet owning the largest platform to view content on (Chrome) certainly may or may not have something to do with the viability of alternative payment models.

digitalsushi 6mo ago

after 30 years of waiting for standard micropayments, I have stopped wondering if it's solvable. I perfectly believe we could have had it working 20 years ago but there's a reason someone doesn't desire it to be. i also dont know how economics work so maybe paying 2/3 of a cent for a page view is not helpful. Maybe that's why it doesnt work. Maybe I'm in the 1% of people who would pay for ad-free content on a non-subscription model. I'd rather everything have a price, nothing has a subscription, and everything is a decision to purchase per view instead of funneling into walled garden access per month

jjice 6mo ago
Al a carte content via a good standardized micro payment option sounds wonderful. Not sure if we as a society would pull it off well, but I can dream. Define micropayments, but we kind of do it with television and movies if you rent from something like Apple, Sony, or Amazon. Would love if that model could apply to the written word as well.