5 ms·

The only future for journalism might be reader revenue. Without it, everyone in this field were in danger of becoming a public relations or advertising company

The only future for journalism might be reader revenue. Without it, everyone in this field were in danger of becoming a public relations or advertising company disguised as journalism. I'm an editor at Programmer Magazine in China (http://special.csdn.net/programmercovers/ http://special.csdn.net/programmercovers/), as a coincidence, after 14 years operation, we just release the last print issue last week and withdrawal towards the electronic version only. I think we share the similar experience and feeling about how the tech medias evolved recently. But media is still a very active field, if you have read the New York Times innovation report that leaked earlier this year, you may get a mixed feeling that with the risks, there are still opportunities to build an independent site with in-depth articles, code, algorithms, and reliable product reviews, which quality media should have. But unfortunately, most decisions were not made by the ones who love this career, have ability and skill to lead the change, and do not fear to face the risks.

Natsu 12y ago
> Without it, everyone in this field were in danger of becoming a public relations or advertising company disguised as journalism. We're rather far along down that road already, from what I can tell, and the place it leads terrifies me.
shawn-butler 12y ago
The good news is millennials seem to really want to pay subscriptions for things rather than own them. https://www.moviepass.com https://www.moviepass.com etc. I think even big chains like AMC are now offering subscriptions. Maybe paywall is going to become less of a dirty word. Subscriber revenue/data is definitely more valuable & predictable.
joelthelion 12y ago
I think what these guys (https://snowdrift.coop/ https://snowdrift.coop/) are doing might be useful for journalism, too.
greyman 12y ago
And what about publications like AnandTech? Their editorial seems to be independent of sales, and they are still doing fine.
frik 12y ago
We need more serious competition in the Ad market, someone that interrupts the status quo like Uber did for taxi business [and Google Ads previously did]. Let website owners host the Ads on their web server (no 3rd party scripts; would help also with noscript/adblock). Today Google Ads and Amazon Referral with the new greatly reduced payments are the new problem. IMO pay per click (PPC) is a big problem (1. click fraud, 2. most people don't click anyway but seeing it still influence by seeing it, 3. adblock/noscript blocks 3rd-party scripts) and it got popular as Google introduced it in AdWords in 2002. Til 2002, cost per thousand impression (CPI) and cost per mille (CPM) where most used. CPI/CPM are the better model for website owners and company that run Ad-campaigns; PPC for Google an other ad networks. Paywalls are not the answer, the WWW is successful because it is open. Learn from the history: Microsoft's MSN started as serious competitor to WWW, and it was a fiasco in 1995. (I mean the original The Microsoft Network that came with Win95: http://winsupersite.com/windows-live/msn-inside-story http://winsupersite.com/windows-live/msn-inside-story (incl. photos)). Bill Gates even completely rewrote his "The Road Ahead" book half a year later - I have both editions, and almost every page has different wordings (MS Network, Information Highway -> Internet/WWW)
- stingraycharles 12y ago
  You do realize there is already heavy, impression-based competition going on in the ad market (google "real time bidding", for example)? That is exactly the kind of disruption you are asking for. AdSense is usually only used to fill remnant inventory; any big publisher uses a hybrid of real time bidding, direct sales and ad networks nowadays. Running your own ad server is a big, big liability. While running a news website is mostly a read-operation, adservers are extremely write-heavy (every adview results in at least 2 write operations). Do that 10 time for every page view, and have 100 pageviews a second during peak times, and you suddenly find yourself becoming and engineering company instead of a publishing company. Anyway, the scenario you are describing to "disrupt" to ad market is exactly the scenario we had in the 90s. Everyone was using phpAds, which could be embedded directly from within php, and advertisers ran almost exclusively CPM based campaigns. What happened? Publishers found out that their adserver was eating >95% of their server resources because frankly, adserving is HARD, and advertisers found that their ROI was crap because people didnt click ads. The real disruption is already happening, in the background, far away from where the public looks -- real time bidding has completely disrupted the adserving market in the last two years, and more and more ad networks find themselves becoming irrelevant. Disclaimer: i was co-founder and cto of an adserving platform.

Natsu 12y ago

> Without it, everyone in this field were in danger of becoming a public relations or advertising company disguised as journalism. We're rather far along down that road already, from what I can tell, and the place it leads terrifies me.

shawn-butler 12y ago

The good news is millennials seem to really want to pay subscriptions for things rather than own them. https://www.moviepass.com https://www.moviepass.com etc. I think even big chains like AMC are now offering subscriptions. Maybe paywall is going to become less of a dirty word. Subscriber revenue/data is definitely more valuable & predictable.

joelthelion 12y ago

I think what these guys (https://snowdrift.coop/ https://snowdrift.coop/) are doing might be useful for journalism, too.

greyman 12y ago

And what about publications like AnandTech? Their editorial seems to be independent of sales, and they are still doing fine.

frik 12y ago

We need more serious competition in the Ad market, someone that interrupts the status quo like Uber did for taxi business [and Google Ads previously did]. Let website owners host the Ads on their web server (no 3rd party scripts; would help also with noscript/adblock). Today Google Ads and Amazon Referral with the new greatly reduced payments are the new problem. IMO pay per click (PPC) is a big problem (1. click fraud, 2. most people don't click anyway but seeing it still influence by seeing it, 3. adblock/noscript blocks 3rd-party scripts) and it got popular as Google introduced it in AdWords in 2002. Til 2002, cost per thousand impression (CPI) and cost per mille (CPM) where most used. CPI/CPM are the better model for website owners and company that run Ad-campaigns; PPC for Google an other ad networks. Paywalls are not the answer, the WWW is successful because it is open. Learn from the history: Microsoft's MSN started as serious competitor to WWW, and it was a fiasco in 1995. (I mean the original The Microsoft Network that came with Win95: http://winsupersite.com/windows-live/msn-inside-story http://winsupersite.com/windows-live/msn-inside-story (incl. photos)). Bill Gates even completely rewrote his "The Road Ahead" book half a year later - I have both editions, and almost every page has different wordings (MS Network, Information Highway -> Internet/WWW)

stingraycharles 12y ago
You do realize there is already heavy, impression-based competition going on in the ad market (google "real time bidding", for example)? That is exactly the kind of disruption you are asking for. AdSense is usually only used to fill remnant inventory; any big publisher uses a hybrid of real time bidding, direct sales and ad networks nowadays. Running your own ad server is a big, big liability. While running a news website is mostly a read-operation, adservers are extremely write-heavy (every adview results in at least 2 write operations). Do that 10 time for every page view, and have 100 pageviews a second during peak times, and you suddenly find yourself becoming and engineering company instead of a publishing company. Anyway, the scenario you are describing to "disrupt" to ad market is exactly the scenario we had in the 90s. Everyone was using phpAds, which could be embedded directly from within php, and advertisers ran almost exclusively CPM based campaigns. What happened? Publishers found out that their adserver was eating >95% of their server resources because frankly, adserving is HARD, and advertisers found that their ROI was crap because people didnt click ads. The real disruption is already happening, in the background, far away from where the public looks -- real time bidding has completely disrupted the adserving market in the last two years, and more and more ad networks find themselves becoming irrelevant. Disclaimer: i was co-founder and cto of an adserving platform.