Oh no, if only I had a 12 ft ladder… 12ft.io
And that’s $7/month for fewer, better ads.
The Verge loved shitting on streaming services pushing paid subscriptions that still have ads. I wonder how critical they’ll be of that now…
I used to donate to Vox back when it was free. I’m such a sucker.
Well vox is garbage anyway, so no loss.
It’s been really bad ever since Klein, Coaston, and Yglesias departed.
Well how do you expect people to both make money and provide stuff for free?
I subscribe to more periodicals than most, I think probably almost twenty of them. I just cut out NYTimes, Washington Post, LA Times, Atlantic. I was growing disillusioned with some of their coverage- NYTimes desperately triangulating to the comfortable, safe, meaningless center, WaPo and LAT owned by oligarchs kissing Trump’s ring. Atlantic just bores me lately- lots of opinion and not a lot of investigative coverage. But happy to add The Verge. I’ve read them daily since they were This Is My Next and don’t intend to stop.
Yeah I finally killed my Atlantic subscription. Lots of doom and gloom or pro-isreal opinions, very little substance compared to the magazine they used to be. I miss when they had writers like Ta Nehesi Coates doing real journalism.
If it is behind a paywall, it isnt news, it is an asset.
So physical newspapers aren’t news?
“Can I have that once you’re finished with it?” Physical newspapers are subject to being given away by the original purchaser (or getting picked up from cafe tables or pulled from trashcans—people used to leave the damned things lying around everywhere), if you can’t afford to pay for them. It’s a bit more difficult to do that with digital content.
I guess gift links are a bit similar but obviously at a much smaller scale. I’m not sure how a fully similar digital system to sharing newspapers could be setup while still funding decent journalism.
I don’t hate paywalls though because I get it but I can’t say I’ve ever subscribed to get around one.
News papers are a physical item, not bits hidden behind a boolean set to true. Plus, I can go read a newspaper at the store if I want to.
You pay for information and not paper or pixels.
You might. 🏴☠️
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Information should be free. Putting it behind a paywall makes it so the less fortunate suffer by being kept out of the loop.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t live in a utopia that works like this. Journalists have wages, web servers cost a lot of money to run. Printing presses and physical distribution channels also cost a lot of money. If information should be free, how should publishers pay for all of these labor and infrastructure costs?
Everything you said is true and I never implied it wasn’t I was just saying that information should be free. If I had an idea on how to make it work I’d be working on it
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I also hope we get there which is why I said it should be free.
Information is free, it’s the transmission medium (paper printing or webservers) and the journalist’s wages that you should pay for.
That doesn’t really address their point, that’s simply a motte and bailey. Limiting access to information (knowledge/education) on a basis of payment is a hindrance of lower classes not upper classes. We especially see this with academic publishing and the people writing those papers aren’t even paid for it usually.
You shouldn’t have to pay for the journalist or the transmission, similarly to education it is best for a society (especially a democracy) if information is freely accessible regardless of one’s finances.
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‘It’s a tragedy that garbage is free and news is behind paywalls’
Boy, you summed up The Verge beautifully.
You go right the fuck ahead, Verge. Your content wasn’t worth free.
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I’m not sure how sustainable this model is. Especially when a reader browses via a link aggregator and therefore reads news articles on many different websites. I doubt most people want/can afford a subscription on dozens of different news outlets, as that’ll quickly add up to a triple-digit monthly bill.
Something like Flattr, but maybe non-optional, would be better. Pay a fixed monthly fee and split the payment between all sites you read articles on (maybe based on how many, or reading time or whatever).
God forbid we read a few sources and avoid clicking on 60 links for the same story.
Sounds like a Reddit/Twitter/Lemmy addiction more than anything.
This is what scroll did, before they got bought by Twitter. Same for coil, who shut down, by the people behind then still seem to be working on something. See https://webmonetization.org/
Pretty sure that’s the model Apple News+ uses, but the price has always seemed pretty steep to me compared to other subscription services.
$1-$2 month maybe: they want $7 which is close enough to a Hulu/Netflix subscription fee that you immediately realize it’s not tenable to subscribe to all the major news sites you read, so then you start needing to build a “top 5” in your head because that’s all you can reasonably budget and that’s either too much of a PITA for whatever article you’re trying to read or you realize Verge isn’t in that top 5 and move on
That price is way too much. My wife and I use Netflix for hours each day on average. I get significantly more use out of netflix. There is no way I’m paying a website like the verge $7/month when I can get the same new for free from some YouTuber.
Even $1 is probably too much. I read articles from dozens of different sources and managing that would royally suck. Got a new credit card? Have a fun next hour of your life logging in everywhere…
No, just give me an add-on so I can pay to bypass a paywall. I don’t want an account everywhere, I just want to read your article, and I’m willing to pay a few cents to do so (way more than they’d get with ads).
Isn’t this EXACTLY how it worked before publishers started using the internet? You had to pay either a subscription, or per issue for every magazine or newspaper you wanted to read. Instead of having subscriptions to “dozens of different news outlets”, people only paid for a few. The ones that interested you most, you paid a subscription for, and if you were interested in anything else, you just bought single issues.
I would do this with one caveat: sometimes people link really garbage articles. There was one here yesterday written so poorly I feel less informed for having read it. I would like the option to take my money back for reading such a bad article.
I do want to pay for news, but I can’t subscribe to everyone, or even just “the good ones”, because I do use aggregator sites.
I also wonder if that would lead to a model of paying every website for content because if Reddit is good enough to train AI on and good enough that many people include it in their Google searches, who is to say the comments aren’t “articles”?
or reading time or whatever
Could result in badly written, overly long articles and poor UI to force people to take longer. I know you’re just spitballing, but thought I’d point out how easy it is to induce unintended consequences.
There was one here yesterday written so poorly I feel less informed for having read it. I would like the option to take my money back for reading such a bad article.
That’s hilarious.
Can you share the post?
Exactly. Give me an add-on to pay to bypass paywalls for a few cents and they’ll get my money. I’m not making an account or paying a subscription, but I’m happy to leave some change in the donation box.
Here comes cable TV, but for written news.
Watch as sites allow other sites to resell their content, so users can subscribe one place to get all the news they want!
Wait 10 years.
Here cones streaming, but for written news.
Watch as sites separate, and recreate their own DTC models!
Wait 10 years.
Oops, planet is fire now.
Flattr was such a good concept, it’s so disappointing it never caught on
In this case the garbage is behind the pay wall then. Verge is all opinion pieces and cheap content nowadays anyway.
I think the “garbage is free” narrative needs to change. AI generated garbage sure isn’t free, you pay for it with your attention and your data. Publishers need to make money somehow, and they can either do that with tracking cookies that harvest your data and sell it to the highest bidder, or in reality, both. If average consumers had any idea of how much data they give up for “free” content or services on the internet, I think more people would be okay with paywalls, and I think there would be a lot more pressure on paid subscription/service providers to use paywall revenue as an alternative to, instead of in addition to, the surveillance capitalism method that’s so pervasive right now
It also needs to be easy to pay for content. If you have to make an account and create a subscription, that’s a non-starter for many people. If you can just click a button in your browser, you’ll get a lot more engagement. If I pay, get rid of the ads and show me the article.
Supposedly The Verge is behind a dynamic paywall, metered based on high use, but I got a block in the first article I clicked on this week. I don’t mind a paywall but be clear on what is behind a paywall and what isn’t. I will stop visiting the site at all if I can’t figure it out.
I wish these sites had an option to pay 50cents or whatever for articles I want to read so i can still support them without having to commit to another fucking subscription.
They’re trying to kill us all with financial bug bites.
Cue dipshit statement: It’s just one more little subscription, what’s the big deal…
