andrewducker | How you should pay for newspapers in the 21st century

I saw yesterday that Google had announced a News Initiative, to make it easier for people to support newspapers. And that they were working with numerous newspapers in partnership to manage this.

Great, I thought, finally someone is going to drag newspaper funding into the 21st century.

But no. They're making it easier for you to sign up to individual newspapers online, using your Google login.

The problem being that I don't want to read individual newspapers. There are pretty much no newspapers where I read enough of them to justify subscriptions. But there are dozens of newspapers where I read an article or two per month, and probably over a hundred over the course of a year, and paying for that number of subscriptions for the occasional article makes no sense.

The solution I want is to pay a standard amount per month which gives me access to _all_ of the newspapers* - and then divides up the subscription between the different newspapers based on how many articles I read from each one. A Spotify for newspapers, if you like.

I'd be fine with this having limits. If I'm reading 20 articles per day from The Guardian then fair enough, tell me I need to upgrade my subscription to cover that. Access to the deep archives might be an add-on. But in general, take £20/month** out of my account, give me access to all of the papers, ad-free, and make sure they all get their fair share.

(With thanks to Mike Scott, who pointed out this obvious solution a fair while ago. It's been going round in my head since then.)

*And I mean all. There are some which I don't want to read, and some that frankly I'd rather didn't exist, but generally I'd be in favour of this approach including all of them. Obviously newspapers who didn't want to take part in this wouldn't be forced into it. But I'd hope that once it started to snowball it would be an obvious win.
**£20/month is a finger-in-the-air number. I'd be happy to pay more than that. Looking at various newspapers it looks like £2-£3/week is what most charge for access (although The Times is £6/week).

Crossposts: https://andrewducker.livejournal.com/3670488.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

danieldwilliam

I like this idea.

From:

channelpenguin

But, under your suggestion, how will they be sure they can feed you a consistent flavour of propaganda / bias ?? :-)

That is why I think we will never see this. Plus, how many peope out there are like you? Is there any consumer demand?

It took a long, long time to get from Sky TV packages to Netflix - maybe I am too cynical and it wil happen - in about 15 years time...

From:

andrewducker

I think more and more people get their news from a multitude of sites.
Being faithful to one news supplier is about as modern as only watching one TV channel.

From:

channelpenguin

That's as maybe (but I will gently remind you that your friends group is not at all typical of the world at large), however, until the newspapers and the people behind them see it as a benefit to them, then they will continue to want to sell you their whole pie, rather than be happy to get paid for even regular slices.

Don't forget, many media owners have ideologies to push - mainly to maintain or increase their own financial or social status, but with the odd noble or ignoble cause.... It's harder to control influence when the readership attention is scattered.

Edited Date: 2018-03-21 11:42 am (UTC)

From:

alithea

No, I think newspaper loyalty is still a thing, among both older people and the less educated/intellectual. I suspect it was a significant factor in the Brexit vote.

We live in something of a bubble.

From:

jordanpower

I work at a tech company - PressReader - that's doing exactly this thing, aggregating newspapers AND magazines into a single subscription. Not just to their websites, but to a single platform. That way, we can learn about what you like to read and surface more of that.

I agree - loyalty is still a huge thing for newspapers. Especially among current subscribers. What we've found working with the industry, though, is that people go to different sources for different kinds of reporting.

From:

miss_s_b

I think you're right: this hasn't happened because news providers are actively resisting it, not because the tech etc isn't there.

From:

miss_s_b

I'd want the money to be split among the newspapers I click on, and everybody else's money to be split among the newspapers THEY click on.

From:

andrewducker

Yes, sorry, that was what I meant. Should have been clearer.

From:

mountainkiss

To you both then: would you still want it if it could only be workable if the money were split in pre-determined ways (e.g., according to terrestrial readership as a marker of scale, or similar)?

From:

miss_s_b

As long as the readership were being dynamically tracked, yes.

From:

mountainkiss

Thank you.

From:

jordanpower

I just came upon this thread and this discussion you guys are having. It's awesome because I have it every day. :)

I work for PressReader (disclaimer) and we ARE the tech that can do this. We have more than 7,000 publisher partners and we track how much people read their stuff on our platform and pay them a royalty accordingly.

It's basically...as OP said, Spotify for news.

From:

miss_s_b

That's ace! But are all newspapers signed up to it?

From:

jordanpower

Every newspaper in every country ever? No. Not yet :)

BUT, we're literally adding dozens every week. Sometimes more.

It started slow, getting to the first hundred was tough. Then it snowballed to 1000. Now we went from 6,000 to 7,000 in a few months. Because the papers are seeing the benefit of getting in front of readers from all over the world.

From:

miss_s_b

I might give it a prod.

From:

miss_s_b

Hmm. When I click on UK the first thing it gives me in big full colour is The Daily Mail. There ARE people who don't object to the Daily Mail... But there are a lot who do. Maybe the Indy or the Torygraph might be less offputting? Some free market advice for you there.

Yeah, unless I can easily STOP it from showing me stuff from hate-filled rags like the Mail, the Express, The Star... I'm not going to give you money, sorry. I do not want to risk accidentally clicking on them and giving them even a fraction of a penny.

Edited Date: 2018-03-21 09:26 pm (UTC)

From:

jordanpower

That's fair. Thanks for the advice. (One of the main reasons I like to come onto chats like these). It's something we're definitely working on. How do you create a platform with everything, when newspapers (unlike movies or music) often have strong, real, emotional connections to readers - good and bad.

From:

andrewducker

I can't see any reason why that would be the case. And if they tried to pull that kind of thing I'd assume cheating.

Every website can tell which pages have been looked at, and if you're logged in (which you'd need to be, in this case), exactly what you've looked at. So dividing up money by access should be trivial.

(Same as with Spotify)

From:

mountainkiss

That might be so but does not answer my question. (Perhaps regard workable as "newspapers would consent" rather than "technologically workable"?)

From:

andrewducker

Ah. Maybe, in order to get them on board.

But paying them more for being read less would probably be unsustainable.

From:

mountainkiss

Sorry, I'm not following.

From:

andrewducker

If, say, the Guardian signs up on the grounds that it will get 5% of all money, because it sells that percentage of total newspapers, but actually only 1% of page views are to the Guardian then that probably isn't a sustainable situation.

(That make sense?)

From:

mountainkiss

It doesn't quite. Am so sorry. What makes that unsustainable?

From:

andrewducker

In the long run I'd expect that other partners would feel short-changed, and it would be a raised cost on the whole organisation which would not be worth it in the long run.

If a member of the group is extracting payment higher than the value they're adding then I'd generally see that as something which would self rectify (so long as things were transparent)

From:

mountainkiss

Thanks.

From:

benwerd

Sooooo, this is part of what I do. (My firm is also supported by the Google News Initiative.)

There have been so many Spotify for News businesses, and so far, none of them have worked. I see pitches for the model all the time. There’s actually a behavior change inherent to it that’s pretty tough to crack, let alone the organizational gymnastics needed to get every publisher in the world on board with the same system. (Blendle is the most successful but even they are not doing that well. They did do a fascinating study that shows people are more willing to pay for long form journalism than news, perhaps unsurprisingly.)

I’m the world’s biggest blockchain skeptic, but this really is somewhere where a distributed, ownerless ledger could help. One company I know is building distributed access control - and that starts to be more interesting as a model for paywalls. In that situation you “just” have to work with an open standard, rather than make deals with a central company. I think payment would likely break down as fixed unit economics rather than proportional allocation though.

It’s hard and there are a lot of intertwined issues that make it even more so. Hey, if anyone’s working on something better, I’ve got money for them.

From:

andrewducker

I've not seen anything so far where I can just log in with my email address (or whatever) to a news site I've never been to before, and have it know that I'm allowed access to articles because I've signed up to a central organisation.

Didn't know anyone had actually tried that before.

I'd expect that to start with local newspapers, who would be happy to outsource their billing/subscription management.

From:

jordanpower

Hi. We're working on something better :)

I like to think so, at least.

We've got more than 7,000 of the world's biggest publishers on board and more are signing on every week. (We just signed a deal to get Chinese news content...so that's a few more thousand)

The trick is to work WITH established behavior. Not against it. PressReader can auto deliver newspapers right to your phone or your tablet if you want it to. And - every publisher gets paid a royalty when someone reads their stuff.

Edited Date: 2018-03-21 08:49 pm (UTC)

From:

benwerd

Nice! I’d love to have a conversation if you’re up for it!

I’m at ben@matter.vc. Let’s set something up?

From:

jordanpower

Always! I'll be in touch.

From:

jordanpower

Dude. It's actually wild how spot on you are with what PressReader is already doing.

Disclaimer: I work there.

Yes. People don't read individual papers. Let's get real.

PressReader has 7,000 titles. About half are magazines and the rest are newspapers. Yep. Newspapers. From all over. Plus you can translate a lot of the non-English ones easily.

It's a Spotify for newspapers. Sort of. You get to download full papers or read on a stream of curated content based off of your interests. Then, the newspapers get paid a royalty based on what you read.

There are no limits. (Other than certain titles having licensing restrictions in certain areas but that's a whole legal mumbo jumbo that's pretty unavoidable)

Access to the deep archives...typically we hold on to newspapers for about 90 days. But for Canada 150 we brought back famous newspapers from Canada's past and had stories that covered the Titanic sinking...pretty sweet.

You're actually close on the price, too. It's $29.95/month (USD) so about £24.00.

The only ads you'll see when you open a newspaper are the ones that were there in the original printing. You can read it like that or in a mobile-friendly text view.

We've been around for years but, to be honest, awareness isn't super high. We're working on it, I promise!

Send me a DM on Twitter if you can - I'm @jordanpowpow. I'd love to set you up with an account for free so you can try it out. :)

From:

doug

Interesting stuff. Can you follow links to newspaper sites shared on social media and get through the newspaper's paywall? That's much more how I read news these days than getting a large chunk of news in one gulp.

It'd need to be pretty frictionless. My employer (a university) has subscriptions to many of the newspapers I'd like to read in this way, but logging in is such a faff I usually don't bother.

From:

po8crg

Cool. So when I get a link from twitter to a story in a random US newspaper that has a paywall, I can click on a thing that says "use my pressreader login" and it works on their website?

Because the thing I want is to read the page my mate linked me to on twitter/facebook, not to have to go to your website and re-find the story.

From:

jordanpower

Ahh, I see. No, unfortunately. You'd have to pull it up on pressreader.com or open that newspaper in the pressreader app.

That's a brilliant idea, though - a kind of universal login - but, as someone else already said...getting everyone to play nice would be the biggest challenge.

How would you feel if you clicked your mate's link on twitter, got to a paywall, and one option instead of logging in was to "read that story on PressReader" so long as you're a PR subscriber?

I should be clear that that's not currently an option, and I'm not the one who builds all the cool technical stuff, but I like to know what people are interested in seeing. Of course, we'd have to find a way for this option to make sense for the original publisher. They'd still want to own that view or earn a royalty or something.

From:

cesy

Yeah, that would work for me.

From:

po8crg

That would be amazingly great, and yes that would be good.

There are a small number of places I read enough of to be prepared to contribute to directly. But I read a lot of stories from random US cities because something happened in Kalamazoo or Miluwakee and the local paper has the best coverage. I'd be happy to drop a few cents their way, but I'm not paying $5-10 a month for a paper I'll almost certainly never read a second article from.

From:

andrewducker

That sounds awesome. Sorry for the delay (spent hours at hospital with pregnant girlfriend) - but am shooting you a DM now!

From:

firecat

last year I subscribed to a number of news publications. i've noticed that they all cover similar stories in similar ways, but i liked the formats and special features of some more than others. so this year i let some of the subscriptions lapse.

From:

birguslatro

The Brave browser is an attempt to monitize the sites you visit, whether newspapers or otherwise...

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/washington-post-adds-support-brave-browser-basic-attention-token/

From:

andrewducker

I'm not convinced by the BAT model. (I want no ads, ever, and I don't want to switch browsers) But I am glad it's getting wider support, and hope it might lead to a new model I do like more.

From:

birguslatro

And just because you visit a site doesn't mean you approve of it and want your money to be going to them!

I want news sites to be free to all for the simple reason that if I post a link to them, I want those who go there to be able to read what's there, hassle-free. So a service that puts them all behind a paywall, no matter how cheap, isn't the answer in my opinion.

I'd rather they just signed up to sites like Patreon or https://www.presspatron.com/ to allow me to support them that way. Ideally, such a site wouldn't pass on to the news sites any info about who's supporting them. Presspatron does though, with payments sent individually to each site you're supporting, which is annoying. That's not the case with Patreon, but it's possible they're still told who their supporters are.

From:

birguslatro

Research shows people are six times more likely to donate monthly to a news site than to subscribe to one behind a paywall...

https://www.presspatron.com/market-research.html

Not quite as good as it sounds though... :)