andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2018-03-21 10:01 am
andrewducker) wrote2018-03-21 10:01 am
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).
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).
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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...
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Being faithful to one news supplier is about as modern as only watching one TV channel.
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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.
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We live in something of a bubble.
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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.
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Thank you.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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That might be so but does not answer my question. (Perhaps regard workable as "newspapers would consent" rather than "technologically workable"?)
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But paying them more for being read less would probably be unsustainable.
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Sorry, I'm not following.
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(That make sense?)
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It doesn't quite. Am so sorry. What makes that unsustainable?
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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)
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Thanks.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I’m at ben@matter.vc. Let’s set something up?
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This already exists
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. :)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Re: This already exists
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https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/washington-post-adds-support-brave-browser-basic-attention-token/
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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.
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https://www.presspatron.com/market-research.html
Not quite as good as it sounds though... :)