I really dislike ad driven publications. I’m not opposed to paying for quality news publication, but for something like NYT, there’s only a couple articles a month I come across that I’m really interested in reading. There problem is that there’s 4-5 other paywalled publications where I have that same issue. I’m interested in their content, I just can’t justify the subscription price for the small amount of content from them I’ll actually consume, and I really can’t justify paying subscriptions for 4-5 publications at once.
I would pay $5-10 a month for a news aggregator for paywalled publications. It could be set up in a way that the publications get paid per view of their articles, it could be opened up to independent writers as well (e.g. integrate your substack with it). Maybe even an additional fee that includes digital magazine publications as well.
I can’t imagine it would be worse for the industry (unlike Spotify), as it already seems like journalism/news is hovering above collapse. They would be making money off of people who weren’t providing revenue previously.
There is. It’s called Apple News+
I’d love to try out Apple News, but as far as I can tell you can only access it on an Apple device, there’s no web access :(
Also it’s not available in Switzerland so I can’t use it unfortunately…
The same btw goes gor movies in my oppinion. Why do I have to have 3 Streaming services for a couple hundred movies when I have 70 Million songs on evey streaming services? I hope this will eventually change…
I don’t want to read full magazines. I need more or less what an RSS reader can do. But in good.
I use this, it’s quite good. No complaints about it, no ads, reading articles doesn’t feel like a chore. I definitely recommend it
Mostly… the advertising is disguised as top 10 articles with Amazon links. 50% journalism 40% articles 10% Reddit copied BuzzFeed “articles”
It could be set up in a way that the publications get paid per view of their articles
This is idea behind the BAT token and the Brave Browser¹. Unfortunately it won’t break through paywalls, but ad blocking is pretty good and in theory is less guilt.
¹ although, there is this
Because good journalism is expensive and the space is so much more competitive in the digital age. Also greed, usually it’s greed preventing us from having good things.
Isn’t news free though?
This. Is. Exactly. What. I. Wish. For. A. Very. Long. Time.
Nowadays every news site has paywalls. I’m willing to pay for good work, but if I pay a single news provider, I’m missing too much. Nobody is willing to pay for every publisher. Even if an article is just a few cents I neither want to be annoyed with the payment process nor do I want to manually keep track of how much I spent for news in a month.
We really need a platform providing a news flat rate, aggregating most larger publishers.
No they can fuck off with the charging me money to read their article thing. I would prefer that they load that shit up to the gills with ads that I then block
Where does quality news come from if people aren’t willing to pay for it?
Clearly people are willing to pay for it. They’re profiting 50 million a year.
My buck a week isn’t going to have any impact on whether or not they can run the paper, I can’t fathom making the argument that someone who can’t afford to contribute to the already massively successful paper should have zero access to it.
I’m not exactly an expert, but I doubt the newspaper gets paid for blocked ads.
Nope you’re spot on, of course they don’t. Something something ability something something need, gating information except to those who can afford to support their organization should classify them as something other than news media.