this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (4 children)

I mean, many (several?) sites tried optional subscriptions where you pay to get rid of ads, but that doesn't seem to have worked. Judging by the fact that most sites that have subscriptions instead of ads use pay walls.

People have come to expect free access, so if you can easily use an ad blocker, why would you choose to pay to remove the ads that a blocker removes for free.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago

Let's just take NYT for example. Subscription costs $325/year. Why would I ever pay that much? It's not 1954. I'm not sitting down with my morning coffee and reading the damn thing front to back. I'm reading maybe one article a week from 15 different sources. Am I supposed to pay $5000/year just to cover my bases?

As with everything else in [CURRENT YEAR] the value proposition is so absurdly out of step with reality that fixing it basically relies on rolling out the guillotines.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (1 children)

IMHO the problem is the same one as everywhere. Companies are no longer interested in creating products, they are only interested in creating revenue streams. I've been working on my finances lately and it's incredible how many 'products' have become subscriptions over time.

I'd love to be able to buy a day's access, or access to an article. If I want to share it, I'm willing to pay a small fee to show it to certain folks. I feel like there could be a market there but in the current financial climate it would never get any interest or backing because it wouldn't be a method to capture people into a reoccurring billing cycle.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Something I think is interesting is that, in order for companies to adopt these better non ad reliant models, they would have to dramatically scale down.

In a climate where ad and clicks = revenue, your solution is to scale as large as you can and pump out content to maximize views. But that wouldn't work under normal models

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

if I ran the world, these tech companies would get the ma bell treatment, heck the current phone companies need a round 2.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

As does the entire financial sector

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

I'm not visiting any of those sites regularly. I'm not subscribing to any outlet without sampling their content, either. So that was always going to fail.

In the before times you were able to purchase one edition of a paper and be done with it. Now it's subscription only, so they won't see a dime from me.