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0 pointsjordigh10y ago0 comments

Right. Sell premium movie ticket prices that do not have ads (although I like previews, those can stay). Sell me a subscription to duckduckgo, payable in bitcoins or similar. Paywall every newspaper website. These are far more honest approaches in my view.

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smacktoward10y ago

> Paywall every newspaper website.

Nearly every newspaper website is already paywalled, and every time someone posts a story from those sites to HN all the comments are people complaining about the paywalls.

HN even added a special little link to let people skip around them, because why would we want to encourage people to pay for quality work they appreciate?

jordighOP10y ago

No, do it for real. Paywall completely. Keep the Googlebot out too. If people want to read a newspaper, they'll have to hear from their friends how great it is.

jay_kyburz10y ago

I agree, and you know what? I think online newspapers could be so much better.

Imagine an online paper where, instead of just mimicking a real newspaper with story after story, a site that collects facts, history as it happens, and weaves them together to form a cohesive stream that a reader can explore in all kinds of innovative ways.

You can still have he said / she said news. Still make it dramatic, but allow the user to follow the protagonist, step back in time to see what else they have said, what brought them to this point in time. Or folly the ripples outwards, how did what was said affect others, how did it interact with other stories.

I want to do an online news startup one day. It will be one where everybody thinks I'm crazy when I start it.

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dreamfactory210y ago

And funnily enough they are finding that model doesn't work and removing the paywalls as of course there is no scarcity of material in an attention economy, just scarcity of attention. As strange as it may sound, ultimately publishers need to compete for and pay the viewers - and they do that with quality content. This is why youtube own the video space.

VLM10y ago

newspapers are un-needed intermediaries. For whatever weird reasons AP and Reuters and the like don't want the hassle of 6 billion individual subscribers, so they contract out to an intermediary who pays them a vaguely fixed amount per month based on viewer numbers and then the intermediary stuffs the pages with ads and clickbait headlines to profit more than their 1000 competitors trying to do the same thing, which is unsustainable.

But they aren't "really" needed, as mere intermediaries.

Someone should startup a "newspaper" that doesn't bother with filler or ads or clickbait and just aggregates and handles subscription costs that funnel back to Reuters (or AP, or ...). I'd pay a little more for "The Intercept" and "Linux weekly news" in addition to the standard Reuters feed. Basically a pay version of the google reader / newsblur / rss ecological system.

I'm not seeing the newspapers as valuable intermediaries. They, and their clickbait headlines and ads, can just go away and nothing of value will be lost. We'll still have the sources of raw news.

javaun10y ago

AP is a member-owned organization (owned by national/regional papers), that's why they can't really go direct to consumers. NPR is the same way. NPR's board is owned by member stations, which is why you only hear Morning Addition and All Things Considered either on terrestrial radio or co-branded with the stations on NPR One. You won't see NPR distributing a full podcast of either shows. The governance model is tied to the old method of local distribution and at odds with the way the Web works.

theg210y ago

Because without those "un-needed intermediaries" paying the bill for AP content, the AP couldn't afford to run. And I'm guessing this then makes it OK for there to be only 1 source of news by your claims then as well. No chance for bias there eh?

philh10y ago

> although I like previews, those can stay

Why is an advert for a film that you don't need to see, better than an advert for a product that you don't need to own?

chiaro10y ago

It seems like the verisimilitude of the advertising medium to the product makes for the most innocuous marketing. So trailers are a "friendly" way to advertise films, like chapter extracts are friendly ways to advertise fiction books, or a tasting is a friendly way to advertise wine.

6stringmerc10y ago

...especially when film trailers are highly edited and engineered for the maximum response to manipulate the viewer into wanting to see the film exactly in the way that the OP decries as undesireable!

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