[BoiledCabbage]

Fundamentally, we refuse to pay for content. As long as we continue to do so, they won't be profitable.

The issue is that we also complain about the dumbing down of online info, and decry the lack of quality content.

The advertising model does not work for valuable content creation. Period. Until someone figures out what its replacement is, news (and all non mass-produced content) will continue to slowly die online.

[m3rc]

Some people, myself included, pay for some online news content. But just by virtue of being paid doesn't make news content creators more valuable. I had a NYT subscription until their OpEd board started churning out Nazi apoliga like it was their job. The world of paid content is still pretty terrible and stuck carrying water for their corporate overlords just as much as ad-supported groups. Maybe that's the future, but if all it took for quality to go up was for paid subscriptions to exist and people to want to buy them, it would have happened by now.

[throwaway613834]

Do you happen to know what Quartz's business model is (qz.com)? They seem to have no subscription model to pay for even if you want to, nor do they seem to serve ads (as far as I've noticed, but maybe they serve a few), and yet they seem to have decent quality content.

[mikeyouse]

They are a subsidiary of Atlantic Media Group that are explicitly advertised as no pay walls, no registration, and no app downloads:

https://www.atlanticmedia.com/brands/quartz/

Atlantic Media is owned by David Bradley and Laurene Powell Jobs invested in The Atlantic recently (but I think all of the subsidiaries are still owned solely by Bradley).

Before he was in media, he founded and sold a few advisory companies that went public, where he made a few hundred million dollars. So I guess Quartz's business model is live off the largesse of very wealthy benefactors?

[throwaway613834]

Oh wow, thank you! It very much did remind me of The Atlantic -- makes sense now!