[Kalium]

What I think you're seeing is that people are paying the amount they're willing to pay. When your choices are $40/mo or $0/mo for the WSJ and you average an article or two from them a week, a lot of people will opt for $0.

Right now I'm led to think the answer might be consolidation. Or some other form of subscription intermediation. A dozen outlets is far more than I want to manage, especially when the price really has little correlation to how often I actually read an article from an outlet.

That buying a subscription doesn't make ads go away is also not helping. I do not want to pay to support something so I can be the subject of behavioral targeting, thanks.

With all that said, I do want to address one underlying point. "What's the alternative?", you ask. That's not my problem. That's your problem as a media professional. As a media consumer, I'm perfectly happy to watch the vast majority of media outlets dry up and blow away because they never figured out how to respect the people they purport to serve. I'll stick with the ones that provide me with value I find reasonable and treat me with a measure of respect.

I refuse to accept that democracy can only survive at the price of listicles and privacy-invading ads.

[jryle70]

> With all that said, I do want to address one underlying point. "What's the alternative?", you ask. That's not my problem. That's your problem as a media professional. As a media consumer, I'm perfectly happy to watch the vast majority of media outlets dry up and blow away because they never figured out how to respect the people they purport to serve

Journalism is there not just to serve the consumers. It serves as a critical check and balance tool of democracy. We need healthy and functional journalism.

Paying for the content is about as transparent as it can be to ensure the media is sustainable yet can maintain its integrity.

Media works in a pyramid just like many other industries. There are handful of top level publications and a sea of unknown, low readership ones. Journalists often start with those low level publications. If they can't make a living working there no matter how good they are, how can they get to the top level ones that you're willing to support?

> I'll stick with the ones that provide me with value I find reasonable and treat me with a measure of respect.

Which ones are you currently stick with? Is Conde Nast one of them? Ars Technica -- which has a very good science section, has an annual membership of $35, with no ads. Do you consider them worth paying for?

[Kalium]

> It serves as a critical check and balance tool of democracy. We need healthy and functional journalism.

You're absolutely and completely right! Journalism accomplishes this critical function by serving the consumers. I refuse to believe that these essential checks can only be accomplished with privacy-invading ads, paywalls, and subscription models from the 70s.

With that said, you're describing a structure that only works when there's a functioning business model. When everyone's model falls apart, the whole pyramid starts gets structurally unsound. At this point the question at hand is not how to people keep advancing up the pyramid, but rather a more fundamental one of how the industry needs to function.

> Which ones are you currently stick with? Is Conde Nast one of them? Ars Technica -- which has a very good science section, has an annual membership of $35, with no ads. Do you consider them worth paying for?

Ars Technica is, in fact, the Condé Nast publication I mentioned subscribing to. I also like that they offer RSS feeds.

I also have a lifetime subscription to Nautilus and a yearly one to The Economist (the audio edition is perfect for my commute).

[klingebeil]

> What I think you're seeing is that people are paying the amount they're willing to pay. When your choices are $40/mo or $0/mo for the WSJ and you average an article or two from them a week, a lot of people will opt for $0.

Again. That‘s their choice and that‘s totally fine in my book. But journalism is a business and no business survives on people not willing to pay.

I completely agree that behavioral targeting can die a premature death and I‘d love to go back to models based on local, contextual or brand-driven advertising.

> With all that said, I do want to address one underlying point. "What's the alternative?", you ask. That's not my problem. That's your problem as a media professional. As a media consumer, I'm perfectly happy to watch the vast majority of media outlets dry up and blow away because they never figured out how to respect the people they purport to serve. I'll stick with the ones that provide me with value I find reasonable and treat me with a measure of respect.

I think we‘re on the same page here. And again that‘s totally fine for you to make this decision. Media companies need to find a sustainable model. At the moment it looks like subscriptions and paywalls are the way to got. Maybe that‘ll change again, but I wouldn't count on it, tbh.

[Kalium]

> Again. That‘s their choice and that‘s totally fine in my book. But journalism is a business and no business survives on people not willing to pay.

You're completely right - business needs revenue.

What I'm pointing to here is that the way subscriptions are structured and priced doesn't match the way media is consumed. It's like if beer was only available in kegs or in free samples, because nobody had hit on any other approach. It's a sign that the assumptions about user behavior no longer hold.

I mean, I understand that newspapers with print editions often rely on those regular subscribers to the dead-tree ones. But it seems weird to base your business model around assuming that the internet is not different.

[klingebeil]

News media does not operate at the scale of Netflix or Spotify, etc. Spotify has about 87 million paying users, Netflix around 150 million. The New York Times has around 4 million. That‘s a huge difference in scale alone. And the NYT is the exception, not the rule.

Journalism is expensive. Really expensive, if you want quality. More so, if you want some great investigative reporting.

So, yes subscriptions are mostly structured around the needs of the media company, not the needs of the consumer. No one is assuming, the "internet" is different. The economics of journalism just don‘t care.

[nine_k]

One tiny detail.

If payment options are not convenient to the customers, fewer customers will agree to pay. Maybe too few for the whole thing to be sustainable.