[arctictony]

CEO of Scroll here. Glad you're a fan of The Correspondent, we love them too. Also hear you on the privacy concerns. The publisher contracts with Scroll require that they remove third-party trackers 'that share information with parties other than Publisher or have a commercial purpose other than improving user experience.'

It's always going to be a negotiation when you're trying to work with sites rather than unilaterally act against them, but we're genuinely trying to get them to a place where they're living up to the privacy promise that a consumer would want.

[fbelzile]

I actually had this concept in my Trello list of good business ideas. I wasn't going to pursue it since I like running one person businesses, but I'm glad you're working on it! Good job, keep it up and good luck!

[arctictony]

Thank you! I really appreciate that

[akkartik]

Does Scroll work if I block third-party cookies?

Update 10 minutes later: It isn't working for me on theatlantic.com; I got the "free articles" drawers and then got blocked after they counted down to 0. So perhaps the answer to my question is "no".

I can whitelist third-party cookies on specific sites, but I don't think I can whitelist a single cookie across all sites. This seems unfortunate.

Update 30 minutes later: I tried disabling both cookie- and tracker-blocking in Firefox and still saw no sign of it working on theatlantic.com

[mirimir]

Huh, maybe that's why it didn't work for me. I allow third-party cookies, but only from sites that I've visited during the current browser session. And all cookies are deleted when I close Firefox.

[arctictony]

If you whitelist [*.]scroll.com in Chrome for example, Scroll should work. Important to note it doesn't get you past paywalls. The economics would make the price insanely high for that.

[andai]

Ahh, this is an important note. My first thought seeing this post was, "finally, a Spotify for the news!"

[arctictony]

Would love to do it, but for a publisher the economics get super hard at this time. The number of new consumers has to be large enough to offset the drop in ARPU that a bundle would represent and publishers are super wary that there are enough people out there who want to get past paywalls to make that happen. This is the reason why even Apple News+ had such trouble convincing anyone to join.

I do think that over time more opportunities for, at first, skinny bundles will emerge but the world isn't there yet at the scale you'd want.

[jacques_chester]

In theory we might be competitors, but I'd rather the world sucked less than feel smug.

So here's my argument: You don't charge enough money. It's the same mistake literally everyone ahead of you has already made before failing. Charge more money. Charge what seems like an absurd amount of money. Because you need a large pool to get people through the door. It's easier to cut prices than to raise them. Charge more damn money.

More selfishly: I can help you with the paywalls thing without cookies. [e-mail].