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Newspapers made a huge strategic error in how they approached advertising, which ultimately resulted in much of their value being essentially given away to Google. It used to be the case that much of (for example) the New York Times' advertising value came not just from the number of eyeballs, but from the specific nature of those eyeballs. Being able to target a specific category of people who read the NYT (they can afford the paper, they are likely to live in New York, they know long words, they have a specific worldview, etc) is incredibly valuable to advertisers. Market segmentation by publication is very powerful - even knowing that a viewer doesn't have much money, or hates buying things, or is cynical about advertising is more valuable than not knowing anything. It's the reason that so many niche magazines exist. Advertising to someone who cares about a very specific hobby is worth a lot. It's also the reason that most printed publications aren't free. Many could be if you take a simplistic view of the economics. However they would dilute their audience to the point where it would become less valuable to advertisers. Vogue advertises to people who want to look at fashion photos enough to pay $9 or whatever to do so. With the internet, two things changed. Firstly the fact that anyone in the world could read a given article for free, meant that the average eyeball on a NYT article was much less 'NYT-reader-ish' than an eyeball on a printed page of the paper. Secondly, tracking and analytics meant that there was much more valuable and monetizable information about that reader than the fact that they are a NYT reader. Information like all the other things they have looked at, what they've recently bought, what apps they have installed, the content of their emails. Only the big tech companies and data brokers have this info. The data that the NYT has on you is trivial in comparison. It didn't have to be this way. Newspapers could have ringfenced their own data and sold ads in a way which kept them in control. As a side effect it would have been better for their readers' privacy. They failed to understand their own business as well as Google did. Now consumers are being blamed for this, for 'making the wrong choices'. I resent this for several reasons. Firstly it is an argument which denies the nature of reality. It is analogous with telling people they shouldn't shop at Wal-Mart, because local businesses will close. The solution is to change the rules to optimize for the things that we care about. Not to rely on the unlikely event that lots of people with limited resources will all make altruistic decisions to protect the nebulous thing that you care about. Secondly these newspapers set themselves up as society's only defenders of liberty and truth against the forces of darkness. In fact, a lot of them are full of propaganda, gossip and clickbait. Some of the $5 newsletters are in a class above almost everything in these newspapers. The people writing them are (typically) experts on one topic, they love that topic passionately, they have no particular axe to grind and they have much incentives to make something high quality. |
I totally agree with everything you've said here, but I always get stuck on this part. What rules should we even change, and how should we change them?