I just spent a couple of minutes in dev tools deleting about 50 script, iframe and div tags that didn't contain the actual text. Then remove the "overflow:hidden" css style on the top div.
Utterly miserable waste of everyone's bandwidth. But that's media for you...
It's not the business model I object to. Though they'll probably need to do something different to actually make it work: you can't write clickbaity shite that optimises for ad revenue and then expect people to pay for it.
It's the horrible inefficiency and ineffectiveness of their markup that I object to. Megabytes of script and tags that achieves nothing except using up bandwidth and cpu cycles. Why are there 3 iframes (iirc) in there? Why are there so many script tags? Can't they use a packer? It's all so badly done.
Yeah, why optimize for ad revenue when they have a paywall?!
Sounds like you went through a lot of work to read that "clickbaity shite." It's not worth paying for, surely it's not worth the time you spent doing that?
I used to run a newspaper. The business model question is very hard.
There's basically a choice:
You can write clickbaity ad-revenue-optimised shite, which draws people in, gets them to open the article (and get served the ads). But once they've done that then there's no point in getting them engaged further - from a business point of view there's nothing gained by getting them to read stuff once the ads have been served. So you target the journos for 5 articles a day, minimum, knowing that that's not enough time for them to write decent articles, and get your editors to make the headers clickbaity. Job done. Except ad revenue is declining year-on-year and you're trashing your reputation for journalism.
Or you can do "proper" journalism, which involves paying journalists for good articles, investigative journalism, Pulitzer prize stuff. It costs a fortune. It's not worth doing for ad revenue because the clickbaity stuff actually earns more money. But it does increase your reputation. And if you get your reputation high enough, people will start paying to access the stuff you're writing.
At least that's the theory. No-one (as far as I'm aware) has actually made a profit from either model since about 2000. The Guardian has done very well out of the Wikipedia model, but all the opinions I hear is that that's probably not sustainable, and is anyway very specific to them because they cater to a niche that is very politically aware and fairly well-off. i.e. they have money to spare to support the Grauniad, and identify with its political stance.
So, yes, optimising for ad revenue when you have a paywall is stupid - people who are drawn there by the clickbait header won't pay the paywall. And people who have paid for the paywall will be annoyed if the article is optimised for clickbait (ad-revenue). I hope that makes sense? Let me know if not and I can explain it again.
I'm a geek, I enjoy messing with this stuff. The enjoyment of the technical challenge of "hacking" their paywall was more than worth the time it took. The article was probably not. Not sure I'd do it again.
I believe there are plenty of examples of profitable news organizations. They all generally sit in the 'patronage' category as you described/ala The Guardian.
I know, my first question was a joke; you're causing clickbaity headlines and inline ads by bypassing their paywall. You still haven't explained why it was worth your time to manually edit the frontend in Inspector when the article is such poor quality it's not worth paying for.
Google and Facebook ate the ad market. It doesn't matter if you win Pulitzer prizes or not, you need another source of revenue.
There's plenty of profitable paywall models, Wired, NYT, Economist. You haven't heard about any of the profitable models in the last 20 years?!
Use a browser with a "stop loading" button and press it before overlay obscures the page. Esc works too. I guess it helps if your internet isn't blazing fast, it depends on the site and needs a bit of practice, but on this one it works just fine.
I would be super interested in truly unbiased news and I am willing to pay quite a fortune for it -- through I am quite sure it wouldn't, philosophically, be possible to find.
> Yes, this sucks, but the loss of many substantive articles
would suck worse.
Yes, me using open-source code without the author's permission, license, or attribution sucks, but the loss of the software I make with it would "suck worse." So I'm using your code for free, you put it on the internet anyway silly!
I will happily pay for quality content - Bloomberg is not one of those sources. You're defending a company that will happily use it's monopolistic edge to charge 24,000 a year for an API. Get off your high horse.
I recently switched to the Brave browser, and had no issues reading the article.
It would nevertheless be wonderful if HN readers could manage whitelists or blacklists related to paywalls, so by choice we could never see posts for content we can't read. Publishers shouldn't get the publicity for articles they won't share.
Utterly miserable waste of everyone's bandwidth. But that's media for you...