[marcus_holmes]

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.

[B4CKlash]

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.

The New York Times is the first one that comes to mind: https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/NYT/company-people

The economist is very profitable: https://www.economistgroup.com/pdfs/Annual_Report_2021.pdf

And lastly, (while I'm sure there are more), I believe Conde Nast has said the New Yorker is also profitable.

[lamestream]

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?!

[marcus_holmes]

> 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 kinda did. You're obviously more interested in making "jokes" than reading the replies.

I do make a distinction between straight "news" sites and the more niche sites like the Economist, Wired, etc. I wasn't aware that NYT was now profitable via paywall - last I heard it was still struggling and laying off journalists, but I could be wrong.