[rcarr]

> The reader is not respected enough by the software.

The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a product is digital then it should be free which is maybe fine if we are going to live in a world with Universal Basic Income but in our existing system is absolutely ludicrous.

We used to pay for things - including the news. The clear issue is that the working class have (since 1970s but especially since the financial crisis) tolerated having their inflation adjusted incomes degraded so there is no longer the money to pay. Outside of governments who have failed to take the necessary action against corporations and promote a power balance between investors, business and workers, the main cause of this is the lack of courage in middle management.

The executive suite have not tolerated this degradation and their salaries have risen accordingly. In contrast, middle management attain a level of safety/comfort and then coast - they don't want the hassle of looking for another job so they don't risk pushing for a pay rise. They just accept whatever meagre rise is offered because they think "well at least I'm still better off than the guys lower down the chain". This then filters down as the ceiling for the lower ranks can never be higher than the management. Over time this becomes a gigantic issue, particularly in countries with a strong minimum wage that rises every year as the gap between the worker and management closes every year. Management then start blaming the government rather than actually looking at themselves and the fact that they are not pushing for bigger wages out of fear of rocking the boat.

I literally saw this play out at a billion dollar revenue international non-tech company where I used to work a few years back. Directors were on £125k. Department heads on £75k. Tech leads on £55-65k. Seniors on £40-50k. Intermediates £27-35k. Juniors £25k. Devs who had developed features worth millions to the company would get offered pathetic pay rises of £2-5k because offering any more would then mean they'd be treading on the next rung.

[llm_nerd]

>If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version.

? Where is this true?

I pay for the NY Times. Logged in to my subscriber account, the front page is 68MB and has a giant Hume band ad filling 1/3 of the screen. Loading an article that contains about 9 paragraphs of text and I have a huge BestBuy banner ad filling the top, and then smaller banner ads interspersed between every paragraph.

That maybe 10KB of text is surrounded by 10MB of extraneous filler downloaded for just this page (not even including the cached content).

[maybewhenthesun]

It is true in a historical sense.

People used to all pay for their newspapers. So newspapers had an actual budget apart from ad revenue.

This has largely dried up and nearly all 'newspapers' today need to get their money from ads. Sure, some people subscribe, but it's hardly ever the main income for news organizations (some exceptions notwithstanding, I'm talking about the average news organization here).

On top of that the ad revenue is extremely 'diluted'. Putting an ad in a print newspaper was expensive!.

For an organization who get their main income from ads, tailoring their pages for the few subscribers is hardly worth it.

[llm_nerd]

>For an organization who get their main income from ads

The NYT makes about $2B per year from subscriber revenue. They make about $450M from digital ads over all properties. Obviously not all news orgs are the same, but the lead example of a shitty experience is the NYT, so weird that all of the rationalizations work so hard to diverge.

>tailoring their pages for the few subscribers is hardly worth it

"Tailoring" a digital page to not include ads for subscribers is so laughably trivial that this is a farcical claim. They aren't hand-laying out the content and removing ad upsets it or something. But they don't remove the ads because, gollum style, why shouldn't they force ads on me?

What we're talking about is classic enshittification, and every justification people make up is just cope. Indeed, the fact that I'm a subscriber makes me even more lucrative to advertisers, in a classic catch-22 that completely undoes all of the "just pay and you don't get ads in my invented scenario".

[maybewhenthesun]

Ok, point taken. I've heard very different numbers for dutch newspapers and blindly extrapolated that to the US. And if the numbers are like that than maybe the numbers I heard about dutch newspapers are bullshit too, who knows!

[raw_anon_1111]

The subscriptions barely paid for delivery.

[torben-friis]

Press is a difficult one.

I grew up in a household where several newspapers were bought daily (dad was a journalist himself). I would struggle doing the same though, even if I can very much afford it, because it is very clear to current press that even paying, I'm the product.

There's all sorts of articles that are actually ads, attempts to move me in an ideological direction, information that is in the owner's interest to spread.

Press double dips. If the interest is on distributing ideology, have the parties/lobbies pay.

[mcculley]

What paid subscriptions respect the readers? I would love to pay for news from organizations that only get money from readers. For example, I have been paying for The Economist for decades and still see advertisements.

[jrmg]

The money has to come from somewhere.

Agree - and I pay for news - but I also find it hard to imagine that the current morass of low quality, usually scammy, ads is the most lucrative way to monetize a news web site. It’s literally driving away views while attracting advertisers that are willing to pay less and less. We’ve hill-climbed onto a plateaux (hill-descended into a crevasse?) and everyone is too afraid to make the leap to a potentially better one because if they get it wrong they’ll end up with less or no income.

[hunterpayne]

At the dawn of the web, no industry was better positioned to take advantage of it than the news media. Instead they ignored it and were cannibalized to a greater degree than any other industry. Its hard to keep an industry afloat when it is managed so badly. Part of the reason that the news media is where it is, is that they have lost most of their income and viewers so the only people who are willing to work in it have ulterior motives. This drives a vicious cycle of continuously more partisan news coverage which drives away even more viewers. The ads are just a symptom of this, not the cause. If they were managed better, they would have a more effective ad policy but they aren't. Still though, I'm sure its a hard balance to keep but others seem to do it so...

[twoodfin]

We used to pay for things - including the news. The clear issue is that the working class have (since 1970s but especially since the financial crisis) tolerated having their inflation adjusted incomes degraded so there is no longer the money to pay.

This isn’t true of the US:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

With fits and starts, real median wages have been on a solid upward trend since the mid-1990’s.

[red_admiral]

> We used to pay for things - including the news.

Have newspapers or magazines ever been financially sustainable on sale revenue alone? They've always carried ads, and I suspect that's always been a bigger income stream than the cost of buying the paper itself.

[wmeredith]

> Have newspapers or magazines ever been financially sustainable on sale revenue alone?

Most certainly not. The hollowing out of classifies by Craigslist in 2000s is what killed most local newspapers.

[projektfu]

The division has been more equal in the past. When I was a kid, probably 75% of the neighborhood subscribed to the paper and others, like my parents, bought it regularly on Sunday and certain other days. Perhaps sales was 25-30% of revenue. Advertising was big but a large portion was classified ads. Wikipedia says up to 70% of some newspapers' revenue was classifieds. These ads are unlikely to have much editorial effect, but that revenue has basically gone away. What remains is more perilous to independence, and since the number of print readers has gone way down, also not as important to the advertiser.

[HexPhantom]

Yep paying for content is part of the solution, but it doesn't fully explain why the experience has become so aggressively bad

[philipallstar]

> Devs who had developed features worth millions to the company would get offered pathetic pay rises of £2-5k because offering any more would then mean they'd be treading on the next rung.

Some companies are like this, but they generally lose their best people to better salaried jobs elsewhere. They exist because not everything needs to be done by top people.