
The Economist’s digital strategy and the limits of a model based on advertising - dnetesn
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-economists-tom-standage-on-digital-strategy-and-the-limits-of-a-model-based-on-advertising/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_campaign=464c55f003-dailylabemail3&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d68264fd5e-464c55f003-395827456
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slyall
I subscribe to the digital edition of the Economist, mostly read it via the
mobile app but previous I read it on the website. Got really annoyed recently
since they raised their prices from around $100/year everywhere to being a
discount on the local cover price.

What was worse that since the cover price where I live (New Zealand) is much
high than the US I was paying 2.5 times the US price to subscribe to exactly
the same digital product, without even the excuse of delivery costs. So I
changed my address to the US.

More details here:

[http://blog.darkmere.gen.nz/2015/03/parallel-importing-vs-
th...](http://blog.darkmere.gen.nz/2015/03/parallel-importing-vs-the-
economist/)

~~~
CONTRARlAN
That's unfortunate.

The Economist's attempts at creating a sensible digital pricing model has just
been a range of awful options. From the Kindle, to the iPad, etc.

To say nothing of the fact that it's still cheaper to just find a decent
discount on the print edition and access the web version via that account,
than it is to save the materials and costs and go digital-only.

For all the normative claims they make about the need for better
environmentalism and economic policies, they sure seem to have difficulty
keeping their own house in order.

~~~
dingaling
> To say nothing of the fact that it's still cheaper to just find a decent
> discount on the print edition and access the web version via that account

I thought I had found a clever trick when I called them and asked them to stop
physical delivery ( as will they do if you're going on an extended trip, for
example ). The next week they also suspended my digital access...

I tried to explain to them that I didn't actually want the paper copy but it
didn't register with them. When it came to renew, I let the subscription lapse
because it felt so wasteful to be throwing the magazine straight from the
letterbox into the recycling bin. And I wasn't prepared to pay _more_ to go
without the paper!

~~~
CONTRARlAN
That'd be funny if it wasn't such an infuriating brand of stupidity on their
part.

With only one or two exceptions where I like to keep print copies around for
reference (or for travel use where I want something disposable–don't want to
leave an iPad on the beach or by the pool, for example), I'm the same as you:
it arrives, it goes straight to recycling, and I read it on my
iPad/Kindle/whatever. Last year I went on a tear, trying to stop all paper
delivery while retaining digital access.

Turns out very, very few publications were helpful. Everyone understood why I
wanted to do it, but they make their ad money off of paper copies shipped. So,
as with the Economist, you have a lot of rags who're talking the talk about
conservation, provided it doesn't cost them a penny.

Sure, they'll charge the customer more for less.

A couple were great about it: a quick email and it was moved over to
Newsstand, or their app, etc. But the rest, the bigger publications, almost
uniformly baulked, and could never make it happen.

I even considered trying to shame them by creating a site so everyone see
who's forward-thinking, and who's myopic. I may yet.

It kind of reaffirmed my view that the whole print industry is a broken model.
The end result is that I canceled a bunch of subscriptions, since the ones
that are supposed to have credibility about world affairs just lost it in my
eyes, I couldn't take them seriously (not that I ever should have).

It's also made me extra sensitive to the whored-out nature of publications
that take ad dollars.

As a result, I canceled a bunch of subscriptions, and focused my energy on the
ones that operate from subscription models (which are more expensive
individually, but I saved more than that getting there).

Turns out I'm getting better information, paying more attention to it, and
don't have a stack of magazines to worry about recycling every month.

------
mike_hearn
I'd really like to see a strong competitor to the Economist that reuses their
core model, but minus the absurdly over the top biases (sorry, opinions). Sort
of like a weekly more in depth version of BBC News, with saner digital pricing
and a more attractive website.

I used to be a regular read of TE, but stopped last year because of the
infuriating and endless propaganda re: Putin and Russia. The topics they write
about where the editors have very strong opinions on controversial topics have
always been by far the worst of their output.

As Standage points out, people read TE to feel at the end like they're
informed. To read TE and at the end feel like I've been treated like a child,
or shovelled a big steaming plate of angry warmongering ... well, it didn't
give me the TE experience I was paying for.

They should have learned from their experience of strongly supporting the
invasion of Iraq, but apparently no such luck. I hoped after Micklethwait left
they'd get a grip on this but it only got worse. They just don't seem capable
of talking about wars or foreign policy with anything like the same detachment
that they'd discuss e.g. the economy of Indonesia.

When I read on the BBC occasionally I read something eyebrow raising too, but
it's much, much rarer. They have a specific commitment to being unbiased, they
clearly separate fact from opinion instead of mixing them and overall they
don't seem to have many journalists or editors with extreme opinions. The
BBC's accuracy suffers badly however from being a real time news organisation.
Whenever I read something that's clearly (factual) nonsense on the Beeb it's
pretty obviously always because someone who wasn't a subject matter expert had
to throw together a story within an hour and struggled to do it well.

A combination of the two approaches would be something I'd happily pay for
again.

------
toyg
This is a pet concept of mine:

 _" the idea that news organizations can hand over their content so it can be
consumed on other platforms. The advantage, obviously, is reach, and maybe
that model works [...] I’m not sure it does — it just means you’re splitting
the advertising revenue with someone else._

Standage assumes this model can only work where "other platforms" are
sustained by advertising, but I think that's not the case. Any app with a
subscription model could do it, and at that point you as a news org are
actually tapping into _their_ revenues, regardless of where they come from. I
think the first reputable news org that will make its content developer-
friendly from a licensing perspective, will soon become a platform for all
sorts of revenue-generating experiments.

Software and hardware devices will keep expanding -- any news org in isolation
will constantly struggle to keep on. The Economist were among the first to
launch on iOS, Android and Kindle, but they've missed other boats likes
Snapchat Discover and this can only happen more and more frequently as the web
expands. The only way to exploit this is to leave the minutia of platform-
specific tweaks to other developers, and concentrate on producing great
content people want to pay for.

~~~
the-dude
The Economist is already on Blende (
[https://blendle.com](https://blendle.com) ), an article-publisher/aggregator
with micropayments from a wallet, no ads.

------
tomjen3
>the promise we make to the reader is that if you trust us to filter and
distill the news, and if you give us an hour and a half of your time — which
is roughly how long people spend reading The Economist each week — then we’ll
tell you what matters in the world and what’s going on.

Except then somebody else mentions something else that the Economist hasn't
talked about, or shares another article on Facebook and then you still have to
go read that, or be left out.

Plus just getting your news once a week: 9/11 happened on a Tuesday, you
wouldn't know until friday. The US president is elected wednesday night, you
don't know until friday which means the people you talk with are going to
assume you are a fool.

~~~
zmb_
I've actually been relying entirely on The Economist for my news for over a
year now. I used to spend a lot of time reading various news sources, but then
at some point started asking myself for each story I read: "Does having this
information make any difference to me? Do I need to know this? How much
information does this actually contain?" to which the answer was "No, no, and
very little".

The Economist's weekly schedule filters out a lot of the useless noise and it
gives time to write in-depth analysis rather than just bloating up non-news to
fill the 24h news cycle. As a result I have a much more in-depth understanding
of the current affairs than I had before. Of course my view also gets slanted
by The Economist's biases, but those biases are at least well justified and
supported most of the time.

Of course that does not mean I'm blind to the world around me. When a
president gets elected or 9/11 happens or something else that actually
matters, I will hear about it. It's just that a lot of the useless noise
masquerading as "news" gets filtered out.

~~~
tomjen3
The problem I have with filtering out news articles is that you are right
about the mean, median and 0.9 quantile of news.

I am not convinced that the value/impact of the 1% doesn't drastically
outvalue the rest. That said it seems they are offering a month free so I
guess I should go have a look.

------
inthewoods
It's telling to me that the former editor left to go to Bloomberg. Bloomberg
represents, in my opinion, a more sustainable approach to news - they want
their news org to break even or make money, but they don't expect it to be a
barn burner and recognize that having the news sources internally gives them
an advantage in their core business - their terminals. Dow Jones is taking a
similar approach. With this approach, they can afford to pay for excellent
journalists while not being a slave (completely) to the advertiser. It keeps
them out of gray-areas like native advertising as well (although Bloomberg may
have that as well).

~~~
lrei
Bloomberg does native advertisement but they label it as such.

The whole anti native advertisement movement seems so late it's silly
considering news publishers have been basically doing it for years without any
disclaimer. PG wrote about this some back in 2005:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
inthewoods
PG was writing about PR and the ability to place stories. This is different
from native advertising. PR can place stories because, as PG points out, the
news media is lazy and needs to feed the beast.

Native advertising is the reporting being actually bought and paying directly.
Native advertising is a natural outcome of a struggling business model - they
looked at what they were doing around PR and concluded that they could make
actual revenue on it.

------
michaelchisari
I wish we could do micro-subscriptions in a seamless way. I would gladly pay
$0.50 a month for a site to get the ad-free version of it.

Unfortunately, the legal and financial problems with those kinds of systems
have kept that from becoming a reality. It's not a particularly difficult
technical challenge.

~~~
bodyfour
Probably the bigger problem is that the more money you'd be willing to pay to
get rid of ads, the more your eyeballs are worth to a potential advertiser.
You're demonstrating that you have disposable income that you're willing to
part with to overcome an inconvenience.

~~~
lsc
>Probably the bigger problem is that the more money you'd be willing to pay to
get rid of ads, the more your eyeballs are worth to a potential advertiser.
You're demonstrating that you have disposable income that you're willing to
part with to overcome an inconvenience.

Hm. Conventional wisdom is that at least for websites making money off of
adsense, you don't want to advertise to Engineers, because like most
sophisticated customers they don't click on ads.

My take is that the class of consumers willing to pay money to block ads is
likely to be more sophisticated than average, and thus less likely to click on
ads.

~~~
tomjen3
>Hm. Conventional wisdom is that at least for websites making money off of
adsense, you don't want to advertise to Engineers, because like most
sophisticated customers they don't click on ads.

Engineers will click on ads for products that are interesting for them. The
fact that they won't click on most ads are an issue with the quality of that
ad or product.

Digital Ocean advertise in my Twitter feed, but I am already a customer of
theirs, otherwise I would be very tempted to click.

Most ads and most products suck so badly, but that isn't an issue with the
advertising model.

~~~
lsc
>Digital Ocean advertise in my Twitter feed, but I am already a customer of
theirs, otherwise I would be very tempted to click.

Huh. See, I have been using digital ocean as an example of how a good product
can overcome terrible advertising, and how what really matters in the VPS
market is how much ram/disk you are handing out per dollar you charge.

But then, I'm thinking of their animated ads (Which I see all the time, 'cause
apparently google thinks I really want to watch ads produced by my
competitors.)

~~~
tomjen3
I haven't seen their animated ads, because I adblock all sites by default, but
their ad was a textbook case of a simple ad with a straightforward pitch:
"VPS, starting from $5 a month" (if I recall correctly).

~~~
lsc
>I haven't seen their animated ads, because I adblock all sites by default,

wait, i thought this conversation started when I said something like
"Engineers don't click on ads" and then you said something like "But I click
on ads"

Now it comes out that you use adblock, which does seem to support my thesis in
the general case.

------
RyanMcGreal
"what we actually sell is what I like to call the feeling of being informed"

Ugh.

------
tomjen3
Advertising doesn't work because ads are so badly targeted. For kicks I turned
adblock of on Facebook and the offers are so generic and useless, "oh you are
a single guy you must be interested in this subpar dating service", you must
be interested in saving money on heating from this company 100 miles away, you
must be interested in a Bitcoin miner, are you really sure you don't want to
sign up for a subpar dating service, here is this game that you can play it
sucks like all the other free to play games.

The only company that can actually target ads is Twitter.

~~~
blumkvist
I find it pretty funny that you say that the only company that can target ads
loses money every quarter, while you bash on a company who makes gobs of money
through advertising.

Also, advertising certainly does work. Just not so well for organizations like
The Economist, because they are pressured by new media companies like
Facebook, which have the eyeballs and the necessary targeting options to
deliver the same audience cheaper, plus every other audience you can imagine.

~~~
tomjen3
Do you have evidence to suggest a causal relationship between Twitters
inability to make money and its better ad targeting?

That is to say, would Twitter be better at making money if it had ads that
were targeted worse?

