
Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers - miiiiiike
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/business/media/google-subscriptions-publishers.html
======
mindcrime
Subscriptions are just the wrong model for news publishers. There's NO way I
could possibly afford to subscribe to every news output I occasionally read
news from, unless the subscriptions were so close to free as to be useless as
a revenue source for the publisher. It's just not going to happen.

What we desperately need is a real, useful micro-payments model where you can
pay per-article. I'd be happy to pay you a few cents, or a dollar, or
whatever, for each of the 3 or 4 articles I read on your site per month. But
I'm not buying a subscription just to read 3 or 4 articles. The economics just
don't work.

~~~
jawns
> What we desperately need is a real, useful micro-payments model where you
> can pay per-article.

Former news editor here. I have spent a loooong time thinking about how to
help my beloved news industry find a payment model that works. I've become
convinced that a "cable subscription" model has more promise than a
micropayments model.

Here's what's wrong with a micropayments model. Each microtransaction is an
additional cost incurred by the user, and in many models that cost can vary
based on the website visited and other factors. And so every single time you
choose to engage in a microtransaction, you have to do some brief mental
gymnastics to determine whether the transaction is valuable enough to you to
proceed. It may be only a few cents, so for many people it's not a big
deliberation, but the decision is always there, every time.

The benefit of this approach is that there's very little economic waste
involved; you pay only for what you buy. But it encourages stingy, penny-
pinching behavior, and that's horrible for adoption. If you want broad, mass-
market support, it's a big problem.

Under the cable subscription model, you pay a fixed monthly fee for access to
a large number of "channels," and in return you can access those channels as
much as you want. Under the hood, that subscription fee can be doled out to
each channel based on how much it's accessed, or divided equally, or by some
other method in between. But to the end user, it's an all-you-can-eat buffet,
and they just don't need to think about it. Part of the fee they're paying is
for content itself and part of it is for the convenience of not having to
regulate usage.

The downside of this approach is that there's more economic waste involved;
some light users won't get their money's worth and will end up subsidizing
heavy users. But it discourages stingy behavior, and that's great for
adoption.

Later on down the line, once the cable-subscription model has been widely
adopted, the market will eventually demand more a la carte payment models (we
see this happening right now in the fairly mature cable television industry).

But for right now, widespread adoption should be the primary focus of any
online payment model. Ultimately, a good number of the major U.S. news
publishers would need to get on board, and to date they have been relatively
unwilling to cooperate (which may be due to regulatory hurdles). But I'm
pretty sure that's what needs to happen. Less sure whether it will be enough
to save the industry.

~~~
amelius
That's the model used by Flattr [1]. They started years ago. Not sure why
adoption is taking so long.

> Flattr is a browser add-on that intelligently measures your interaction with
> content on the websites you visit, and then automatically distributes the
> right amount of funds to those sites you engage with the most.

[1] [https://flattr.com/](https://flattr.com/)

~~~
djhworld
I have some tabs in my browser open that remain there for months (poor tab
hygiene), how does it account for that?

------
erentz
I have no problem with this. But in return I should be able to opt out of
results that I cannot view. A result for a news article that changes when I
click on it to a "Please subscribe..." plea is _not_ the result that was
returned that I clicked on.

Unfortunately, like the AMP fiasco, I doubt this is what will happen as Google
doesn't exist to serve it's users.

~~~
Pxtl
> I doubt this is what will happen as Google doesn't exist to serve it's
> users.

There intent is to serve users with quality, truthful information. If all the
quality information goes out of business and gets replaced with "Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:
Obama failed New Orleans during Katrina!!" then Google doesn't have any more
quality information anymore.

Google and Facebook are becoming acutely aware of how easily dishonest
propaganda can propagate through their systems and are trying to find a
solution for that. One step is making sure that people who have to make a
living finding the truth for us all have the means to get paid.

~~~
ehsankia
Also, it's a very small percent of users who dislike it (or even know AMP is a
thing), and majority of them are developers who don't want their site cached.
To claim that they don't serve their users is ridiculous.

------
strictnein
Not the best headline. Here's the gist of it:

> "Google’s plans include doing away with the “first click free” policy, which
> requires subscription-based news outlets to offer three free articles a day
> through its search and news features, allowing users to skirt pay walls. A
> new program, which Google plans to start this week and is calling “flexible
> sampling,” will allow those publishers to determine how many free clicks to
> give Google’s users."

So sites can still give access to Google visitors (which I bet many will), but
they just have more say over the specifics.

------
TheAceOfHearts
I happily pay for lots of services, but I just don't think many of these
publishers are worth paying for.

I'm pretty tired of shitty clickbait headlines, and stories which cherry-pick
a handful of twitter posts to make it seem like there's outrage over
something.

Even worse, it seems like most publishers are dead set of trying to feed you
their agenda. Why would I pay for misleading or intellectually dishonest
articles?

~~~
baldfat
These news paid sources are usually only valuable for local content. My local
news paper' only redeeming value is it is local but it isn't $4 a week
valuable.

~~~
TheCowboy
I agree that $4*52 is expensive, but it could cost less if more people were
subscribing. Unfortunately, even at a more reasonable price per month or week,
I think papers wouldn't see a surge in subscribers in the current environment.

Short-term, I think people undervalue the value of local news. There are often
a lot of info holes when it comes to local government and politics. I wonder
if this has adverse affects that lead to less involvement in local politics
except when a NIMBY issue appears, which doesn't seem like good governance.

Local news coverage, with the exception of major cities, tends to be sparse
and often non-existent. Even for some major areas there can be a lot of holes
in coverage.

This problem makes itself apparent to me when come election day I try to look
up all of the candidates, and find no info for many of them that isn't from
their own website (if it even exists).

~~~
baldfat
It is going to bot created I am afraid to say. My city has good local
coverage, a wee bit biased but it is local people in a School Board meetings
and City Meetings at least.

Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/08/google-is-funding-the-
crea...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/08/google-is-funding-the-creation-of-
software-that-writes-local-news-stories/)

------
dheera
Just change your web browser's User-Agent to the Google crawler?

~~~
Operyl
That said, some publishers are smart and also check to see if your IP is in a
Google range.

EDIT: That is, you can check the PTR record of an IP:
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en)

~~~
marindez
You can set the PTR record of an IP to a domain you don't control. Most ISPs
won't let you do that, though. Also, whatever host you set as the PTR record
won't resolve back to your IP.

~~~
lucb1e
XS4ALL in the Netherlands lets you. I never knew I should be using it for that
-- I just set it to match my email domain to end up in less spamboxes.

------
15charlimit
Cue massive drops in traffic (again) and news orgs whining about it (again)
and blaming the next boogeyman, whatever that is. Probably something something
"piracy" etc.

Paying/subscribing for general-purpose news is old news. It had its time, and
that time is over. Much like music industry CD sales with the real rise of
p2p, news orgs will have to figure out what their "ipod" equivalent is going
to be.

------
downrightmike
We should just go back to having newsies selling newspapers on the street
corner for a nickle. Study has found that there is a direct correlation to
musicals about newsies when they are a significant portion of the news
ecosystem.

------
bluetwo
Like others I think a well done micro-pavement or bundle of payments would be
nice.

One thing I think that is missing from the discussion is metrics. If you do a
nice job building the site, and let users give an indication whether they want
to see more or less coverage on the topic, you can offer this metrics data
back to the news outlets, which can give them far better direction than simply
looking at website clicks (which encourages click-bait). This, along with a
slice of micro-payments would be valuable to them.

------
wnevets
As a side note google gave me a free digital subscription to the nytimes for
posting reviews on google maps. Is google or nytimes making money off of this?

------
j-c-hewitt
Maybe non-subscribers should get a lite reader's digest type abstract of the
article instead of the truncated/cloaked stuff that currently gets served on
sites like WSJ. Most articles can probably be described in 50-100 words or
less. The automatic truncation is often less descriptive than a good meta
description would be.

------
baldfat
Block the paid wall sources so you are not annoyed anymore.

I have CNET blocked due to their CBS and CES Fiasco and never unblocked them.

[https://news.google.com/news/u/0/settings/sources?hl=en](https://news.google.com/news/u/0/settings/sources?hl=en)

------
chatmasta
Called it [0]

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15383058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15383058)

------
throwaway2016a
The O'Reilly Safari system is a great alternative to paywalls. You pay for
Safari and it pays out royalties to the authors proportional to how many users
read your book that month.

So an author of a book that had 200 readers would get roughly double the pay
of one that has 100 readers.

I would gladly pay for a kind of all access pass that divided up my
subscription money to the news sites I visited the most.

Of course, if someone goes to 200 different sites equally an individual
publisher would get less from that customer but I think that's fair.

~~~
pmyteh
There's an older version of this principle used to compensate authors for
library borrowing in the UK and other countries called Public Lending Right.

The government puts some tax money into a pot, and it's paid out to authors in
proportion to the number of loans of their books. There's also a cap to stop
the bulk of the money going to a handful of bestselling authors.

In some ways, this can be seen as croudsourcing decisions on government
subsidy, which is an interesting model.

------
ThomPete
Publisher have one and mostly one way to be profitable. Shrink the overhead
with 90%. If they cant do that most of them are simply not going to survive.

Subscription or no subscription.

------
davidgerard
archive.is still captures text from most of these.

------
graphememes
Unfortunately there is no need to pay for news articles, there is a need to
pay for RESEARCH and MEDICAL papers.

News? No.

------
grandalf
Paywalls are a dying gasp being uttered by the publishing industry.

Here's why they don't work:

\- If I respect a publication and feel that the content has value for me, I'll
happily subscribe.

\- If I click on a clickbait headline only to arrive at a paywall, it's like a
small and unpleasant electric shock, punishing me for clicking the link.

\- Paywall creators think that the combination of clickbait and paywalls is
magical and gets people to subscribe, but it does not, it only creates
negative emotion and irritation.

\- There is no such thing as a free lunch. If publishers want subscribers they
need to consistently produce high quality content day after day, week after
week. They also need to forego the sugar high of clickbait.

\- That means there can't be some sort of social virality genius telling the
editor how to title articles and showing charts of all the clicks from Reddit,
etc. Doing this may generate some incremental subscribers, but it does so at
the cost of the publication's brand image.

\- The approach Salon used of showing the first third or half of the article
is better than a "You obviously love great journalism" banner. Let the content
stand on its own and earn the subscription.

\- I have not been able to bring myself to subscribe to the NYT or WaPo for
one simple reason -- around half of the articles they publish are very low
quality and many have clickbait headlines. The article headlines have the feel
of being ads themselves that falsely represent the content of the article. In
many cases the articles are pretty solid reporting, but the headlines oversell
them as being the article that will bring down the Trump presidency.

If I were a journalist I'd be pretty outraged if I took the time to write a
thoughtful article and then some virality genius retitled it something silly
and tribe-oriented to get the shallowest of readers to thoughtlessly click it.

~~~
dheera
Agree. Also, the websites that try to get you to unblock ad blockers are
equally irritating. Usually I just leave, and find another source of the same
news. In many cases their ads are super annoying and CPU-intensive, which is
the main reason I block them; it's not that I hate advertising itself. If they
were just a simple <img> tag and a hyperlink without a huge pile of JavaScript
bloat I would probably not bother blocking them.

~~~
grandalf
Indeed. It's true, in a world where a major newspaper will decide to write a
multi-page story about one of Trump's silly tweets and run it on the front
page, it's not all that hard for a large number of news orgs to write a
similarly informative story, and many make it available for free.

I agree about ads, but my least favorite are the ones that begin playing video
in a tiny window that devours laptop battery life... It's strange to imagine
the marketers who are designing these pages. They must imagine that all of us
read only when watching TV is not an option, so they try to make the website
as much like TV as possible, complete with a tiny screen that you can click on
to simply shift into couch potato mode.

------
AmIFirstToThink
GoFundMe?

Patreon?

Those who could find people to buy what they are producing, are already doing
it on social funding platforms.

The models that are struggling are those who are not able to sell what they
have to sell... a product that not only sold ad-space but infoticles, just
like infomartials on TV or product placement in movies, there was paid bias in
articles. In the days of Internet, no body wants to watch ads, not in the
sidebar clearly labeled as an ad, or in the center of the page in terms of a
info(ar)ticle.

I would rather pay to hear the bias of the person speaking, than letting a
corporation tell that person what he or she can or can't write. There is
banding together of like minded people to pool resources together to keep
making progress on a cause, much better model than a corporation. Much
efficient use of funds, time, energy. The only one to loose is the investor or
influence seeker, who would have to do much more digging than just walking
into an top floor office with a check in hands.

------
bayofpigs
To block news sources in Google News go to Settings > Sources and add the
domain to the Block section.

Used to have to add the source, then slide the frequency slider down to 0.
Looks like Google automatically moved them to blocked.

Better yet, just have a setting to automatically block all sites using
paywalls. They have a right to deploy paywalls, we have a right to request
never to see them in our feed.

