
Scroll: Ad-free subscription for news sites - chkuendig
https://scroll.com/sites
======
winkelwagen
It’s strange. Part of me thinks this is a great idea, but some of the websites
are also the worst offenders of what the site is trying to combat. Looking at
Gizmodo and the verge, the crazy amount of 3rd party cookies, unable to really
opt out at all. While writing pieces about how horrible google and Facebook
are for all the privacy evasive stuff they are doing. I’d rather support
content that aim for quality and differ it kind of business model then
rewarding some of these sites for being so horrible that this service is even
needed. Like [https://decorrespondent.nl/](https://decorrespondent.nl/) or
specific patreons

~~~
arctictony
CEO of Scroll here. Glad you're a fan of The Correspondent, we love them too.
Also hear you on the privacy concerns. The publisher contracts with Scroll
require that they remove third-party trackers 'that share information with
parties other than Publisher or have a commercial purpose other than improving
user experience.'

It's always going to be a negotiation when you're trying to work with sites
rather than unilaterally act against them, but we're genuinely trying to get
them to a place where they're living up to the privacy promise that a consumer
would want.

~~~
akkartik
Does Scroll work if I block third-party cookies?

 _Update 10 minutes later:_ It isn't working for me on theatlantic.com; I got
the "free articles" drawers and then got blocked after they counted down to 0.
So perhaps the answer to my question is "no".

I can whitelist third-party cookies on specific sites, but I don't think I can
whitelist a single cookie across all sites. This seems unfortunate.

 _Update 30 minutes later:_ I tried disabling both cookie- and tracker-
blocking in Firefox and still saw no sign of it working on theatlantic.com

~~~
arctictony
If you whitelist [*.]scroll.com in Chrome for example, Scroll should work.
Important to note it doesn't get you past paywalls. The economics would make
the price insanely high for that.

~~~
andai
Ahh, this is an important note. My first thought seeing this post was,
"finally, a Spotify for the news!"

~~~
arctictony
Would love to do it, but for a publisher the economics get super hard at this
time. The number of new consumers has to be large enough to offset the drop in
ARPU that a bundle would represent and publishers are super wary that there
are enough people out there who want to get past paywalls to make that happen.
This is the reason why even Apple News+ had such trouble convincing anyone to
join.

I do think that over time more opportunities for, at first, skinny bundles
will emerge but the world isn't there yet at the scale you'd want.

~~~
jacques_chester
In theory we might be competitors, but I'd rather the world sucked less than
feel smug.

So here's my argument: You don't charge enough money. It's the same mistake
literally everyone ahead of you has already made before failing. Charge more
money. Charge what seems like an absurd amount of money. Because you need a
large pool to get people through the door. It's easier to cut prices than to
raise them. Charge more damn money.

More selfishly: I can help you with the paywalls thing without cookies.
jacques@robojar.com.

------
reaperducer
I used to use a similar service called Blendle. It, too, promised ad-free
news. But even though I have lots of credit in my account, I stopped using it
for three reasons:

1\. It had a very limited number of publications available.

2\. You couldn't just read a whole publication. You could only read a selected
few articles from each publication. And the curation of those showed clear
political bias on the part of the curators.

3\. Blendle sends out a weekly newsletter with a list of the stories it thinks
are the best. It also presented a clearly one-sided view of the world and the
stories available from the Blendle publications, accompanied by a TON of
editorializing on the part of the newsletter authors.

Instead, I subscribe to several newspapers both in electronic and dead tree
editions. I don't mind paying for news. But I want to make up my own mind
about the news, and not be force-fed one ideology by a gatekeeper.

Back on topic: I hope that Scroll does better than Blendle. Looking at its
list of publications, I only see two that I would read, and only one
regularly. If Scroll expands to more interesting content, I'll get on board.

~~~
notatoad
I also was excited by the promise of Blendle and stopped using it, but for
different reasons to you: the main way i consume news is by finding links to
articles on twitter and reddit. with blendle, those links didn't take me to
the "blendle version" of the article, but to the paywalled version, and there
was no easy way to jump from the paywalled version to the blendle version. To
see an article on blendle, i'd have to go out of my way to find it on blendle,
and their browsing experience wasn't especially great.

Scroll looks really nice because you don't have to access the content
_through_ scroll. You're still on the original source, and you get the
benefits of your Scroll subscription no matter how you found the article.

The downside here is that because Scroll isn't re-hosting the content, you're
stuck reading it on the generally awful websites of the original publishers,
which are only made marginally better by the lack of ads and trackers.

~~~
ripdog
I had the same issue. I emailed blendle, suggesting they write a browser
extension which could manually/automatically redirect supported publications
to the blendle equivalent. Obviously, they didn't think that was necessary.

Can't say I think much of their decision-making skills.

------
MikeGale
A fascinating area. I've seen several people getting into it in one way or
another:

Blendle

The system in the Brave browser

Scroll

...

What I really want is:

1\. A friction free way to pay what I want AFTER I've read an article (I
assume a base level fee to read it in the first place) so that I can reward an
excellent article. I want to know that that money goes to those who made that
article not all the other people at the "publication".

2\. Coverage of many good articles and publications, so that I can get most
anything I want.

3\. Excellent search that suits me. (Would be great bonus to have a mechanism
to automatically hook me up to a rewardable version.)

4\. No attempted surveillance at all. (I block much of it but hate that people
try this nonsense, and I note that they do, if they're really objectionable I
block them permanently at the DNS. Newspapers and magazines tend to be the
worst offenders of all.)

~~~
grenoire
Friction-less payments is unfortunately an issue that seems unsolvable on the
'banks' end. There's no easy way for you to just one-click take care of a
payment, and for good reason. I do wish it wasn't as friction-full as it is
right now, and there are initiatives by alternative banks to make that happen
(direct API connectivity for small payments etc., although seems like the new
EU standards will turn that into a pipe dream); no standards to my knowledge,
however.

~~~
0-_-0
> Friction-less payments is unfortunately an issue that seems unsolvable on
> the 'banks' end.

This is actually already solved in Brave, you can tip a website or even a
youtube channel with a click (technically it's 3 clicks: click BAT triangle,
click "send tip", choose amount).

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gruez
It seems that the OP linked to the /sites page, rather than the landing/home
page. Can this be corrected? The linked page is pretty bare and has almost
zero information.

~~~
lolc
The list of sites was actually most relevant to me because I rarely read those
publications.

------
WritelyDesigned
I think it's a compelling and feasible solution to the news site monetization
problem. It just seems difficult to imagine users flocking to something like
this away from ad blockers—which improve daily (and are mostly free).

~~~
crispinb
There's been a bunch of similar initiatives, albeit more typically aggregating
via a single app (Inkl, Pressreader etc). I've tried some in the past because
I'd like to pay for news, but consider site subscriptions as deeply hostile to
the www per se. But they all end up with the same problem - great early hope
of accumulating more sources over time, which then doesn't happen.

Standardised micropayments are the obvious answer, but it seems to be a ship
that's sailed.

~~~
reaperducer
If you're in the Apple ecosystem, Apple News Plus isn't too bad. If you read a
lot, it's pennies or less per article.

Apple's added a good number of publications since it launched, and I get more
value out of it than I used to. But it's still trying to find its sea legs.

~~~
crispinb
I've had no Apple devices for a couple of years, but in Australia at least its
newspaper coverage is pretty much limited to News Corp. That'd be a nonstarter
for me. Though that's based on what I read during the Aus launch. It may have
expanded since.

------
Deimorz
I was really excited about Scroll when I first heard about it, but after I
looked into it more I lost almost all interest. I was looking at it almost a
month ago, so it may have changed a bit since then, but at the time, the main
things were that:

1\. Even though almost all of the material about Scroll says "300+ sites
supported", it's actually about 30 sites, mostly from the same few networks,
and 304 "SBNation blogs". This was the list of domains initially supported:
[https://gist.github.com/archon810/b4ec827d5fbe9e22a43ad39ca2...](https://gist.github.com/archon810/b4ec827d5fbe9e22a43ad39ca2f7c0c8)
(and I broke down that list by owner here, if anyone's interested in that:
[https://tild.es/lc6#comment-4ij7](https://tild.es/lc6#comment-4ij7))

2\. Scroll _does not_ get you past paywalls:
[https://intercom.help/scroll/en/articles/3344875-does-
scroll...](https://intercom.help/scroll/en/articles/3344875-does-scroll-get-
me-behind-paywalls)

So if it's a site that's supported by Scroll that also has a paywall (like The
Atlantic), you're expected to _both_ subscribe to the site and Scroll to get a
"clean" experience. It's also notable that even though the New York Times is
one of the main investors in Scroll, they apparently don't currently intend to
support it themselves (mentioned here: [https://www.poynter.org/business-
work/2020/revolutionary-a-h...](https://www.poynter.org/business-
work/2020/revolutionary-a-hit-a-miss-in-any-case-tony-hailes-scroll-has-
launched-at-last/)).

~~~
asdff
Why pay for the atlantic and pay for scroll when you can just pay for
atlantic, or not, and read their RSS feed however you like w/o ads?

I don't know who the target audience of this product could be. There's
probably 40 people on earth who fall in the venn diagram of not knowing about
ad blockers, not knowing about RSS feeds, and willing to seek out a service
like scroll for their 30-odd supported websites.

------
TrinaryWorksToo
The problem with Scroll is we trade one evil for another: instead of ads and
trackers, we get legally dubious "AS IS" clauses in Terms of Service, and
censorship-laden arbitration clauses that cannot be subject to oversight.

~~~
ericd
Are there any concretely troubling parts to the terms that you saw?

~~~
arghwhat
Well, primarily:

> Scroll may, from time to time, change these Terms of Service, including the
> Privacy Policy. Such revisions shall be effective immediately and we will
> notify you if these changes are significant.

There is also the usual arbitration agreement.

~~~
ThePhysicist
That seems indeed non-compliant with many legislations. I think in the EU this
would not be legal as you have to inform your customers about any changes in
the terms and if you change them they have the right to end their contract
with you.

This clause would otherwise allow them to raise prices tenfold without the
consent of their customers.

Maybe they should revise this...

~~~
jacques_chester
They only accept US customers:
[https://intercom.help/scroll/en/articles/3344891-what-if-
i-l...](https://intercom.help/scroll/en/articles/3344891-what-if-i-live-
outside-the-united-states)

------
jarrell_mark
I use scroll as a way to read USA Today ad-free. Their content is pretty good.
I also read Vox, The Atlantic, and Verge sometimes. It's nice to not have ads
on these sites.

~~~
asdff
All of these sites also offer RSS feeds, by the way.

~~~
jarrell_mark
Good point I should look into that. If RSS has pictures and categories, might
be the way to go.

~~~
asdff
Depends on the webmaster on each site. Some of them have embedded images. Some
papers offer specific feeds for certain sections, others will only offer the
firehose feed of everything. Many RSS readers offer some way to categorize
incoming articles from feeds, akin to rules for email.

------
manigandham
We tried this before and failed. It was a browser-extension called Sterling
that would block ads on every site with a monthly subscription. Payment to
sites would be based on the ratio of time spent across domains.

The problem isn't technical, it's that people just don't want to pay for
general content. They might accept subs for netflix or spotify or specific
newspapers but paying for "the internet" is still an unknown and unaccepted
model. Until that changes, no amount of new apps are going to fix this.

~~~
jacques_chester
And Readability and Blendle and Contenture and several Google things and I've
lost count.

Disclosure: I had the same basic idea and I have a patent on a small problem
related to it (reliably tracking visits, allowing paywall passage without
revealing user identity, without box-stuffing by either readers or
publishers).

------
Wowfunhappy
I really wish they'd get rid of that persistent Scroll banner on every page
where the service is active. I'm not going to pay for a service to get rid of
ads just to see a different ad.

And no, the ability to share to social media isn't a "useful" service.

I realize they need a way to remind users that Scroll is active, but there
needs to be a much less intrusive way to do it, or else they're defeating the
purpose of the product.

~~~
arctictony
CEO of Scroll here. yep, it's super annoying and we're changing it to be way
less so. Should be rolling out early this coming week, so let me know what you
think.

I'm sure there's going to be a lot of stuff to change as we learn, so please
keep the feedback coming.

------
hnarn
There's an unfortunate lack of what I consider "real" news (I realize the
definition is subjective), such as NYT, WP, Guardian, BBC, Al Jazeera, RT etc.
I'd never pay for a subscription of "news" that doesn't cover my basic need of
actual news.

And just to cover my bases here, by "real" news I don't mean that they are
"unbiased". I just mean sources that will give me actual, interesting reports
about things happening in the world. As long as there is a baseline, I'm happy
to filter what I believe on my own as long as the sender is clear.

I'm also skeptical as to why a paid service selling news would include things
like The Onion. I appreciate them as much as anyone but I don't want it in my
"news" feed.

------
asdff
Off the shelf solution is just pulling you favorite news website's RSS feed
and running it through a full text filtering service, if the publication don't
already give you the full text feed from the get go.

------
mike50
50% of the websites listed are click-bait garbage, content free, or rewritten
wire stories. Hope they go bankrupt and learn that the internet is not a copy
paste and charge money machine.

~~~
dannyw
Perhaps the declining cost of ad revenue has resulted in these sites shrinking
their content budget?

------
dehrmann
I was thinking about doing something like this a year or two ago, but the
cross-domain cookie landscape is making the idea less workable.

Also how much people hate paying for things. I recently went on a short rant
about how I've never seen anyone with a paid version of Sublime Text. A lot of
its users are professional software engineers should either be able to afford
it or work for a company that can, and engineers that should have empathy for
someone trying to make money off software

~~~
YarickR2
Well, I'm the one with paid version of Sublime Text. And a subscription to
Bloomberg . I'm not going to disprove your point, but not all of us are overly
greedy )

------
paul7986
I wish there was a Google News replacement that only lists news sites that are
focused on privacy and do not have those stupid turn off your AdBlocker
messages.

There is a ton of news sites out there that need an audience. They can make
their money through sponsorships and non-invasive ads. You don't have to make
millions off of your news site .. maybe off a few you can.

------
bratao
Every time people say that if they had how to pay for the site they would use
it. Now is the time to show the truth

~~~
ericd
I've been wanting someone to do this idea (spotify for news) for years. But
they really need to get one of the heavy hitters with paywalls (NY Times, The
Economist, Financial Times, WaPo, or WSJ).

But maybe it's worth paying just to show publishers that it's viable. It's a
rough chicken/egg problem.

~~~
arctictony
CEO of Scroll here. It's hard with the big guys when you get started, they
tend to move slow. However, the NYT and WSJ are both investors in the company
so we're hopeful we can bring them in over the next year.

~~~
ericd
Great! I wish you all the luck in the world, I’ve been wishing for many years
that someone with connections in the news world would make this happen.

I’m hopeful that fixing the business model of news on the web will cause them
to step back a bit from polarizing clickbait and back towards factual
reporting, which I think should help reduce the polarization in the political
sphere.

------
eh78ssxv2f
How would this work with third party cookie blocking that Chrome is planning
to start ([https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-
web-...](https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-path-
towards.html))?

~~~
freeAgent
I had to whitelist Scroll in my DNS-level ad and tracker blocking (nextdns),
but that works fine. I assume you can whitelist in Chrome or whatever else as
well.

------
wiradikusuma
Can you make a browser plugin for HN (and preferably other popular news
aggregator) to show icons which sites are Scroll partners?

------
layoutIfNeeded
They say it’s ad-free. Is it tracking-free too?

~~~
Tepix
That's what they claim: "It would be private, no shadowy trackers selling your
data."

On the other hand they bill you based on the percentage of the time you spend
on each individual partner site. That seems somewhat contradictory.

~~~
Brakenshire
You could have an open source addon or reader app which provided only that
highly aggregated data.

~~~
true_religion
When it comes to money between untrusting parties no one is going to open
source it to make it easier for the other side to commit fraud.

------
hhjj
Advertising is bad and it's good to get rid of it but you also need to get rid
of tracking.

------
dmje
Struggling to see how this is different from running an ad-blocker or PiHole?

------
dylz
How can I pay with BTC or anything else?

------
surround
I don’t want to pay for sites to be ad & tracker free, I want to rewards sites
that don’t have ads & trackers in the first place.

------
Crazyontap
So this is like Spotify for websites?

~~~
jackdh
spotify without the free tier.

~~~
r-w
The free tier is what we already have.

~~~
nkozyra
Not at all. We hit paywalls, are bombarded with low quality or malicious ads
(without adblock) even if we're paying ... it's a mess. Spotify and free
streaming platforms keep advertising largely unobtrusive.

~~~
_-___________-_
The advertising Spotify slots into your playlists is hardly unobtrusive...

~~~
nkozyra
Where else would they slot ads? Advertising is obtrusive by default so we have
to compare relative to the egregious examples.

------
tonymet
“news” sites

------
sys_64738
Apple News?

~~~
saagarjha
Nobody subscribes to Apple News+.

~~~
CharlesW
Apple News+ reportedly had 200,000 subscribers within 48 hours[1]. May we all
have "nobody" customers.

[1] [https://www.macrumors.com/2019/11/14/apple-news-plus-
subscri...](https://www.macrumors.com/2019/11/14/apple-news-plus-subscriber-
issues/)

~~~
saagarjha
How many actually paid once their free trial expired?

------
LeoNatan25
The Onion LOL

