
Media Websites Battle Faltering Ad Revenue and Traffic - tysone
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/business/media-websites-battle-falteringad-revenue-and-traffic.html
======
matt4077
What a sad state of affairs... I used to discount the pessimists, but it
appears that large segments of the population are indeed completely lost for
any media that doesn't involve moving images.

From what I read (even on HN) these people aren't just happy they can
currently get most content for free – they actively loathe the so-called
'traditional media', to the point where they'd welcome the bankruptcy of the
NYT or WSJ. It's going to be a dark future if we're to rely on tumblr to keep
us informed. Donald Trump may one day represent the index case for the plague
that killed the US's civil society.

I'm still hoping for media to find sustainability online. I don't quite get
why there's no Spotify for publishers yet. I feel like I'm grossly underpaying
for my media consumption – yet I'm not going to pay >250$-800$/yr to any
single publication for the 4 or 5 articles I read per month. There must be
millions of people who'd gladly pay 500$/yr for universal access.

~~~
pmontra
I won't pay anything in advance. I'd pay 1 cent per article but I want a
preview first.

If 1 cent looks too low, divide the price of a newspaper by the number of
articles it contains.

And I want the privilege to read with an adblocker, to be fairly sure not to
be tracked and spied.

And if pay per read will ever happen I'm quite sure we'll read less than now
and we'll privilege free (as beer) information. After all I used to read only
one newspaper and watch one or two tv news programs. Having to pay will make
many people go back to that. That was sad too and people were easy to exploit
by scarcity of information.

~~~
matt4077
That's the idea of a subscription model: you'd pay about the same as now (or,
let's say, 10 years ago). But you get to read whatever you want because it
doesn't cost anything to give you the extra content, knowing that you wouldn't
pay for it anyway. Everybody wins: readers get more diversity, publishers
stand to actually increase revenue because it's a much better offer than in
the past and could attract more readers and the society profits when people
are better informed.

It won't be at <price of newspaper>/<articles per issue> because nobody reads
every single article. There's also the slight complication that newspapers
used to get about half their revenue from ads and classifieds and that's
pretty much gone. We should find out in the next decade if there's an econmic
model for journalism. If it turns out that there isn't, and if some sort of
disruption hits TV as well... It's at least going to be interesting.

------
pj_costello
The writing is on the wall, websites are in decline, NYT lost 50% of home page
traffic in just 2 years: [http://blog.naytev.com/publishers-must-
adapt/](http://blog.naytev.com/publishers-must-adapt/)

------
HoppedUpMenace
Any site online providing news will be behind a Paywall at some point in the
future, its inevitable.

