
Condé Nast to Put All Titles Behind Paywalls by Year End - smacktoward
https://www.wsj.com/articles/conde-nast-to-put-all-titles-behind-paywalls-by-year-end-11548244800
======
piokoch
"Condé Nast is considering charging advertisers a premium for access to those
subscribers, said Chris Mitchell, chief business officer for Condé Nast’s
culture division, which includes the New Yorker, Wired and Vanity Fair."

This one is interesting. So they will charge fees from subscribers and they
will sell their data to advertisers anyway. For me one of the advantages of
paying for something in the Internet is that my privacy is not violated and I
will not have to see ads.

~~~
nopriorarrests
>So they will charge fees from subscribers and they will sell their data to
advertisers anyway.

Allowing advertisers to target paid subscribers for some very high CPMs is not
"selling their data to advertisers".

In fact, it's not much different from ads in a printed version Vanity Fair or
WSJ. You are being charged for a printed version of magazine and advertiser
pays for having an ad in a said version.

~~~
blakesterz
> You are being charged for a printed version of magazine and advertiser pays
> for having an ad in a said version.

I do get that, but this is not a printed magazine. This is the web, and I
think I generally agree, especially with content like this, if I'm going to
pay for something, I don't want ads there.

Generally the web is free because of ads, and if I pay for something then I'm
paying because there's not going to be ads, and especially not going to be
trackers like most media sites pile on.

~~~
nopriorarrests
My main point was against the "sell their data to advertisers ".

I know a bit or two about big advertisers, and I can absolutely guarantee that
they have no clue what to do with said data anyway.

What their marketing departments ultimately want is "pls show our ads to
affluent people who will buy our product, thank you, and we will go out and
have a cocktail or two in a trendy bar near our HQ". You can give them huge
dataset about people and they will have problems opening it, because
powerpoint would not recognize the file extension.

~~~
elliekelly
> I know a bit or two about big advertisers, and I can absolutely guarantee
> that they have no clue what to do with said data anyway.

I don't know what to do with someone else's social security number, are you
comfortable giving me yours?

~~~
nopriorarrests
not being a US citizen, I don't have one, so I can't give you one, I just lack
it.

But come on, do you really tell me that _advertisers_ have your SSN?
Seriously, all that advertisers can know about you is that some random cookie
bought some stuff (may be periodically). Reinstall your PC or just clear
cookies, boom, and their data is worthless. This will not work with
amazon.com, since you have to log in to buy something, but with advertisers on
any Cande Nast property it will.

------
ulfw
Which will make me read no more Conde Nast articles. Cool.

~~~
klingebeil
Those pesky journalists, wanting to get payed!

Not something you wrote, but HNs relationship to journalism is weird. On the
one hand there‘s an infinite stream of complains about clickbait and how
advertising ruined the media. On the other no one is willing to pay for a more
sustainable model.

~~~
Kalium
I, personally, can and do pay for a reliable and sustainable model. At least
one of those is for a Condé Nast property. On days like this I find myself
wondering why.

For the rest, I think it's something like the Netflix problem. Netflix is
great if that's all you ever want to use. However, if what you want is
scattered across Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, and other video services?
Then you might be less sanguine about the situation. The costs add up, at $15
per month per service.

Journalism, for all it's _absolutely critical_ importance to freedom,
democracy, and our shared hobby, is far more dispersed than that. How many
different subscriptions would I need to have to read every article that graces
the HN front page every day? At least a dozen, but perhaps more. That's going
to add up too. WSJ wants $40/mo, Atlantic $80/yr, Economist is $180/yr, and
that's just three.

How much do you think each HN reader should be paying monthly for jornalism?

~~~
basch
Both journalism and video could be fixed with the same solution.

1) a standard oauth2 login system. One identity I can use to sign into all my
streaming platforms.

1b) mint/manilla like management tools from the account provider for keeping
track of subscriptions, bills, and what you are actually paying for.

2.5) something that can deduplicate when you are paying for the same content
twice. It's very easy to end up paying 2 or 3 times for access to the same
streams, whether they be viacom or fox or nbc. Once I pay for the rights to a
library, I should be exempt from paying a second service again. Its very hard
to see overlap, when youve signed up for access to the same libraries through
multiple providers.

3) a rss/pubsub like standard for feeding video to a video player. Sure if I
want to navigate to the Netflix app to see the netflix experience for browsing
video, I can, but I should also be able to click videos and see all the videos
I pay for across all services, in any library browser I choose.

Roku and Apple TV, and to some extent Amazon, have all somewhat recreated this
experience for the user through sheer force, but it requires streaming
platforms to be compatible with Roku and Apple and Amazons way of doing
things. It's not an industry standard for 1) tracking licensing access 2)
providing authenticated access to raw video. Anyone should be able to write a
video player interface that can automatically interface with compatible video
providers. Just like web browsers and websites.

And to the same extent, until paying, tracking, and access to journalism
follows some kind of open standard, its just too hard to pay for access to
tons of articles from a ton of providers. Ill gladly pay a la cart or through
usage (not when I open a tab, but after i finish at least half an article?)
And I know these kind of startups exist, but they are still proprietary, they
arent a technology built right into the browser and and into each news
platform. I should be able to prove I pay for a news site, and get the
content, without the site caring what browser/librarymanager I am using.

In essence, the frontend newsreader/videoplayer should be completely decoupled
from the backend content provider infrastructure, and both ends should be
infinitely interchangable and compatible.

~~~
neuralRiot
It should be something easy to implement, perhaps a "token" system where you
start to read and a mesaage tells you "this article costs x "readerCoins"
continue?".

~~~
Kalium
As soon as you throw in a custom currency, the whole thing falls apart. From
the user's perspective, part of the value-add is the _seamlessness_ of the
proposal. Micropayments are anything but seamless.

------
konschubert
I think this is a good move, they need to make money to exist after all.

I just hope they price their subscription reasonably.

~~~
_the_inflator
Agree.

And if we get better content instead of marketed content which is simply ads
surrounded by cheap content, I think this is a cool move.

------
wincy
Does this include Arstechnica?

~~~
xythum
According to their subscriber forums, their current subscription model counts
as a 'paywall' as far as Conde Nast is concerned, and there are no plans to
change that currently.

------
ArrayList
Does this mean reddit is going to cost money now? /s

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gregknicholson
If they allow each person to view a few articles for free, the “paywall” is
just an inconvenience: you can simply make sure you look like another person.

Mozilla and Google have decided that clearing cookies and faking a referrer is
illegal. Microsoft hasn't yet: [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-
firefox](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox)

I think the add-on author would meet less resistance from the browser
oligarchy if they described the add-on as “Read news anonymously: this add-on
clears your cookies and referral info on news sites, so you can read their
content without being tracked”. Same thing, but avoids DMCA word-crime.

------
newscracker
There isn’t a big enough audience that will pay periodic subscription fees for
written content unless it’s niche and/or really great.

With this move, Condé Nast is about to find out which of its properties are
commodity content that usually find few takers who’d pay to go behind
paywalls. It may then be forced to return to the ad supported model without a
paywall unless it creates an innovative and _usable_ solution for
micropayments to allow people to pay (others have tried and some are still
trying, but I haven’t seen a large enough success story).

I wonder what Apple is going to announce (rumored to be in a couple of months)
on the lines of an “all you can read” magazine and related content offering
based on its acquisition of Texture, and how Condé Nast’s properties will
figure in this offering.

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yabatopia
Not only a strict paywall, they're also planning significant price increases
for their subscriptions.

I'm curious how this will work out in let's say two years and how this will
reduce the current annual loss of 120 million. Desperate times, desperate
measures.

~~~
DannyB2
Condé Nast says: Data does not want to be free, it's his brother that wants to
be free.

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rzzzwilson
Ironic that the article about Condé Nast putting articles behind a paywall is
itself behind a paywall.

~~~
joegahona
[https://outline.com/8Da2Ta](https://outline.com/8Da2Ta)

~~~
thunderbong
That's ironic at the next level!

Although, I do wonder if they will keep their sites open for search engines.

~~~
blakesterz
I thought sites had to serve the same pages to GoogleBot as they do to regular
people?

