
The Wall Street Journal has built a paywall that bends to the individual reader - Cwwm
http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/after-years-of-testing-the-wall-street-journal-has-built-a-paywall-that-bends-to-the-individual-reader/
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netman21
Here's my idea for all these publications. Make it possible for paying
subscribers to post links to articles that are free to anyone if they click
through. That increases the value of being a paid subscriber way beyond just
being able to read the article. They can post to Twitter/FB and people will
(eventually) know they can read whatever that person posts. Ultimately the
WSJ/WashPo/Atlantic could gamify it and give reduced costs or even money back
to the most prolific people on social media. Turn their readers into
affiliates. Get more readers. Get more subscribers.

~~~
jMyles
Seems like an odd incentive structure: You have to pay to _be able_ to post
free links, but then you _get paid_ if you do it a lot?

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munchbunny
I see it more as a matter that some people read to actively source news, but
not everyone does. These people are likely origin points for sharing news more
broadly, so you want to make it easy for those key users to generate potential
traffic for new customer acquisition.

I think the problem is that it's a bit easy to exploit, and articles from the
major publications get shared enough anyway that I don't think giving everyone
the ability to "sample" really changes the decision to buy.

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buttcoinslol
Bookmarklet that unlocks WSJ articles (may require FB acct):

    
    
      javascript:window.location.href='https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);

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Pyxl101
You can also edit the URL and replace wsj.com with fullwsj.com, which employs
the same redirect technique.

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prepend
This is an interesting approach. So I need to appear as an unlikely customer
even though I want to read their content.

Can’t wait for the browser plugin that facades being a cold customer. I
foresee a cat and mouse game in the future where my AI is presenting me as
beneficial to me as possible while their AI is trying to figure out if I’m
real.

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Sir_Cmpwn
Something similar to this is explored in Permutation City (a book), where
"smarter" emails won't disclose their message unless they think they're
disclosing it directly to you, so people train AIs to run the emails in a
sandbox and pretend to be the actual human operator to detect spam, and the
emails are trained to try and figure out if it's the real intended recepient
before getting to the spam part, and so on.

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aventrix
Fascinating. It's a shame that it's so hard to get people to pay for quality
journalism. The world will be a dark place if the only news sources left are
blogs by self-proclaimed journalists.

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tmnvix
The best news source in NZ currently (in my opinion) is not behind a paywall,
nor is it funded by advertising. It is the publicly funded Radio New Zealand
(they have a news site along with the radio stations).

Similar could be said for Australian news sources (the publicly funded ABC and
SBS networks being the two best sources of news there in my opinion).

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jakecopp
I am so grateful for Australia's ABC News [1], on the web and TV.

For those who don't know they have a program called Media Watch which calls
out biased reporting in the media - sometimes they even criticise their own
organization when backed by evidence.

[1]: [http://abc.net.au/news/](http://abc.net.au/news/)

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chis
This is a reasonable application, but AI-powered price discrimination
definitely raises some ethical questions. What if we find that one ethnic
group is being charged more for a product? That would certainly be illegal for
a traditional store, but would be difficult to detect online.

Sadly it's already happening and is impossible to regulate for electronic
products.

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bduerst
One of the benefits of using a model like this is that it can make
recommendations that are contradictive of human biases but still high quality.

For any hypothetical situation, "What if AI makes this unethical
recommendation?", we can't actually answer this question unless it happens,
because as humans, the reasoning behind such a situation are hard for us to
imagine in a hypothetical.

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tmnvix
I've always thought that a possible compromise between per article micro-
payments of a few cents and monthly subscriptions might be daily or weekly one
off payments.

You could visit a site and read an article or two for free so you have some
idea of the quality and then have the option of paying something like $2-5 for
full access for a day or week with no obligation to unsubscribe because it
really is a simple payment - like purchasing the daily/weekly paper.

This might work better for online magazines or blogs that publish relatively
few articles than for newspapers that feel they may have a better chance of
attracting traditional subscribers.

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bsbechtel
Like paying $1 for today's print paper at your local news stand?

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tmnvix
Exactly.

You wouldn't have to use this as a replacement for the more traditional
subscription because that would still offer much better value (just as
subscribing to printed newspapers does).

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mirimir
Meh. I get to see the front page, but can only read teasers, not full articles
:( And it did try to grab a screen fingerprint. I'm using Firefox in private
browsing mode, through a VPN service with an exit in Germany.

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frandroid
How do you know it tried to do that?

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mirimir
Canvas Defender warned me.

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frandroid
Wow, everyone is trying to fingerprint me, even sober journalism sites like
the Neiman Lab. Thanks for pointing me to this tool.

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sparky_z
I really really hope that the "propensity score" doesn't try to check whether
you have subscribed to other news sites in the past. I'm worried that a) it
would work pretty well in the short term, and b) because it works it would
spread.

In a few years, if all the sites were doing this, then anyone who pays for
journalism at at one site could find their propensity score raised, and
encounter paywalls everywhere else. The last thing we should want is for
consumers to internalize the notion that "only suckers pay for journalism
because then you get locked out of the rest of the internet".

Sort of like how people can be reluctant to ever give money to any charity
because they know it will sell their info to other charities and they will be
inundated with junk mail.

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gizmo385
How would it determine whether or not you've subscribed to other news sites?

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williamscales
Correlate your unique identifier with credit card transaction data? Maybe ad
networks provide this information as part of a profile?

~~~
sparky_z
Bingo. I get mailed magazine offers that can only be because of other
magazines I subscribe to. If that sort of info sharing is already happening in
the print world, it must be happening on the digital side as well.

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circadiam
just use [http://outline.com](http://outline.com)

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ggm
Long ago, news ltd offered me a 10:1 pricebreak to sign up for a year. I got
the national flagship paper delivered all week including the saturday funnies
for a dollar.

It was a classic 'boil the frog slowly' campaign. I boosted their print
circulation numbers and over the next five years I barely noticed the
increments until I paid full price.

I stopped because Murdoch press is toxic. But the trick undoubtedly worked.

The up front paywall costs we're exposed to are far higher than the 'free
option' choices. 2c is closer to free than $2 is in my own mental barrier. If
we had a sensible marginal cost micropayments framework, I would subscribe
initially to a lot of press for 2c per day, and probably tolerate the
incremental costs.

the WSJ headline offer is $1 for two months. Thats damn close to my margins. I
think they've got the message.

The AFR, an Australian equivalent, want to give me a month free but then $69
per month. I don't think they understand kitchen-sink economics as well as
either Mrs Thatcher, or the WSJ.

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mjcohen
I would never subscribe to the WSJ. Wonder if they will pick this up?

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kaycebasques
I wonder if they plan on selling this approach to other companies?

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iaw
I have to commend WSJ, not a fan of paywalls but at least they're trying to
innovate within the space.

