I've not gone through to look at other domains specifically, but NYT typically shows up in the top 3--4 sites through 2019, then falls to #7 in 2020, #9 in 2021, and recovers to #5 in 2022.
Interesting. They had a major refactor of their paywall in August 2019. Maybe that turns people off to posting content that isn’t unique to the NYT. Or maybe paywalled articles are less likely to make the HN front page (?).
It'd be interesting to, say, look at a number of sites which have gone paywall and see how that impact on HN front-page posts.
Off the top of my head, some of those would be:
- NYTimes
- WSJ
- Quora
- WaPo
- LA Times
If anyone has a handy list, especially with dates, I'd appreciate it.
Here's the top 40 "general news" sites with barplots by year. I know that NYT, WSJ, WaPo, LA Times, telegraph.co.uk, and possibly a few others have paywalls and may have implemented them over this period. Pastebin to spare readers here another monster text post, expires in a month:
Paywalls certainly seem associated with a few declines (NYT, WaPo), but not others. E.g., NPR and CBC.ca both fell off a cliff in 2022, PBS fell after 2008. None impose paywalls.
Probably it's just a typo, but I'd like to point out that "monetarization" is the process of turns something into a currency, whereas I think you're referring to "monetization" which refers to making something generate revenue(, or to make a painting beautiful by using the wrong colours and lots of blur).
Thanks, not a typo, never occurred to me that the two character sequences are almost as different as the two concepts. I guess I'll invoke "they rarely occur in the same context" as my excuse, and how passive use gets by just fine without looking at the letters all that closely.
Looking over my front page archive, that's one of the first big site-related shifts I've noticed, and it's quiet pronounced:
I've not gone through to look at other domains specifically, but NYT typically shows up in the top 3--4 sites through 2019, then falls to #7 in 2020, #9 in 2021, and recovers to #5 in 2022.That's a pretty big movement as these things go.