Nearly a Third of New Subscribers To News Publications Cancel in the First 24 Hours (niemanlab.org) 45
Nieman Lab: The clock starts right away. New data from the paywall tech company Piano shows about 33% of new subscribers cancel their digital subscriptions within a day. Piano, one of the world's largest paywall providers, sells their technology as well as strategic advice to media companies. Most of their clients are news organizations -- including giants like Gannett, Dow Jones, Meredith, and Axel Springer -- but they also work with other types of companies experimenting with paywalls to drive subscriber revenue. Their report released Tuesday notes that subscribers who cancel almost immediately might have signed up to access a single article or found the full paid experience lacking after taking a quick look around.
I guess... (Score:3)
...when they notice that you can click reader-mode and refresh to read for free?
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...when they notice that you can click reader-mode and refresh to read for free?
That seems to work on most, but not all, sites. Often, particularly when reader mode isn't available, I have to disable JavaScript, but even that occasionally fails to display all the content. I have noticed, however, that using the app NoJS on the iPhone seems to work very well most of the time.
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Let people buy articles (Score:5, Insightful)
Or just day rates for like $1 or some type of alliance that allows smaller papers to bundle article reads or subscriptions into block buys for people.
We can't have every local newspaper on top of every national news source having it's own monthly subscription, people just can't and won't do it.
Re:Let people buy articles (Score:4, Interesting)
Let people buy articles or just day rates for like $1 or some type of alliance that allows smaller papers to bundle article reads or subscriptions into block buys for people.
Exactly this. I almost never sign up for a new news site, but almost every day am about to read an article but have to go back because it is paywalled. I could see myself paying $50 per month on articles if someone could put together an alliance or if they would charge my google account $1 per article. Probably $100-200 per month if I could cancel all my current subscriptions. I would be happy to pay it, and the industry as a whole would get 50% - 100% more money out of me.
Re:Let people buy articles (Score:5, Informative)
This happens to you almost every day? You can easily bypass news paywalls by just pasting the URL into archive.is. News sites don't paywall their content when it's being scraped by an archiving site.
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This happens to you almost every day? You can easily bypass news paywalls by just pasting the URL into archive.is. News sites don't paywall their content when it's being scraped by an archiving site.
For the same reason I haven't pirated movies for decades, I don't try to bypass their paywalls. If those that publish the content want to be paid for their work, I have no right to bypass that. There is plenty of other content to read.
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They have the ability to block archiving bots, which announce themselves in the User Agent. I don't see why you'd artificially limit yourself when they're permitting that use.
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You, mere human, are no archiving bot.
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>The purpose of archive.org and other sites is for robots to archive things for robots to view
Big brain take
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I feel the same way as you. I feel that everyone probably feels the same way as you.
But look at the business decisions companies are making. Newspapers are requiring subscriptions. Substacks are requiring subscriptions. Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop are requiring subscriptions. Even BMW is requiring subscriptions for features in its new cars.
If it's a question of our feelings versus the internal analyses of all these companies in different industries, I think it's probably our feelings that are wrong
Re:Let people buy articles (Score:4, Informative)
... or some type of alliance that allows smaller papers to bundle article reads or subscriptions into block buys for people.
This is how news services like Reuters and Associated Press have traditionally made their money - local papers paid a subscription fee for access to their feed plus the right to republish the stories. I'm not sure if the current situation (where Reuters et al attempt to pull in direct individual subscribers) came about due to declining newspaper revenue, or if somebody told them the internet was an opportunity to "grow their business" by co-opting newspaper subscribers, a combination of the two, or some other factor.
FWIW I subscribe to a local newspaper, but not to any of the national / international services.
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this is very much true and local papers are very very important and honestly need to band together in some way to keep their revenues alive.
Local papers are some of the few news sources that have actual on the ground reporters out there doing work in many parts of America and that is expensive compared to the national pundit rags that just pay people to comment on the actual work done by actual journalists.
When a local paper has a story that starts getting national attention there should be a way for them t
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Back in the old days, people use to go to a store and buy a News paper. They also had a vending machine in cities where you can get a paper, if an article got your interests.
Sure some people got a subscription to a paper, which was delivered daily but it wasn't the the only option.
The internet had really screwed up the News. By disrupting the normal business structure for the news paper companies, the industry has changed rapidly within the past 20 years or so, and mostly not all for the better.
1. Over R
The 30 cent swipe fee hurts (Score:3)
Back in the old days, people use to go to a store and buy a News paper. They also had a vending machine in cities where you can get a paper, if an article got your interests.
Cash in a vending machine also has much smaller fees for small transactions than major forms of electronic payment. Payment processors that handle credit cards and debit cards through the credit card network tend to charge a merchant on the order of 0.30 USD plus 3 percent of the transaction's gross amount. This 30-cent swipe fee takes a huge chunk out of a small transaction.
Re:The 30 cent swipe fee hurts (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is a pretty decent article on the history
https://caseorganic.medium.com... [medium.com]
Personally I think the fundamental problem is that it's too much work and pain to constantly make small financial decisions (Is this article worth it? (click) No, it sucks. Argh!!) People seem to prefer "all you can eat" plans, unless the financial case for ala carte is overwhelming.
Re: The 30 cent swipe fee hurts (Score:2)
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If bitcoin wasn't so wildly unstable, and slow and expensive to transact on, then it could have fit perfectly into a "world wide" micropayment scheme. But it otherwise could have solved the larger issues, which boil down to people not wanting to have to provide personal and financial information and create logins for a multitude of sites.
Bitcoin might be an interesting approach to micropayments if the "payment processing costs & slow processing time" in Bitcoin processing were addressed, but that is transparent to the average person on the street who just wants to buy a coffee.
When the average user realizes that 0.0001 BTC might be worth 10 cents today and then 10 USD tomorrow due to market fluctuations in Bitcoin value, well then the perceived value in using BTC can fall apart due to those exchange price gyrations...unless they are har
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That is a horrific recipe for mass ignorance (Score:2)
Or just day rates for like $1 or some type of alliance that allows smaller papers to bundle article reads or subscriptions into block buys for people.
We can't have every local newspaper on top of every national news source having it's own monthly subscription, people just can't and won't do it.
People need to be informed outside of of what they're passionate about. We've got a huge problem with this on the internet already. People read what they want, not what they need to learn. I love technology and can read about programming topics all day. I would never pay to read something about some iPhone app that makes me a more productive human being...but it's good for me to read. It's good for me to be informed about places in the world I don't care too much about.
Slashdot has a headline about
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I get you and I definitely understand and agree to many degrees but since the death of print media and the landscape changing with social media aggregating lots of sources to people these outlets need to make money somewhow.
We would not have known about Jeffrey Epstein if Julie K. Brown didn't spend years digging at the story. She works for the Miami Herald, not the New York Times or Washington Post, it's to a certain extent essentially a local paper. I don't live in Miami so can I justify a $16 a month s
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Or just day rates for like $1 or some type of alliance that allows smaller papers to bundle article reads or subscriptions into block buys for people.
We can't have every local newspaper on top of every national news source having it's own monthly subscription, people just can't and won't do it.
Fuck that...
I'm not putting in my CC details 20 times a day for 20 different sites. Want me to pay to access your crappy news, meet my little friend, the X button.
There's loads of quality news services that are free at the point of use. On the plus side, I'm not giving money or time to Murdoch.
"News" (Score:1)
Maybe they realize they are paying for lies and bullshit?
Microtransactions vs Subs (Score:1)
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$20 initial buy-in on each site (Score:2)
Wanted is a site that would let you spend virtual coins on various news sites, on a per article basis. The news sites would then cash in once enough coins from multiple users had accumulated to be worth the exchange fee. Certainly the concept of in-game currency is well understood, and this would not be much different.
You usually can't transfer in-game currency from one game to another, despite what NFT advocates would like you to think. Likewise, with the credit card networks' 30 cents per transaction swipe fee, each news site offering pay-per-article is likely to expect each reader to pony up on the order of 20 USD up front to buy articles from that particular site. So if you buy one article from each of ten different websites, that's 200 USD.
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Trying to run multiple, competing versions of such a service would probably fail, as it would just be adding overhead to the same problem. That is why it should be owned and run, as a not-for-profit enterprise, by the news companies themselves.
Re: Microtransactions vs Subs (Score:3)
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Yeah. What we need in news is clickbait titles :P
Print + Digital (Score:4, Insightful)
I had a print subscription to the sf chronicle, which came with a free "digital edition". I would get an email from them daily and none of the links worked when clicking on them from the gmail app on my phone. Absolutely worthless.
Cancelled my Wired print subscription for the same problem. Clicking through from the news right swipe thing on android causes the same problem.
I just use archive.is to browse websites now, paying for the subscription was worthless waste of time.
“Reporting” quality is in the gutter (Score:5, Insightful)
People cancel because they quickly realize that these publications are pushing trash as “reporting”. News outlets report hearsay and uncorroborated nonsense from anonymous sources as fact along with personal opinions and misrepresented facts to push an agenda. Nobody wants to pay for that crap, just look what happened to CNN+.
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People cancel because they quickly realize that these publications are pushing trash as “reporting”
I think you have the causality backwards. Reporting is trash because people no longer pay for subscriptions.
Reporting used to be a paid job. Now too much of it is gig work.
Why should I pay to foment Dezinformatsia? (Score:4, Insightful)
From at least the Spanish-American war to now, it's all lies. And quite possibly before that, too
I guarantee you you're being manipulated by all sides of the news. All of it. From CNN to Fox to Al Jazeera to BBC to RT. You're being told what to say, what to think.
I took Journalism for a bit. Even in the late 80's I couldn't handle it. The spin, the lean, the bias was just too much. Completely unethical and untrustworthy.. and that was just high school! If that was just high school journo, imagine then how rabidly Communist the college courses must be! And then the real papers..
It was a reaction not unlike a friend of mine who went into law. he quit after 2 years, couldn't handle the complete lack of ethics.. and that was in some fancy-ass Ivy-Leage college in Boston. He went into his dad's field instead, Banking.. which in 2010 he told me it was as rotten as law, but by now he couldn't back out - Family and sick wife (now dead). He's looking to move to IT and is working to that effect now. He's willing to throw away 30 years of career because of how he feels about the ethics of the business.
I'm glad I never did go down the journo route. I'd have to bathe in boric acid every day to wash the stench of traitor off me.
People pay for news? (Score:4, Insightful)
Welcome Pack (Score:2)
Could it be that when you subscribe to anything you get an overwhelming welcome pack of multiple emails on the first day?
Aurorenew (Score:3)
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This is exactly what I do whenever I'm 'forced' into paying for a sub. Immediately cancel so I don't forget if it's a US based service. The EU ones as far as I'm aware aren't allowed to do silent auto renews.
It's "Video Killed the Radio Star" all over again (Score:2)
Newspapers gotta make money... we all understand that. The problem is, the most successful methods for doing so in today's world are quite a bit different than what worked best in years gone by; the news boy on the corner of Main Street screaming, "EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!" has essentially been relegated to the annuls of history; today, it's all about banner ads and subscriptions. So naturally, some publishers are going to try one way and some will try the other.
Thing is, passers-by couldn't "mute"
Similar to porn sites? (Score:2)
Daily Wire is an exception (Score:2)
tracking (Score:2)
Micropayments (Score:1)
Paywalls suck. They should just pull 10-25 cents out of a Google or Apple pay account for each "exclusive" article they would normally paywall behind a subscription.
I don't want to pay monthly or annual subscription fees for the local paper, NY Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. But I'll gladly fork over a quarter to read an article.