The Economist is a prime example of how for-pay curated content can work and can work well to serve a market... a wide market.
Can you imagine, just imagine, how craptastic The Economist would be if it were "free" and all you had to do was endure curated advertisements?
PS I would pay extra if they would stop stapling in those cardboard subscription cards in the middle of the (print) issue.
PPS I feel the same way about the NY Times---worth paying for---although they have gone so broad recently that I'm worried they're becoming unfocused, trying to appeal to too many at once.
I would not put the NYT in the same league as The Economist.
The NYT used to be a quality publication, but recently has been going down hill, fast (recent fiasco with quickly edited extremely one-sided article on Ellen Pao's verdict, etc)
I have been a subscriber to The Economist for 25 years now, and while I don't always agree with their opinions, their articles are unquestionably well researched - and beautifully written (and often tongue-in-cheek, British-style).
The job the Times has is at least an order of magnitude harder than the Economist.
I enjoy reading the Economist, but I don't know if I'd say well researched. A few times I've come across articles in my own field that seem really off, which makes me uneasy about the articles on banana plantations in Uruguay.
AFAIK the gold standard in copy editing and fact checking is the New Yorker.
The Economist has a writing style where they present the 'facts' that make their case but never state the uncertainty over those facts. It makes their articles look really persuasive until you do your own research at which point they look really, really shaky.
The New Yorker has a sterling reputation what it comes to copy editing, not sure if they have the same reputation regarding fact checking. The New Yorker isn't a destination for me though whereas the Economist most certainly is one of the few sites I will directly type into the URL bar in a browser, I buy their end-of-year year in review religiously, I am neither politically nor economically aligned with them but they cover the shit that matters most in a timely fashion with their ideology in plain sight.
The New York Times has great writers but it is incredibly biased even though it pretends to be impartial -- really it is only a notch up from Pravda and whatever that mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party is called. There have been numerous scandals over the past decades involving journalistic integrity. It is telling that Snowden's revelation broke in the Grauniad (as Private Eye nicknamed it) and the WashPo (dunno). Journalism is in an _amusing_ place right now what with Al Jazeera (in English!), Russia Today, The Intercept, and others. Don't know where I'd class the BBC News.
Economist is the only publication i pay for. I'm not sure how many newspapers/magazines could really follow suit. There is only so many high quality sources anyone can read, its a small niche I think. Also the average economist reader is probably quite high on income so I suspect thats a skews their ability to charge
Quality and accountability is what happens when we pay.
We've traded quality and accountability for "free" garbage floating in a sea of ads.
The NYTimes is still too dependent on advertising. That they consider "native advertising" acceptable shows compromised journalistic principles.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."
– Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
We call ourselves hackers and innovators. Yet instead of pouring our energies into figuring alternative business models and micropayment solutions, we spend our energies on more ways to capture users in viral schemes and then collect their data for sale to advertisers.
As I wrote the other day: Where are our backbones to stand up against selling out the internet so that we can get rich quick?
Because that is what the advertising business model is: a get rich quick scheme. Undercut the straight up competitors that charge for their product by fooling consumers into thinking you're offering what the other guy is offering, but for free. Come on, who could turn down that?
The saddest thing about Hacker News is that we all get behind radical things like FOSS (Bill Gates called it un-American) and Snowden, and fight SOPA and NSA violations of privacy, but because too many of our salaries depend on advertising revenue, our cognitive dissonance blinders go up lightning fast.
I'd say you overestimate the number of people working on ad-supported software. Many, if not most of us are working on for-pay software and services.
The reason I'm ambivalent about ads is not because it funds my paycheck (it doesn't, we charge for our services), but because for all their evils, ads work as a kind of enforced redistribution mechanism, and since geographic adjustments of prices work poorly on the web, I fear that any kind of payment system will inevitably lead to prices being set at the US middle class income level, shutting out everyone with a lower income level.
I know can afford to pay for stuff, and I'm happy to do it, but that's only been true since I started working, and only because I'm lucky enough to have a decent job.
I suppose "we'll figure it out" is one answer, but I'm afraid I can't put my heart behind a proposal that would have left my teenager self closed off from most of the web.
Imagine a world, pre-internet, where almost all books are handed out free, but with their pages loaded with ads, and their stories embedded with "native" ads and product placements. Imagine that book "stores" get a cut of the ad revenue and so are incented to stock and push whatever book titles "clicked" the most and contained the most ads?
Authors in this world would say they have no choice, because readers will always choose the free book over the $10 or even $5 book. The bookstores only stock the free books for the same reason.
In that world you would make exactly the same argument that you just made to me.
I'm glad you work on non ad-supported software. But look at it from a consumption, share of revenue and availability perspective: ad supported software is eating the web.
And in that world, I would have been able to read a lot of books that I wish I could have when I was growing up, when I only got 3-4 books per year, plus access to a poorly stocked library.
Would I have traded? Yes, I probably would have.
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I also don't agree that one must oppose all advertising or none; we can oppose native ads and personal tracking without being necessarily opposed to well demarcated side ads.
> The saddest thing about Hacker News is that we all get behind radical things like FOSS (Bill Gates called it un-American) and Snowden, and fight SOPA and NSA violations of privacy, but because too many of our salaries depend on advertising revenue, our cognitive dissonance blinders go up lightning fast.
What? I don't think I've ever read a positive comment about ads on HN. Also, I'm apparently in the only one on HN who would rather see ads than pay for stuff.
With all due respect I don't think you have been paying attention as much as I. Anti-ad sentiment on HN as well as elsewhere has only been on the rise in the past few months. But all you have to do is go back in my comment history a ways and you can see all the flack I get, though you won't see all the down-votes I got (a lot!).
Bashing ads is just starting to get hip, just as bashing Flash only got hip relatively recently, after an earlier period where Apple got bashed by many simply for being ahead of the mainstream.
The HN type of audience has been bashing Flash pretty aggressively for at least 15 years, certainly it was a common refrain that could be relied on for easy upvotes back in Slashdot's heyday.
Looking at this thread, it looks like we run into problems because we jump to solutions quickly, then thoroughly waste our time debating them.
Perhaps we'll have greater success if we can first agree on common ground?
There's a fundamental force at play here that extends far beyond the internet. I'm not entirely sure what it is.
Attention and mind share can be bought. This causes some weird outcomes in the Internet and politics.
It has to do with how we obtain/exchange value in our society - speech, information, material goods, attention, justice, etc. Perhaps how we make people produce value: labour, creation, votes.
Could we get closer to a solution if we spent more time understanding the root cause?
We probably wouldnt even have the internet if people always believed pronouncements that seem to be irrefutable, but in truth rest on narrow assumptions or narrow thinking.
Nick's logic (which I'd arrived at independently, though years later) is solid. He's known for some fairly impressive ideas, some of which I disagree with.
Publishing, traditionally, has worked through integrated purchasing rather than dis-integrating purchasing. Magazines, newspapers, books, subscriptions, broadcast advertising (bundled payments through advertisers rather than subscribers). Music syndication. For numerous reasons.
Individually assessing the purchase validity of ever smaller quantities of content simply doesn't pan out. Paying into a kitty and apportioning based on general consumption patterns, rather more so.
Micropayments are the media payment plan of the future, and always will be.
1. Nick wrote this in 1999 and he's been proven wrong. For example when Apple proposed selling music tracks for 99¢ and he probably would have used this very argument and pooh-poohed them along with everyone else.
2. His arguments are one of an anal accountant. Do you know what fraction of the population even reviews their monthly credit card statement, their long distance phone charges, whether or not their mobile data plan minutes are being counted accurately, or whether their iTunes charges matches the number of songs they download exactly? A very small fraction. Do we need to? No, not all of us. We can trust that if a vendor violates trust and commits fraud, someone will catch it and they will suffer a class-action lawsuit, as does actually happen.
3. "Paying into a kitty and apportioning based on general consumption patterns" can work great if the amount I pay per month is fixed, and that fixed payment is apportioned among the things I consumed in a way that rewards quality. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008960. This is just a simple idea by me, an amateur.
Back to "impossibles":
- If before Wikipedia existed, someone proposed to create an online encyclopedia that anyone in the world could anonymously edit, that it be funded by donations and that it become the encyclopedia that most people refer to, nearly 100% of us would have rolled on the floor and laughed out loud.
- If before it existed someone described a magical currency with the properties of what we now call Bitcoin, most would have said, "yeah right".
- If before asymmetric public-private key encryption was invented, someone said we needed a way to communicate where one side could decrypt something sent by the other but not be able to do the reverse and thereby pose as the other, most would have said, "good luck."
Please, please stop speaking in absolutes. It comes off as rather arrogant and foolish rhetoric.
Since you mention Apple/iTunes: I'd argue that it's the rule-proving exception. Yes, Apple's managed to implement micropayments with a music service based on 1) bog uniform pricing (99¢ no matter what — though that's changed since, no?), and for a fairly standard product for which previews and sampling are readily available in many cases — that is, the buyer has a very good idea of what they're buying in most cases.
And yet... there are numerous alternatives which aren't Apple: streaming music services (a bundled, non-micropayments model, either pre-paid or adverts supported), YouTube (adverts). Frankly, I've largely gotten out of the music-buying habit, though I'll pick up a CD occasionally at a show.
Your points on statement review largely make my point: if the idea of micropayments is to make people rational consumers of content, then if they're failing to review and assess their purchase habits, they simply aren't rational consumers. Which is to say, the premise of micropayments is false.
For long distance, he specifically addresses the case: the cost of attributing billing costs was itself a huge portion of the cost of service itself. By moving to flat pricing you can at once reduce costs and reduce customer anxiety over service use. I've been on flat-fee pay-as-you-go comms plans for years now. For what I'm paying, it literally isn't worth the telco's time to compute costs.
The kitty payment method is pretty much precisely how music broadcast and public performance (think bars, restaurants, stores) payments work. You've got a few licensing agencies (ASCAP, Harry Fox), playtime measurement (logs from radio stations and the services providing streams to retail establishments), and artists are cut a check based on plays.
Various checks and balances keep everything reasonably honest. Performance licenses are held by establishments and not performers -- it's the nightclub owner, not the band, who's on the hook for the fee. That greatly simplifies logistics -- on the spectrum of unreliable characters, bar owners rate higher than drummers, or even front-men. Shenanigans by the licensing agencies can be pursued by class-actions among musicians (not to say they can't or don't get screwed, but there are some checks). And the end consumer of the music (bar / nightclub / restaurant / store patron) doesn't worry about any of this at all.
The whole "rewarding quality" is something to consider, though I'll note that Apple dispensed with this entirely at least initially: everything cost the same amount. I can see (and have made) arguments to why this shouldn't be the case (high-quality scientific research or investigative journalism strikes me as more worthwhile than algorithmically generated tone patterns). And I'm not pretending to have a solution fully worked out. But I'm almost certain it lies in the direction of aggregated, not disaggregated, payments. Broadband tax. Syndication fee. General funds tax. Patronage to creators. Something like that.
As for Wikipedia: it follows patterns of collaborative work which date back centuries (review some of the early history of dictionaries and encyclopedias).
Bitcoin's got numerous problems, of which scaling is one. Trust another.
PKI's roots trace back to at least 1874 and William Stanley Jevons, who's just become even more interesting in my estimation. The primary limitation, aside from successful algorithms, was cheap and ubiquitous computing. As that came online, first for institutions and governments, later for individuals.
I'm not aware of any significant discussion that PKI was impossible. One-way functions have been known for centuries. Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman's work postdated national security implementations of PKI by British GCHQ by only three years.
Discussion of absolutes is risky, but there are a few.
I challenge you to exceed 300,000 km/s.
Others similarly exist in various fields, including social and economic ones. Part of the basis for my own statements is Gresham's Law, which I'm coming to view as a fundamental and principle limitation for economics. Others would include the Law of Diminishing Returns, and variations of the maximum power principle (Darwin-Lotke energy law, White's Law).
$1/week is a lot for what a single author could put out. If you take into account time researching, I can't imagine that would amount to more an article per week at any kind of quality?
Let's say you have 40k readers and 50/50 overhead vs writers. So, 40k people pay 1$ and get to read the output from ~10 writers. Now, get another ~2k people to sign up and that just about covers another author assuming your overhead does not increase.
Clearly, you can play with these numbers with various assumptions and readerships. But, the point is you can scale things down with paid subscribers.
Thanks for the reminder that I need to start using that on the way to work instead of the usual NPR or fluffy podcast. What little I've listened to it, it is quality, I just forget that I have it.
I was a subscriber for 4 years and I can confirm that the Economist is crap. It looks good compared to other choices like 'Times' or 'Newsweek' which are totally unreadable.
* It has totally absurd double-standards: Russia, Iran, China and their puppets (e.g. Syria and so forth) are 'bad' and 'evil'. US, EU and the UK stand for 'justice and peace in the world'. If your world-view is so naive, then you deserve the economist.
* You never know the author. You never know the actual author's background so reading between the lines is (in the beginning at least) hard
* It has it's own view of economics, which most of the times is miles apart from the academia: If I had to choose between 'Buttonwood'[1] and Paul Krugman, I'd go with Krugman any day of the week. Having different opinion is one thing, diverting from mainstream academia views CONSTANTLY on 101 macro-economics is another.
* The Economist is extremely PRO-WAR. There is NOT ONE instance that I recall the economist NOT backing a war: Afghanistan, Iraq... Latest one was Syria. The magazine's editor, openly called for the USA to attack Syria. The article (main article btw) was awful and brutal.
Are there any good articles in there? Of course. There are many good articles featuring in the Economist. But overall it's not nearly as good and fair as most people think it is.
I don't know if the editor changed after 2004, but me and many other readers have the feeling that after 2004-5 the quality dropped incrementally.
Generally speaking I found "The New Yorker" to be the best[2] magazine so far. I think part of the reason is that it's not on the spotlight so much, as the 'Economist' and the authors receive less pressure to push a specific agenda.
[2] When I say 'best' in this context I mean avoiding 'double standards' giving everyone a voice and so on. For example check out the articles on Wikileaks, Assange, Snowden or any controversial figure in the Economist vs New Yorker. The New Yorker features interviews, articles and views from both parties, not only from the US gov. The Economist on the other hand even when it tries to be fair to someone, uses diminutive terms like "unorthodox", "unconventional", "self-proclaimed", etc. That's not journalism, that's manipulation. The worst form of manipulation.
Your comment simply says that your politics don't align with The Economist's.
I personally find the "he said, she said" style of reporting that purports to give a fair account of all sides intolerable and hypocritical. It often allows complete idiots to air their opinions in the name of presenting a "different" view. This lets the reporter subtly influence the reader while preserving the illusion of impartiality.
The Economist is a highly biased newspaper. Unlike nearly all other publications aspiring to high-brow status, it displays its biases openly.
My main complaint with the Economist (as a subscriber) is that it doesn't display it's biases openly - it often presents controversial economic or social positions as settled fact in a neutral style. If you didn't know the subject it was writing on you would think they were presenting the orthodox position.
If you didn't catch The Economist's biases on a cursory reading of one issue, that's on you. Simply skimming one of the leader opinion pieces and comparing it to, e.g., a Krugman column, should tell you that the authors would come to blows.
I'm not talking about their overall world view I'm talking about their "Coffee growing in Guatamala" or "Cement production in the far east" articles - the ones where they are providing information on a relatively obscure subject. The articles present very matter of fact tones when in reality they are often reporting on one side of genuinely contraversial issues.
>>Your comment simply says that your politics don't align with The Economist's.
May I enquire as to your stance on the corn laws?
>>it displays its biases openly.
Nope. It claims to speak from the perspective of economists but instead is pushing a panglosian, unilateral free trade agenda. The world view has many internal contradictions (OP notes their treatment of good and evil countries, China is for some reason in the good category despite working hard to disrupt US hegemony while other countries that verbally protest are labeled evil), I can only assume they have sinister motives or are mentally retarded. Much like Fox News.
> It often allows complete idiots to air their opinions in the name of presenting a "different" view.
There, you just described the economist.
Okay, jokes apart... My 'problem' is that most mainstream media, doesn't consider the economist biased. I didn't consider the economist biased in the past. When I did, I stopped my subscription because it had nothing to offer: I knew beforehand what am I going to read on (almost) any given situation.
Well, the Economist is a newspaper with an officially non-neutral stance. I can hardly view it "the worst form of manipulation" when it's not different from every blog and personal column ever in this sense.
As to the Iraq war, it might have been the case that they supported the invasion right at the beginning (someone could point me to links), but since the casus belli turned out to be bogus I can't remember reading anything but denunciation of the war from the Economist.
Yeah, but since the casus belli was ALWAYS OBVIOUSLY bogus, that's on them. Saddam held the world dicatatorship record for "number of times deterred as a rational actor after a little brinksmanship". He could have had the keys to the Russian arsenal and still not nuked anybody. Someone can say, with integrity, that they thought Iraq was a good strategic decision aside from the WMD nonsense, and can even say with integrity that they still think it was. Saying "Oh, I believed the intelligence and thought he was an imminent threat" is admitting up front that you can't read past the first 5 words of a headline.
> "I don't know if the editor changed after 2004, but me and many other readers have the feeling that after 2004-5 the quality dropped incrementally."
I'd concur with this. Even though I disagreed with some of the articles I found them to be well written/edited and I'd learn about different viewpoints (so I subscribed). They even published a style guide. I don't recall when but I started to feel that they (ironically) stopped following their own style guide and around the same time the quality began to drop.
I recall it being far more balanced prior to the Bush administration. They had a viewpoint: pro-free trade, and generally pro-civil-rights. You could reasonably disagree with the pro-free trade stance.
Then, in the mid-naughts, I recall begin shocked as they started to run epic essays begging Karl Rove to attempt to rise above politics as usual, and about how Texas represented the future of the world. Completely off the rails.
I fear The Economist may be one of the only examples of how for-pay content can work. (Not curated, their content is original.) I'd love to know more about how well it's working for The Economist, too, is there anything public about their financials?
Haha you're absolutely right about the cardboard insert! With any other publication that comes to my house, I can easily rip the insert out. I have to be extremely careful not to de-staple the entire issue of The Economist when removing that awful insert.
> The Economist is a prime example of how for-pay curated content can work and can work well to serve a market... a wide market.
It certainly is. But I wonder how much their strategy can really serve as a model for others.
On the one hand, the Economist might be seen as saying, "Here is how to do it." Others can follow and similarly prosper, with increasingly large markets being served.
Or, on the other hand, the Economist might simply be meeting all of the demand for a publication like itself. And the only way for another company to do as well using the same strategy, would be to produce a publication that is convincingly better than the Economist, thus putting the original out of business.
I'm starting to sour a bit on NYT. I do feel that The New Yorker and London Review of Books are both very good examples, however - paid content that is very, very well done and worthwhile.
I agree. I'd go further and say that the NY Times is the world's best English-language newspaper, with the possible exception of the Financial Times. I think much of the criticism comes from two issues:
1) Newspaper journalism is very hard; look at how much new research (i.e., almost everything they publish outside the editorial page) they publish every day; they're going to get a few things wrong and make a few errors in judgment. However, name a paper that does this job better.
2) The ideological right-wing, trendy in some places (e.g., News Corp publications such as Fox News and the Wall St Journal), in their effort to discredit any source of information for their followers but themselves, have tried to politicize the NY Times. After all, the NY Times prints facts, and those are always a threat to any ideology.
That said, some errors, such as during the leaup to the Iraq War, are inexcusable (but what papers did better?[1]). They're the best, but they could improve a lot.
[1] I think the one answer might be McClatchy's (a leading owner of local papers) DC bureau. Highly recommended for their courage on unpopular questions and for their integrity. A very underappreciated resource: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/
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The Economist and NY Times do two different jobs. The Economist provides analysis; the NY Times generates and presents new knowledge (i.e., journalism), essentially for you to do your own analysis.
For example, the NY Times researches and breaks the story on NSA wiretapping; the Economist provides context and analysis of it (think about it: Have you ever seen the Economist break a story?). The NY Times interviews the head of the NSA, telecommunications companies, privacy adocates, etc. and provides their responses to you. The Economist summarizes and analyszes the responses (think about it: how often do you see quotes in the Economist?).
I'm not criticizing one or the other; both have their place. My perspective: The Economist approach is more efficient (someone does the analysis for you) but is more prone to bias (e.g., they apply their free market ideology everywhere). The Times approach is essential (someone has to create the new knowledge) and less prone to bias, but you need to read a lot more to understand the same story.
Can you imagine, just imagine, how craptastic The Economist would be if it were "free" and all you had to do was endure curated advertisements?
PS I would pay extra if they would stop stapling in those cardboard subscription cards in the middle of the (print) issue.
PPS I feel the same way about the NY Times---worth paying for---although they have gone so broad recently that I'm worried they're becoming unfocused, trying to appeal to too many at once.