honestly: good. all of them jumped up their own asses for the sake of SEO and minimum required regulation compliance, which stopped me from even going to the ones that aren't low-quality, content mills, which many of them are.

cut the cookies and tracking, so you don't have to have a ridiculous compliance banner. cut the paywall that tells me what you had to say wasn't important enough for public consumption. cut the full screen ad breaks and page takeover nonsense.

these outlets have had years (decades?) to figure out how to monetize content that didn't drive users away. they have failed over and over and over again, so why should I care that they are failing now? if it wasn't AI, it would be something else that came for them. if you rely on the captiveness of your audience, rather than the quality of your product, I'm always happy to see you destroyed. whatever comes next will be different, at the very least. and I'm an optimist - I'll always hope that it's a better way. if it's not, let that shit die, too.

regardless, I have every faith that the good will that buoyed these sites in their respective heydays will continue on to provide some other resources for the same kind of media.

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1shooner 7 hours ago | parent [-]

What would be your suggestion for monetization without ads or subscription? Or are you thinking some type of privacy-respecting ad system? Because those have definitely been tried.

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troyvit 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Subscription used to work. They can work again, even better than before now that we have the facility for micro-transactions. A micro-transactional framework would have the added benefit of making it expensive for scrapers to steal content.

This is hard for me, an "information wants to be free" kinda guy, to espouse. But there are softer ways to do it, such as how The Guardian does it, or how public media does it.

	▲	catapart 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yeah, I think there's a lot of juice left in the "newstand" model. We just have to figure out how to translate the efficiency of "drop in quarter, get news" with digital currency and content. Like you said: a micro-transactional framework. That would be a hell of a thing to get started, but if you could my money's on it working like a charm.
	▲	pocksuppet 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This reminds me that The Onion is still doing print subscriptions, and they might be better value than most of real newspapers...

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catapart 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not suggesting monetization without ads or subscriptions. I'm suggesting monetization without obnoxious bullshit like full page, scroll arresting ads, or news content locked behind a paywall, rather than editorial content locked behind a paywall.

If I go to your website where you purport to cover the news of the tech industry, it is always in your best interest to actually give me that news. I'd prefer it if they gave a dry, sometimes even bullet-pointed list of bare news facts. What they know, how they know it, and the basic ways it affects the site's topic/hobby, as soon as they possibly know it. From there, link to your subscription content that goes into detail about the news and provides attractive insight or framing or whatever, along with reasoned updates when the news stops breaking and we have some better or more reliable information. People who just want the news can hit the site, light up the in-page and side gutter banner ads, and then bounce. People curious for more or appreciative of the talent can subscribe and get more, and more informed, detail.

Basically, just the same old suggestions for any enterprise: figure out what people, right now, today, want; stop relying on what worked in the past or what is most convenient for your team. Break it down in to how people actually function, and then place monetization where you would purchase, for a price that you would purchase for. I'll always be able to find the news without you, so you don't have any leverage to hold it hostage. Use it as a lead for your content, which can be the kind of reporting (different than news in subtle but meaningful ways) that people will be happy to pay for.