So I get ads are terrible, obviously. I run ad-blockers all the time. But people also get angry at paywalls. So that leaves me wondering, if not through ads or subscriptions, how is a news publisher supposed to sustain itself?
So I get ads are terrible, obviously. I run ad-blockers all the time. But people also get angry at paywalls. So that leaves me wondering, if not through ads or subscriptions, how is a news publisher supposed to sustain itself?
People feel inundated by “the news,” so the desire to pay for a single news outlet to add more noise feels opposite to what I want, even though it would probably be helpful.
We almost need blog rings to come back - almost like spotify of news. Every publisher on the platform is verified, is fully transparent about their biases, and I pay a monthly subscription to read all of them. That monthly could get split based on my actual reading habits perhaps.
I don’t know the right answer - but just offering more “the news” isn’t the right play and will continue to be an adblocker fight. The product offering has to fundamentally change into “the news + <thing>,” where <thing> is either a lot of trust, or transparency, or something that creates the value proposition in the buyer/reader’s mind.
It would be helpful to understand fully WHO you want to subscribe to your thing - that whole “if you build for everyone you’re actually building for no one” conundrum is applicable here too.