Wall Street Journal's Google Traffic Drops 44% After Pulling Out of First Click Free (bloomberg.com) 257
In February, the Wall Street Journal blocked Google users from reading free articles, resulting in a fourfold increase in the rate of visitors converting into paying customers. The tradeoff, as reported by Bloomberg, is a decrease in traffic from Google. Since the WSJ ended its support for Google's "first click free" policy, traffic from Google plummeted 44 percent. From the report: Google search results are based on an algorithm that scans the internet for free content. After the Journal's free articles went behind a paywall, Google's bot only saw the first few paragraphs and started ranking them lower, limiting the Journal's viewership. Executives at the Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., argue that Google's policy is unfairly punishing them for trying to attract more digital subscribers. They want Google to treat their articles equally in search rankings, despite being behind a paywall. The Journal's experience could have implications across the news industry, where publishers are relying more on convincing readers to pay for their articles because tech giants like Google and Facebook are vacuuming up the lion's share of online advertising. Google says its "first click free" policy is good for both consumers and publishers. People want to get the news quickly and don't want to immediately encounter a paywall. Plus, if publishers let Google users sample articles for free, there's a better chance they'll end up subscribing, Google says. The tech giant likens its policy to stores allowing people to flip through newspapers and magazines before choosing which one to buy.
WHAT?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:WHAT?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially
Re: WHAT?! (Score:3, Insightful)
I use google to search for whats available online and accessible. If I wanted to search wsj I'm sure they have their own search engine. May as well block the entire site.
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Speak of this, Google no longer allows you to block domains from search results. Did they ever say why they removed this feature?
I personally hated eHow more than experts-exchange, but they were #2 on my list. My search result hate list looks like this:
1. eHow
2. experts-exchange
3. wikihow
4. quora
5. yahoo answers
6. forbes
And just recently:
7. wsj
Fortunately, after Google adjusted its search rankings to lower sites that have lower quality content, eHow rarely shows up any more, and yahoo answers typically lose
Intent behind Googling (Score:5, Funny)
"They want Google to treat their articles equally in search rankings, despite being behind a paywall"
When I Google I look for article(s) that I can read, not articles that I have to hand over my wallet in order to read
I only hand my wallet over to my wife
Re:Intent behind Googling (Score:5, Funny)
I only hand my wallet over to my wife
I don't want to intrude on your lifestyle, but maybe you should let her have her own wallet?
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I only hand my wallet over to my wife
I don't want to intrude on your lifestyle, but maybe you should let her have her own wallet?
Since she tells me she is the better half, she get the privilege to use both her wallet, and mine
Re:Intent behind Googling (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WHAT?! (Score:5, Insightful)
they should buy (Score:3)
they should buy the advertisement on google.
seeriously. if they cannot view the info for free how the fuck could they index it for free and why would anyone of googles customers like that info to be there in the first place if they cannot access it.
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Yeah, and I want a free pony, and I want Rupert to walk behind it with a shovel.
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I want Rupert to walk 10 metres behind it my herd of elephants picking up what they leave the day after I've let the elephants gorged on fruit and vegetables. No shovel, gloves, or boots are allowed.
Trump walks behind the elephants at 5 metres in just a t-shirt and a pair of shorts.
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I'd like it to be a choice when running a search. When I'm looking for generic info, I'd like to be able to filter out paywalled info. For more esoteric stuff or scientific articles I might want to include paid sources, and have them ranked equal amongst free sources, based on relevance only.
Sure. Having a choice would be nice. But for "generic" info, you have wikipedia. For everything else, you either have to pay, or visit a site that's trying to sell you something else.
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And wikipedia isn't trying to "sell me something else?" They do have ads, you know.
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For everything else, you either have to pay, or visit a site that's trying to sell you something else.
That's why having a choice would be nice.
Accessible information, Clod. (Score:4)
The search engines purpose is to locate accessible information.
Information behind a paywall is not accessible, hence should not be indexed.
As it is behind a paywall, it is up to the owner to provide their own indexing and search capability.
Simple enough for you?
Unfortunately these days it seems it is not simple enough for Google.
This is because it long ago stopped being a search system, and instead became an information aggregator, of which search is only one area of application.
Google has realised that controlling all the information is more valuable than providing an index of it, hence they are willing to participate in these games.
Re:Accessible information, Clod. (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the last part of the last century, Google was displeased with sites that didn't display the same content to the user that they displayed to the spider. So, the spider should see the same paywall that the user sees, theoretically. If it doesn't, they would rank the site lower, or even ban it.
What is different, today?
Info behind paywalls is less relevant (Score:5, Insightful)
What is a search engine's purpose? To find you relevant information? Or to find you less relevant free information?
If the information is trapped behind a paywall then the search engine can't find it for you. At most it can hint that it might exist. The WSJ wants to have its cake and eat it too. They basically want google to provide free advertising for them. I have no interest in a subscription to WSJ and as far as I'm concerned any results trapped behind a paywall should rightfully be lower in the rankings of relevance. If I wanted a subscription to WSJ I would already have one. If WSJ wants to trade fewer total readers for more paying readers I get that and have no problem with it. But I also have no interest in google returning search results that are trapped behind paywalls because that is approximately useless to me.
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I use it to find free information. If it's less relevant, ah, well, c'est la vie. So I'd have to say the latter.
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I found an article.
Well, I found the headline and first paragraph.
No idea if the content contains the information that the other article I read on the topic was lacking.
I could buy a subscription to this no-name "Wall" "Street" "Journal" and hope it has the information I want, or I could keep looking. If it doesn't have the information I want and I spend $105 on it, then what am I to do? Go pay NYT $40, and the Tribune $70, and so forth, just to peek at the same article on all of them hoping one has m
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Print the page and save it as a PDF. Does Windows have this ability built in yet? A long time ago I used to have to get a utility when I was using Windows to print to PDF. I think one of them was called CutePDF. Not as handy as sharing a link but it's something.
Learn to use Google (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a long string of "-site:xxxxxxxxx.com" to add to pretty much any search query I use, simply to weed out the useless pages. Just add "-site:wsj.com" to yours.
I wish Google would offer the option to store such a string and add it automatically to every query you send. I'm pretty sure that information would be enlightening, also to their advertisers...
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Why didn't they delist them, ban them from adsense, and try to pretend they don't exist on the internet as payback for their bullshit?
There's these things called anti-trust laws. You may have heard of them. The idea that Google is all powerful is exactly why Google is not at liberty to use its power.
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But technically, Google is not a monopoly, since it has many competitors, which includes Bing.
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But technically, Google is not a monopoly, since it has many competitors, which includes Bing.
No, that's not how that works. Windows had competitors, too. But their position in the marketplace was considered to be a de facto monopoly. That's what the USDoJ said when they also said that they had basically acted in every anticompetitive way possible. Right before Bush let them off the hook through Ashcroft. I don't know why I keep getting declared a conspiracy theorist for pointing out that it happened, or that so many billions of dollars are involved that there had to be something tricky going on the
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When you have eighty percent of the market, you have a monopoly. The fact that your best competitor only has ten percent means it doesn't really count.
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Google *owns* Youtube, bucko ...
If you want content, pay for it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: If you want content, pay for it... (Score:2)
Exactly, the majority of people searching get no value from paywalled content.
It's less relevant in the real sense that it's irrelevant to the majority of users.
Also, conversion to paid doubled on real numbers, so it sounds like it went fine (44% decrease, 4x conversions).
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the majority of people searching get no value from paywalled content. It's less relevant in the real sense that it's irrelevant to the majority of users....
I think this depends on the person, the search, and the cost for accessing the media. A better search engine would know how likely you are to pay for premium content and would suggest it to you. It would also be able to push you towards premium content if it was really worth it. A search engine that gives everyone free but crappy results is not necessarily the best.
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Google scholar can search for documents in sites you have a subscription to, sounds like something similar for general or new search. Of course I expect it costs money for Google to handle each case, I'm sure WSJ could afford to pay for that...
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https://www.cdreimer.com/slashdot.html
Now we know what the people who read the New York Times really look like. Now I wonder about breitbart.com readers.
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Over at github, and if you're more into prose, you'll find it here. Why're you asking?
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The game I wrote in '92 that's still live on the Internet, the one from '93 that's still live, the website I wrote in '92 that's still online or the multiple contributions to other web presences that I've made since?
My free content is on Wikipedia, IMDB, fifty forums and right fucking here in this article.
I don't even get ad revenue, so what's your point exactly?
Open Internet vs Chargeable Content (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Open Internet vs Chargeable Content (Score:5, Informative)
The simple truth is that there a million sources for news.
There actually aren't. The vast majority of news is generated from a handful of organizations with real humans on the ground doing the work. The other "sources" of news read and summarize those original articles, often with a much lower quality level. If you believe that by searching the internet for news you're getting a "million" different opinions and analyses, you're just wrong.
Google is correct (Score:5, Insightful)
They index and rank what is available. If you want something to be indexed and ranked... make it available. I've no sympathy at all for someone who wants simultaneously have and eat their cake.
The market will find a balance between monetization and reader base. I suspect it will involve giving away a complete summary and limiting subscribers to those interested in in-depth analysis.
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This. How exactly does the WSJ expect Google to rank their articles properly if they can't crawl them?
Re: Google is correct (Score:3)
I am Googlebot (Score:3)
They probably allow access to "googlebot" just not other browers. So technically possible, but against google tos.
So what's stopping us from posing as Googlebot? Are WSJ also filtering on IPs?
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A lot of sites actually did this in the past - they'd hide their content behind all sorts of ads and login required blocks, but Google would fully index them (you can always tell because the "cached" link would reveal all). A site with a lot of experts on sex changes did stuff like this often.
People eventually figured it out and surfed as Googlebot to get at all the answers in the open.
So it doesn't really work for either end - be
Goodbye WSJ (Score:5, Insightful)
Want to know the future? Look at what college kids are doing. When Forbes implemented their paywall the number of citations they recieved, and more importantly the number of citations the authors and articles highlighted in Forbes, dropped to almost nothing. Just look up the cite numbers at your local Alma Mater Library portal.
Forbes is dead to anyone under 28.
Now the Wall Street Journal wants to go the same route. What do these companies think will happen when potential customers grow up, go to university, get advanced degrees, and start their career without having any direct contact? They think of paywalled companies as relics of their parent's generation, doomed to die and never convert to customers.
Having a paywall is an explicit "We want our company to die with baby boomers."
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Want to know the future? Look at what college kids are doing.
Wearing soft clothes, pretending to care about minorites and getting STDs?
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So ... nothing changed since I was in college?
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Baby boomers are going to be with us for a long time... Today's management will be retired by the time baby boomers are dead.
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It seems like the free-to-read model isn't working for a lot of publications, and they see that some people can and do charge for content and do quite well out of it. The Financial Times is a great example - somewhat niche contant that people are more than willing to pay for.
I don't think it will work for the WSJ. Maybe the solution is some kind of "Netflix for news", where you pay one monthly subscription and get access to a wide variety of different newspapers and magazines.
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The solution is for a lot of newspapers to go out of business, for the simple reason that they are not needed anymore.
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When Forbes implemented their paywall the number of citations they recieved, and more importantly the number of citations the authors and articles highlighted in Forbes, dropped to almost nothing.
College kids are smarter than Slashdotters, then. Forbes delivered malware to site visitors and people are STILL posting Forbes links here on Slashdot, in spite of the fact that a Forbes story is never the best story on any subject. Shark jumped.
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WSJ should pay for google adsense then (Score:5, Insightful)
So WSJ wants what is essentially free advertising for its articles. If it's so important, WSJ should pay Google with Ad Sense like every other company.
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So WSJ wants what is essentially free advertising for its articles. If it's so important, WSJ should pay Google with Ad Sense like every other company.
Is Google's job to return the most relevant results, the most relevant free results, or the most relevant results weighted by their cost for access?
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Is Google's job to return the most relevant results, the most relevant free results, or the most relevant results weighted by their cost for access?
I would love to be able to set that in my preferences. But in any case, GoogleBot needs access to the page in order to index it.
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2 articles, 1 can be fully read and indexed by Google, the other only 1-2 sentences.
Google will make the former more available, simply because of the content.
Why present something that cannot be accessed? (Score:2)
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I like the way AndroidTV does the indexing of movies. AndroidTV knows if I'm currently subscribed to Netflix.
When I was subscribed to Netflix and had the app installed, it showed me Netflix results among the other results when I used the google search bar. And when I stopped subscribing and uninstalled the app, it no longer showed me those Netflix results among my general results. This is as it should be.
20 years later.... (Score:3)
For decades, sites have been falling over themselves to appear more palatable to search engines. Now REVOLT! Good for the net. Keep it up.
"Net Neutrality Drives The Left Crazy" (Score:5, Insightful)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/w... [wsj.com]
On May 19th, WSJ published an editorial AGAINST Net Neutrality. Now, they want a provider to lean over backwards to give them better access to customers, for "fairness". LOL hypocrites.
not quite.... (Score:3)
Same for a lot of paywalls where they want to get you in the door but aren't measuring the unintended effects (cannibalizing their own subscription rate) very well....
unfairly punishing (Score:2)
"owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., argue that Google's policy is unfairly punishing them for trying to attract more digital subscribers."
Even in theory it is impossible to "unfairly punish" Murdoch's News Corp.
This makes no sense (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer is obviously the first one and a ranking algorithm is going to take relevance into account. I don't see any reason that Google owes any paywall site a free lunch. More to the point, putting paywalls high in the list risks degrades the quality of results and therefore hurts Google.
Google should tell them to GTFO. Maybe even delist paywalls entirely.
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>Google should tell them to GTFO. Maybe even delist paywalls entirely.
Flagging the result as 'paywalled' and allowing a new filter to remove paywalled sites from your results would probably be a better solution.
give us more control, Google (Score:2)
I would like a button to permanently kill all for-pay news sites in search results and Google News: I never want to see them.
It would also be helpful if Google made it easier to remove specific news sources with a single click.
Re:The WSJ is hurting, you say? (Score:5, Insightful)
The WSJ is NOT hurting. They are gaining subscribers, and they are losing freeloaders. I will no longer read WSJ articles, but that is no loss for them, because I never paid them for anything and I never will, and I never click on the ads. Eyeballs are worth nothing if they can't be monetized.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The WSJ is hurting, you say? (Score:5, Interesting)
Relevance is measured in eyeballs, not subscribers. Back in the days when I was riding the train into the city, you could tell the serious people from the unserious ones by what paper they were reading. With online, it's word of mouth, not the paper you see people with.
It's a long term death sentence to put up a paywall.
This was the prevailing wisdom for much of the internet's rise, but I'm not sure it's as true anymore. Despite an avalanche of media outlets, there are not too many media generators (e.g., companies that gather news, that develop original programming, etc.). The rise of Netflix and its ilk is a testament to this. I'm not going to make a prediction on the future of media, but placing bets on free content solely funded by advertising is by no means a sure bet.
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Back in the days when I was riding the train into the city, you could tell the serious people from the unserious ones by what paper they were reading.
Sir Humphrey: The only way to understand the Press is to remember that they pander to their readers' prejudices.
Jim Hacker: Don't tell me about the Press. I know *exactly* who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they *ought* to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually *do* run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by peop
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It'll take a while, but eventually they'll go back on this. Wait and see.
Re:The WSJ is hurting, you say? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The WSJ is hurting, you say? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'd pay $1 a month, even if that only got me access to a dozen articles a month. That's about all I ever clicked through to anyway.
I get a local (electronic subscription) newspaper that meets most of my needs.
I'd sign up for WaPo, NY Times, maybe LA Times as well for $1 a month gets me a dozen.
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Or emergency toilet paper.
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You think I should not write for the WSJ?
Re:The WSJ is hurting, you say? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Dude nobody in finance reads the WSJ. Everyone follows Bloomberg.
The WSJ is for people who think it's a relevant source of information because it has "Wall Street" in the name. They're the same people who think that "Vitamin water" is healthier than a can of Coke.
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Dude nobody in finance reads the WSJ. Everyone follows Bloomberg.
WSJ may be slower than Bloomberg, but they are more influential. Everyone may read Bloomberg, but when WSJ says something, they turn their head.
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Your point is fine but that's a terrible analogy. While I do think a person can do better than Vitamin Water it has half the sugar and half the calories of Coke per serving so even if you ignore all of the added vitamins Vitamin Water is indeed healthier than a can of Coke.
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Vitamin Water it has half the sugar and half the calories of Coke per serving so even if you ignore all of the added vitamins Vitamin Water is indeed healthier than a can of Coke.
I'll have two cans!
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They're the same people who think that "Vitamin water" is healthier than a can of Coke.
It actually is. Next time, take a look at their calorie counts.
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I am no expert, but I am not sure that calorie counts is a valid metric for determining health qualities. I do stuff like go outside. Dense calories are good, for me. No, I don't drink much soda, but I am not sure caloric count is as great an indicator as you imply.
Re:Google needs to be broken up (Score:5, Insightful)
If there's a better argument for anti-trust investigations against Google than this, then I can't think of it.
Let me put it like this:
You want to open a telephone company or a cable company. But the thicket of laws preventing access to telephone poles either owned by the government or by another company are off limits to you by law.
You want to put in wired phones, you cannot. You have to go to the local telecom monopoly and pay them - at rates they set - to use them. You are not permitted to install your own. If you build a subdivision, you are required to install the infrastructure then pay the local telephone/cable monopoly a fee to take them over from you and you don't get any money for it.
If you want to set up cell phone towers, then you have to go, hat in hand, to the major telecoms and ask "Please sir, may I have some spectrum?" because there's not any available that aren't in the major telecom's players hands. And spectrum is sold at auction so if you want to out bid a industry with billions of dollars, please feel free. In fact, please do - I want to watch.
Google does not stop you from creating your own search engine. If you don't want Google to index your site, it's a trivial entry in the robots.txt file to let them know they are not welcome. And unlike other search engine operators, Google actually honors your explicit request to drop your site from their index and stop spidering your site.
Google invested many hundreds of thousands of man hours to create an indexing system you want to force them to give away to others. Communists do that too, you know. Force people to give up their private property, labor, and time.
I'm good with it if you disagree with Google's business model - but Google isn't stopping anyone from creating an even better search engine.
So... when are you getting started on that better search engine? Again, I wanna watch. I have popcorn.
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Google wants to index the world's information? Fine. Deciding its own policies on information retrieval and what business model it wants to promote? No bueno.
This goes to the heart of the purpose of a search engine. Should it solely return "free" results? What if those results are biased because they are ad-supported? Should they return only independent premium results? What if there is no independent source or the cost of the premium source is so high they are effectively inaccessible to the searcher?
There are a lot of difficult and interesting questions here, but no easy answers.
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How about letting the one doing the searching decide?
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This goes to the heart of the purpose of a search engine. Should it solely return "free" results?
It should return results that I want to see.
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I'd love it if I could not only filter out paywall sites, but all sites which only exist to try to sell me shit.
For all the wonderful business models that have developed with the internet, there are only two that have stuck: sites that get you to pay for their shit or sites that sell you other shit. If Google filtered those out, the internet would be very small.
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you mean, like, say, the way it was before the dot.com bubble? When there was way less content but pretty much all of it was what you were looking for, instead of having to weed out paywalled crap, blinky-ad crap and crap that will BLOW YOUR MIND?
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News in it's current state is not getting my money.
There's very few that aren't just all click bait and stories about celebrities, and even the NYT has decided that luring climate denialists is a positive business decision.
They'd get /some/ money if there was something like Newsflix, that cost 10 bucks a month to subscribe to everything, but I'm not paying 10-20 of them that each because I might be directed to them once a month from a search.
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Oh, and half these asshats allow taboolah and other malware to advertise on their paid sites. Ha, no.
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News in it's current state is not getting my money. There's very few that aren't just all click bait and stories about celebrities ...
I share your frustration, but it's this exact attitude that is causing the media to behave this way. If we all put our money where our mouth is and paid for reputable sources and not just clicked on whatever google sends us, we would all be better off.
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You get your salary at the END of the month, not the beginning. So why should the likes of WSJ get paid BEFORE they've proven their worth?
Build up the reputation for being worth paying for FIRST, and THEN you can try making us pay for it, because by then we've information to decide if it's worth the asking price. "Trust us, it'll be great, amazing" is not worth a penny.
They have free trials, dont they?
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See: Brave (browser)
https://brave.com/ [brave.com]