Mozilla and Scroll Partner To Test Alternative Funding Models for the Web (venturebeat.com) 86
An anonymous reader shares a report: News subscription service Scroll, which is yet to launch to consumers but has received the backing of several top publishers, courted another major player today: Mozilla. The browser maker says it will work with Scroll to better understand how consumers react to ad-free experiences on the web and subscription-based funding models. As part of the deal, Mozilla said it would test features and product ideas provided by Scroll, which itself has been conducting internal tests with a number of outlets. Small groups of Firefox users will be invited at random to share feedback and also respond to surveys, Mozilla said.
If I have to pay for it (Score:1, Offtopic)
I won't be joining uo
Re:If I have to pay for it (Score:4, Interesting)
Various pundits in political and gaming news sphere (of those I follow) generally played around with subscription model to the point where most of the content is free with constant nods to paying patrons on youtube and such. And then they have some kind of a small paywall for extras, with various tiers of payment for more benefits.
It's a model that found its backers.
Crybaby faggot whines about "the MSM" again (Score:1)
Everybody drink, we got a Republican crybaby liar who can't figure out that Fox News is the reason his head is stuck in Vladimir Putin's asshole. He likes the view.
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It costs a lot of money to pay those "anonymous sources" that are 100% factually wrong, but hit the narrative the news outlet wants.
I do point out that legitimate news sources have a firm policy against paying sources, anonymous or otherwise. It's the National Enquirer that you're thinking of that pays for scandal, and if you read them, you do get what you pay for, but you don't get journalism.
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Woosh. I meant NYT and WaPo... NE is more likely to get a story correct than NYT or WaPo. I listed 3 examples of news stories so bad that you should only expect them to happen once every 5 years or so.
But the stories you list show the opposite story from what you implied.
Story 1. Buzzfeed is some internet site. Says nothing about real sources.
Story 2. I assume you didn't actually read the New York Times story of Covington. Here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... [nytimes.com] and follow-up here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... [nytimes.com]
and editorials here https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... [nytimes.com] and here https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... [nytimes.com]
The way you can tell legitimate media from spin is that the legitimate media updates their storie
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>The way you can tell legitimate media from spin is that the legitimate media updates their stories when new information becomes available.
This is the most warped, and frankly disgusting lie I've seen in a long time. The way you can tell legitimate media from spin is that legitimate media:
1. Has more than one independent and verifiable source.
2. Will check such sources to very the story before publishing.
"Issuing corrections after publishing" and "reporting on a single anonymous source" is the realm of y
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Various pundits in political and gaming news sphere (of those I follow) generally played around with subscription model to the point where most of the content is free with constant nods to paying patrons on youtube and such. And then they have some kind of a small paywall for extras, with various tiers of payment for more benefits.
It's a model that found its backers.
Everyone I watch: gaming, science, history, and 1 political channel, everyone is crowd funded now.
It's the proven model once your channel is a success, but ad revenue has an advantage for new/small channels. I'm not sure crowdfunding alone is enough. OTOH, does getting $100/month from YouTube really motivate people to keep building their audience? I don't know.
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The NYT is a crappy example. I can live without any new sources that are publicly traded corporations. The biggest newspaper is not big in the modern scale of things. One million subscribers is on the successful side of a mid-sized YouTube channel.
I think a better example of the problem is modern movies. It's not at all clear that big-budget entertainment can be crowdfunded. It would be nice though to see properties with an established fanbase forced to actually make movies for that fanbase, instead of
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" I can live without any new sources that are publicly traded corporations." = retarded Fox News viewer making bullshit excuses for his treason.
Pretty sure FNC is owned by some sort of News Corporation.
The world would be a better place if publicly traded corporations had no involvement with politics.
Owned by billionaires [Re:If I have to pay for it] (Score:2)
" I can live without any new sources that are publicly traded corporations." = retarded Fox News viewer making bullshit excuses for his treason.
Pretty sure FNC is owned by some sort of News Corporation.
Quite famously, Fox News was owned by Rupert Murdoch (part of the group owned by and under Rupert Murdoch's control, News Corp). So, no: the Fox News you love to hate was not a publicly traded corporation; it was a private corporation owned by a foreign billionaire.
As of this coming June, though, Fox Corporation will be a separate entity (as a result of the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney).
It's still pretty much owned by the Murdoch family, though, since they own 39% of the voting power in the corporat
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I see no remaining value to old-school news companies. They've all become propaganda outlets for one party or another, and stopped pretending otherwise a couple years ago.
With the internet, you don't have to be a big publisher to have broad reach. You just need to have something interesting to say, And I think people's BS filters work better on the internet - there's a stubborn effect of believing broadcasts and print, no matter how often we're reminded it's all lies.
the cluelessnet [Re:Owned by billionaires] (Score:2)
....With the internet, you don't have to be a big publisher to have broad reach. You just need to have something interesting to say
Yep: "interesting". Crazy? Sure, that works, long as it's "interesting".
True? Unnecessary.
And I think people's BS filters work better on the internet
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa.
You make joke, yes?
All the evidence is to the contrary.
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No, it's really not. People believe what they read in the NYT or hear on the news far easier than what they read on Facebook. The studies showing this aren't controversial.
Re:the cluelessnet (Score:2)
The studies showing this aren't controversial.
Yes, not only are these studies not controversial, they don't exist at all!
Try this one: http://www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-... [ucsb.edu]
Very Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
I am happy to pay a fair price for content, but am unwilling in any scenario to be subjected to invasive advertising. Netflix is a good example of an ad-free subscription based library of video content.
One of the early promises of the Web was micropayments, remember that? It has yet to happen because the cost of a secure financial transaction is simply too high. I think the best answer is subscription aggregators, who provide access to a libraries of content and track which customers are accessing said content. At the end of the month, the subscription aggregator sends a single payment to each content provider, which represents the sum of all accesses that month.
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https://reddcoin.com/ [reddcoin.com]
It costs literally cents a day to host a website (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're not willing to pay a few cents a day for a website without remuneration, then maybe you shouldn't have a website. Here's the dirty little secret: All the newspapers exist because someone wants their voice to be heard. No, they're not in it for the profit. That's a means to an end, because newspapers aren't damn near free like servers and bandwidth. All the manufacturer web sites exist because that's the cheapest way to support their products, and you don't sell anything without support. Do you really want the blogs and vlogs that only exist because someone wants your money? People are unwilling to pay for the web because there's already more than anyone can consume in a lifetime. The web doesn't need a coin slot.
Re:It costs literally cents a day to host a websit (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I am concerned, news sites that won't let you use an adblocker but start autoplaying videos obviously don't give a shit about how much their bandwidth or content creation costs...
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That is a bit rich considering most of the web runs on free software, which is vastly more complex than your typical Youtube channel, even the ones which are not just clickbaiting, regurgitating and commenting. No, you're not special because you can talk, sing, dance, draw or write well. The web is full of people like you and they all want their works to be heard and seen. It used to be well known that artists are poor people. The notion that they should be well paid stars is an aberration that is going awa
It's fine to have hobbies (Score:3)
Your websites are a hobby. Your contribution to Linux is a hobby. Your free software is a hobby. Your free artwork is a hobby. It's fine to have hobbies, but what puts food on the table and a roof over your head to support your hobbies?
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First of all, are you saying my web sites and the other things I do for free don't count because I'm paying for them out of my own pocket?
Of course hobbies count. Nowhere did I say they don't. They just need some other source of income to sustain them. I was just curious how you fund your websites and contributions to free software, or how any other artist for that matter should fund his or her art.
Leave the information publication industry (Score:2)
And what is it that you do that's worth being paid for, exactly? Is it being part of the Internet's mechanisms that are ultimately funded by ads?
Some time ago, I had a conversation about this topic with Slashdot user bingoUV [slashdot.org], who recommended that people who can no longer make a living in information publication might try working in a butcher shop.
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Or they could take up coding.
How does writing a computer program and distributing it as free software pay the bills?
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Basically, yes. You can't mindlessly run your ten layers of abstraction with server side scripting on $3/month if you count users/second. You can serve many ten thousands of users a day on cheap shared hosting if you cache properly. For less than you pay for your phone, you can serve a web site to millions of users. A dedicated web server can easily process hundreds of requests per second. Get back to me when you exhaust that capacity.
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Which host are you with? I'm currently paying a lot more than that to WebFaction for shared hosting. And do these "hundreds of requests per second" include the video whose play button the user has clicked, or are you considering only text and small images?
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That's all a business with thousands/millions of users in traffic has to pay for a domain, email and web hosting? Just $3?
He was referring to having a "voice" on the web. It doesn't mean that millions of people, or anyone, will listen to it.
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Hosting the website is dirt cheap, yes. Significantly less than maintaining printing presses.
The problem is that the information on that site costs orders of magnitude more to to produce that it does to present. Reporters, editor, et al, need to eat. If you're consuming the material, it would be nice to get paid for it. I'm pretty sure nobody disputes this.
The problem is what is the best means of doing that? For any given website, I may read their articles daily. Or maybe once a month. Or maybe only o
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People miss reality because of the bullshit, corporate marketing is end to end psychologically destructive and manipulative bullshit. The internet itself in reality is an advertising platform, people produce the content to demonstrate their skills, products and services, to attract customers. Simply psychopaths are making a mess of it, forcing the worst kind of real medicine side show advertisements, lead by the USA, the Union of Shitty Arseholes, when it comes to their cabal of corrupt corporations, runnin
Pay me.. (Score:1)
and you can advertise to me.
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If a website charges $4 per month for ad-free access or nothing for access with ads, you can choose one of three things.
A. Access the website with ads
B. Access the website ad-free for $4 per month
C. Do not access the website
If you choose A, you are being paid $4 per month to view ads on that site. The site's operator just pockets the $4 in order to save on transaction fees with the bank. (Incidentally, swipe fees are why pay-per-article is not common.)
Also there used to be several "get paid to surf the web"
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In a world with "nothing on the internet but personal sites like mine whos owners pay for it themselves like I do", would there still be enough demand for Internet connections to keep the Internet business profitable for phone and cable companies? Or would your personal site's viewers instead have to take a bus to a public or university library during regular hours?
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quick light bursts of information (news, weather, wikipedia maybe?).
Without ads, commercial news sites would become less useful as readers can no longer share paywalled articles with friends and family who happen to subscribe to a different publication. Without ads, Weather.com by The Weather Channel would have no revenue source, unless I'm missing something.
But that horse is dead! (Score:2)
So I'll flog it again: "Charity Share Brokerage".
The idea is cost recovery and accountability, not massive profit. Wannabe donors would pledge shares, perhaps $10, toward the project proposal. It might be a proposal for new software, for a solution to the problem described in an article, for running a server for the next year, for another article on a related topic, or for something else. Each proposal would be vetted to make sure it's complete. That means a plausible schedule, a realistic budget, committed
Happy to have ads... (Score:4, Insightful)
How to market ad space? (Score:3)
there's nothing to say that websites can't sell ads to legitimate advertisers and put up advertisements.
This works for Daring Fireball [daringfireball.net] and Read the Docs [readthedocs.io]. But before you recommend requiring the ad-supported web at large to adopt their business model, please consider the following nothings:
1. A publisher selling ads on its own website has to somehow convince advertisers that the publisher exists in the first place, is worth the advertisers' time, and can detect and not charge for fraudulent page views or clicks. If a web publisher hired you to market the publisher's ad space to advertisers, what steps would you
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2. So...?
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1. How would you suggest that a small media company afford to hire "actual salespeople" the moment it becomes bigger than a hobby?
2. Whether ads pay 0 percent or 33 percent of the writing and hosting bill, that's still operating at a loss.
Transaction fees are the problem (Score:2)
I'll gladly fork over .99-1.99
The problem here is that the banks want a flat 0.30 USD for each transaction on top of a percentage of the total. This is true of both credit card transactions and ACH (checking account debit) transactions. This encourages merchants to reduce the percentage of revenue that goes to bank fees by adopting business models that increase the average transaction total. That's why you see monthly or annual subscriptions on news sites instead of pay-per-article.
Alternatives to advertising? (Score:2)
Subscription adblocker? (Score:4, Interesting)
Looking at multiple [niemanlab.org] descriptions [niemanlab.org] of how Scroll will work, they explicitly say the Scroll subscription fee won't cover individual news site paywalls -- you'll also have to have a subscription to the underlying site to get unlimited (or, in some cases, any) articles.
So unless I'm missing something, the only apparent benefit from my $5/month to Scroll is to get ad-free content (and, I suppose, less anti-adblocker cat and mouse).
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Thanks, that's useful information. It would seem that Scroll is of limited utility if all it does is block ads; I already have software that does that for free.
That said, I don't mind paying $5 a month to support sites I read regularly, but I've got some immediate questions about Scroll's analytics. Certainly it will include some amount of tracking -- I assume I need to be logged into Scroll for the ad blocking to kick in, and obviously it's going to use some sort of analytics to share its subscription fe
I have the results (Score:1)
"The browser maker says it will work with Scroll to better understand how consumers react to ad-free experiences on the web"
I can tell you this without any study at all: People like ad-free experiences, period.
"I wish I could see more ads!" said no one ever.
How to pay and why people pay (Score:3)
No CC brand connected to a political party stopping payments.
No 3rd party payment platform making political connections about who gets users funds.
No payments system that can remove the ability to move funds around.
No secretive banking system to shutdown bank accounts due to politics.
People enjoying connecting in a more direct way with the people who create the content they enjoy.
To support content with funds, long term payments, bandwidth.
Make the internet free and open again. For art, history, politics, reviews, news, projects, hobbies, comedy.
Without needing the political approval of a bank, CC company, platform, political party, government, nation, mil, think tank, NGO.
subscription versus advertising (Score:2)