Comment by Bratmon
1 day ago
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I've gotten tired of these "Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding profitable ads, they should just put in ads that look pretty but pay almost nothing and supplement their income by working at McDonalds" takes.
Well, I'm going to block the ads anyway (or just leave), so if they're trying to find profitable ads, they may need to revise their strategy.
“I’m going to either steal your work in a way you don’t consent to, or not consume it” isn’t really great. The alternative is paywalls
Steal? Their server gave me some HTML and it’s up to my user agent to present it however I want.
Anything that kills adtech faster is a good thing at this point.
Much of their work consists of poorly sourced articles, sensationalism, disinformation, and bias to sway the audience.
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I'm pretty sure people would read more and click on more ads if they didn't have to endure waiting for 49 MB of crap and then navigating a pop-up obstacle course for each article.
100,000 people clicking at $0.01 CPM is way worse for them than 10,000 people clicking at $2 CPM.
If the ad-tech sausage factory needs 49MB of JS for a clickbait article, that is not "earning" a living. They are just externalizing costs to users and ISPs. You can defend the hustle, but the scale of waste here is cartoonish.
If you need a CDN and half a browser runtime just to show 800 words about celebrity nonsense, the business model is broken. Everyone else is footing the bandwidth bill for nonsense they never asked to recieve.
In the case of the New York Times, they have subscriptions and many are willing to pay for their work - but their subscriptions are not ad-free.
This is what killed my willingness to subscribe to most outlets. If I'm paying, I expect the page to load in under a second with zero tracking. Instead you get the same bloated experience minus a banner ad or two.
49MB or homelessness? There is surely other options.
If you can think of any, then congratulations! You've saved journalism!
You should probably tell someone so the knowledge doesn't die with you.
48MB
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Solution, see my post. ;-)
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This argument is valid if journalism was actually journalism instead of just ripping off trending stories from HN and Reddit and rehashing it with sloppy AI and calling it a day and putting in 4 lines of text buried inside 400 ads.
I don't like the state of journalism either but you realize this is a vicious cycle, no? People not paying for news (by buying newspaper, or more importantly paying for classified ads) leading to low quality online reporting leading to people not wanting to pay for online news.
It is an interesting view point. The core issue is journalists have just become middle-men in a free information era and demanding money for it. Like I said, what's to stop me (or someone) to simply write a crawler/agent that just gathers data on a bunch of sites where information is curated (like X, HN, Reddit) and presenting it to me in a readable format? I think people see this and hence the reluctance to pay. The average Joe gets his news from social media (Facebook / Instagram / X / etc.) and doesn't think any online news journal is worth paying $20/month for.
It only proves my point - if journalists really added value - like reporting on something that you can't just find out by browsing social media, maybe they would have a chance. But, what we see and have is only just sloppy reporting.
Here's one example:
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ars-technica-fi...
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I never understand this type of comment. People don't pay for news so newspapers (which by the way have pay walls) are forced to degrade their service. It seems strange to me. If I have a restaurant and people don't want to pay for my food, making even worse food with worse service doesn't seem a good solution. If I write books and people don't buy them, writing worse books doesn't make my sales better. Why journalists are different? They sell a service for money like all the others, but for some reason they have a special status and it's totally understandable that they respond to bad sales with a worse product. And actually, somehow it's our fault as customers. For some reason we should keep buying newspapers even if we don't think it's worth to save them from themselves.
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> Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding profitable ads
I mean, they can absolutely try. That doesn't mean they should succeed.