Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model.
I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind.
There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up.
So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?
Well, one explanation that people often point to is that there are now many more places to advertise. Back then, newspapers were one of the best places to advertise if you wanted to reach a lot of eyeballs. Now you can advertise on Google and other search sites, you can advertise on any number of blogs and other sites through AdSense and other ad delivery networks, you can advertise on social media, you can place classified ads on Craigslist, etc. So newspapers now have to compete against all these other properties in a way they didn't have to do in previous generations.
But there's another consideration that is just as important and doesn't really get talked about as often. With the dawn of digital advertising, where every view, click and conversion is neatly accounted for, advertisers have come to realize that newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue, even when it was the only game in town. They just didn't have the metrics to prove it.
What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search.
So the real battle isn't even a battle for advertiser's attention. It's a battle to remain viable even though the advertisers would be better off advertising elsewhere.
As a consumer, the biggest appeal of print newspaper advertising (as opposed to web, social media, etc) is legitimacy.
No fly-by-night scam operation will be able to afford a full page ad in a reputable magazine, and I hope newspapers also do due diligence on the advertisements they run, as their reputation (and possibly even legal liability, especially in certain fields like medicine, etc) is at stake.
This means I can be confident an ad in a magazine won't be an outright scam and I can somewhat trust it (sure, it's still trying to sell me something that I wouldn't have otherwise bought, but if it's relevant and I'm confident it's not a scam or low quality crap, then why not?).
The same does not apply to digital advertising where there's plenty of shit, no human actually reviews the ads and given the ads are very targeted there's little chance anyone else sees the ad (in a magazine, everyone sees it, so an expert in the field can speak up, unlike for a targeted ad where only the people in the targeting criteria - who often lack the knowledge to make an informed decision - see the ad).
The other advantage of the lack of tracking is that I get exposed to ads outside of my daily workflow. I work in IT, and if I were to browse without ad blockers (cancer blockers as I call them) I would just see IT or business-related ads all over the place. I don't want to see those - I already know what products I need for IT and have the knowledge & experience to do my own research. On the other hand, a print ad which knows nothing about me might show me an ad for cat food - I want that; I know nothing about the subject and am willing to trust the magazine's reputation behind it.
> No fly-by-night scam operation will be able to afford a full page ad in a reputable magazine, and I hope newspapers also do due diligence on the advertisements they run, as their reputation (and possibly even legal liability, especially in certain fields like medicine, etc) is at stake.
I disagree with your assessment. For one, if you base reliability on monetary costs, then it's trivial for a fly-by-night scam to work around it. You just have to get more money. A loan could work. Or VC investment - such companies have plenty of money to burn on advertising, and it in no way reflects the quality of their work.
Two, reputation. I don't think reputation matters much to anyone anymore. Think of all the corporate scandals that are featured essentially weekly on HN. Or, closer to the topic, think of all the bullshit newspaper publish that gets thoroughly debunked in discussion threads around HN or topical subreddits. And yet both those corporations and those papers are still happily chugging along, no worse for the wear. If reputation of news publications mattered at all, nobody would post anything from Bloomberg here ever since the Supermicro fiasco.
I think the theory behind the legitimacy is better than the practice. Sure, you can't buy ads in national publications for a fly-by-night level scam the way you can buy social ads. But outright scams can be as big as Enron, and people running scam ICOs/MLM companies etc can definitely afford the ad bill if they don't find the sucker ratio higher through more targeted digital channels...
Binance is charging a million dollars to list your token on the exchange. If anything there's an adverse selection effect: the more willing you are to fork over a million dollars to get your token listed, the more likely you are to be a scam. Crypto projects with the most real adoption and genuine development (like MakerDAO) didn't even ICO at all, they just airdropped tokens to get the ecosystem started and let the quality of the product take it from there.
IIRC there was a similar phenomena with the dot-com boom: companies that spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising did so because they weren't selling anything useful, while the actual survivors spent zero on advertising and grew virally from word of mouth. Google and Facebook make money by selling ads, not by buying them: Google's first ad didn't run until 2010.
One of the advantages of print newspapers is accountability. Print newspapers can be (and generally are) archived by public libraries. My local library has archives of local papers going back decades. When corrections to previously published articles become necessary, the corrections are published in such a way that both the original article and the correction are archived.
Of course there are projects that seek to archive online newspapers too (archive.org is awesome!), but online newspapers are able to thwart archiving either through technical means or policy (robots.txt.) Furthermore even when they aren't maliciously attacking archival efforts, online publications can swap out headlines or even the full content of articles, sometimes before the original has been archived. That sort of undisclosed on-the-fly revision simply isn't possible with print newspapers.
You shouldn't be trusting any ad, wherever it is. Actually, the most reputable the platform, the more skeptical you should be since you are more trusting of the platform to begin with. The easier you are to be duped.
This, like so many extreme opinions, is just wrong.
An advertisement that happens to reach someone who has a problem that your product solves isn't a scam. It is a way to get that person to know about your solution.
And this is just motte and bailey. Yes, there are some advertisements like you describe. No, vast majority of them aren't like that.
It's like a city was proposing to limit car movement through the center to improve air quality, and you countered with "but some cars are electric and don't pollute!". Yeah, right. Wake me up when most of them are.
Brick&mortar stores, Consumer Reports, magazines[0], product catalogs, trade shows, yellow books, discussion groups, word of mouth. Basically, everything that's pull (vs. push) and limits itself to providing information about products and problems they solve (vs. playing on your emotions, or delivering sales tactics).
I agree with the dislike for over-extended advertising techniques online. But those are all ads, as such don't really answer my challenge to the parent poster. Ads on some fundamental level provide a service to the recipient.
I feel it's a bit disingenuous on the part of advertisers to claim that any commercial information source is an ad. This basically makes any discussion impossible because if everything is an ad then nothing is. It's a dirty trick of the ad industry.
did the creator of the X pay a third party to present X? is X an essential part of its context? is the recipient of X seeking X itself or something else?
Some ads provide a service to the recipient. Most ads, as exist today, provide a net disservice.
I don't think the parent poster meant absolutely all ads, just the vast majority of them. But in so far as they meant all ads, it's still a good point you shouldn't trust them - not even the product catalogs you yourself paid for. There's very little legal and social protection from the merchant lying to you, and all the business incentives to do so.
> What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search.
AFAICT, search is a really amazing ad product. Users are declaring their interest in a subject, _right now_.
> They just didn't have the metrics to prove it.
You're not wrong, but I wouldn't discount the power of inertia. There's a story Steven Levitt tells on his Freakonomics podcast about a retailer who wanted to measure the impact of print ads. He suggested not running print ads for a duration in order to measure impact, and was met with incredulity: "Are you crazy? We can't just do that. We'll get fired like Jordan was. Dude was so unorganized that he forgot to order ads for the northeastern market for his entire summer internship."
After analyzing the data from that mishap, there was no measurable impact, and yet they refused to run the trial for longer. 'We can't not just buy ads' was the argument, even though the data suggested you totally could. I guess if your department buys ads, until you have an alternative, arguing for a budget cut is arguing your department should all be laid off.
The question is: where did this pattern come from? Why buy too many ads in the first place? Corporations are supposed to be maximizing profits, and yet we hear they are wasting tons of money on ads. Why don't some of them would learn not to and bring massive returns to shareholders? Some thoughts:
- A recent comment regarding a travel agency reflected that execs would check the stats on the most popular travel agency every week, and wanted to be at the top. They would therefore run ad campaigns at the end of the week in order to drive themselves to the top, even if the ads were a net loss in revenue. This suggests that a lot of advertising is aimed at people who are already invested in the company: execs and shareholders, who see the ads and think it is reflective of how well the company is doing (which, in a way, it is: it signals they have extra money to waste on advertising)
- I recently saw a clip from a Jobs interview, where he contrasted non-monopolies, which are run by product people, with monopolies (like Xerox and IBM), which are run by "sales and marketing" people. Presumably some ads are effective. Controlling the ads that are effective gives marketing power over the company, in the monopoly case. Having attained this power, they then use it to route the company's spare revenue to buy still more ads. This has the interesting implication (perhaps obvious) that a monopoly is bad for shareholders (as well as consumers), who are being robbed of the revenue now being spent on ads.
> Why don't some of them would learn not to and bring massive returns to shareholders?
I decided not to answer that question in the comments above in the name of brevity, but since you asked. My own thoughts:
- Punctuated evolution. The firms that follow the data are the ones more likely to survive recessions. One hopes that orgs where convention is only upset in a crisis are the ones more likely to fold.
- Re Jobs: he is widely regarded as a 'sales and marketing' genius, and was succeeded by a former IBMer focused on supply chain logistics, which is where monopolies actually focus. Why hire more salesman when your customer has to come to you to buy regardless?
Another thought: advertising advertises itself. So on one side, you have data saying you're buying too much ads. On the other, you have advertisers telling you they'll increase your profits if only you pay them. I have a feeling that the advertiser side usually wins.
> newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue
Back in the 1980s (in the Datalight/Zortech days), the only game in town was advertising in computer magazines. We knew it worked because the day the monthly mag appeared on the shelf, we'd get a big spike in sales, that would then taper off through the month. It was fairly easy to correlate which computer mags mattered, how ad placement in the mag affected results, and how the size of the ad worked out.
For example, we learned to never bother advertising in August. Programmers apparently all went on vacation in August :-) but September would be a huge month for us.
I tried print advertising in the aughts, but there was literally zero return on investment.
Heck, Computer Shopper was an absolutely huge magazine that was almost nothing but ads. There were some mostly low quality articles to lend a little credibility but basically people bought it for the ads.
People like advertisements and used to read whole magazines made of them, but web advertising is a hated, privacy-violating, battery-draining, performance-crushing, pop-up and autoplay-infested, malware-tainted monstrosity. Advertisements used to engage and attract magazine readers, but web advertising detracts from web sites so much that ad blockers are immensely popular if not essential for a pleasant browsing experience.
I think that means we're doing it wrong, but nobody wants to admit it.
That's because they push ads at people for what they think they want. That's very different from people buying ads for what those people actually want.
For example, I buy hot rod magazines for ads for cool stuff for my car. I'm not interested in furniture ads in those magazines, and furniture makers don't advertise in car mags. When I want to buy furniture, then I'll buy a home decor magazine and look at furniture ads. I don't want to see a fuel injection pump in a home decor magazine.
Hemmings Motor News is another example of effective advertising. It's nothing but car ads - and people pay for a subscription.
An online example is newegg.com. All it is is computer electronics. It's my go-to location when I'm looking for stuff for my computer. Seeing ads on newegg is exactly why I'm going there.
I tend to watch youtube videos about cars. One day, the absurdity struck me - they're trying to force me to watch ads at the beginning, but the whole video is basically an ad. It's absolutely ridiculous, the idea that I need to watch an ad for something I'm not interested in to "pay" for watching an ad for something I am interested in (albeit I'm probably going to buy neither in the near future).
Of course, if I actually was able to buttonhole some guru at Google who understood the business and my situation, they would just look at me like I was an idiot and say "we warned you that if you turned off the various personalization features the ads wouldn't be relevant".
But if I left every option turned on, the ads wouldn't be better, just creepier.
Modern consumers still actively seek out and consume advertisements (in some contexts). Movie trailers on youtube rack up millions of views. Industry promotional events like E3 receive huge amounts of eager attention from video game consumers. "I watch the Super Bowl for the ads" is a sentiment so common it's basically a meme.
Computer Shopper was more of a condensed catalog of multiple vendors. It served as a search index and comparison pricing utility. Nobody "liked" the ads other than that was the only way to become informed about a wide range of products.
People like reading ads about products they're interested in. I know I do. This idea that ads are all toxic because their purpose is to sell just isn't right.
In the Computer Shopper case, it was mostly about price discovery for things you wanted to buy. You wanted X. You flipped through pages to find a good price on X.
It was also how I found out that I could now have a whopping 2GB hard disk in my own machine - or that I could upgrade my 486 to a pentium with this cool new thing called the Pentium Overdrive. Computer mags were especially exciting because you got to see the progress of technology.
I think most people back in the day came away from these magazines wanting more things they didn't even know existed prior to opening it up.
I was buying computer magazines in the 90s as much for the ads than for the content. That was the printed version of newegg/ebuyer in some way. I still do browse on those occasionally even when I don’t want to buy anything just to see what’s new and where prices are. And that was a time when clock frequencies were changing month on month!
I think Instagram has nailed this, personally. Their ads get seamlessly placed in your feed, they're usually interesting to look at with high quality graphics and videos, and if I don't want to see them, it's trivial to scroll past them. But the ads have definitely snagged me to make a few impulse purchases this year.
Interesting, I often find the ad selection on Instagram especially abysmal. It might be that my non-US geolocation has a negative effect on this. Most of the ads I get are either generic products for my gender and age range, local industry companies wasting budget on stuff I'm interested in but don't need at scale and won't ever buy through Instagram links, useless recruiting startups aimed at what I assume would be me 15 years ago (and even then I was not interested in this form factor), and of course a wide range of scams from personal finance to Kickstarter products.
Newspapers had a local monopoly on publishing to their circulation. If you want to communicate with 100,000+ people in your city tomorrow you had to pay. News, sports, comics, the content is bait to drive the circulation.
Digital publishing broke the monopoly and eroded the profits. In my opinion, newspapers that already had to deal with real competition before the internet have been much more successful: NYC and London papers.
Now there are basically two kinds of news content: factual information that is cheap and not profitable because it is a commodity, and propaganda that is supported by the beneficiary.
The increased income of Google (which is nearly all ads) matches the decreased income of the newspapers, so it doesn't seem like the ad spending actually decreased, it just moved away from the papers.
I think there is a lot of inadvertent irony/lack of awareness in:
"Google, Craigslist and others are (mostly) in the new high-intent advertising market. It's an entirely different type of market based on an entirely different type of moment. The reason newspapers are losing here is because you aren't even in this market to begin with."
Not even in the market? Surely anyone who reads about the newspaper business has heard about the role of classifieds, and how they propped up newspapers until Craigslist came along?
Which is completely in line with what that person said. Why spend $x on newspaper advertisements when you can spend them on Google and have much better targeting.
Also, certain news stories will naturally attract more eyeballs and today's news has optimized for those stories - hence the torrential outpour of sensationalized clickbait. Today's headlines and stories aim to elicit an instinctive, visceral System 1 reaction, while System 2 articles that take a bit more thought are relegated to the back pages.
I run Thinking About Things [1], an email newsletter with one interesting link every day. Popular ideas and clickbait content always gets more views and clickthroughs, and I see the temptation that newspapers face to include only that content.
The old joke was "We know 50% of our ad buy money is wasted in newspapers, we just don't know which 50%."
Now they know, and they also know the amount of waste is much higher.
This plus the destruction of classified ads has hit the newspaper industry hard.
Now pile on top all the "news" sites that don't really spend any money on editors, research, or reporting (all those sites that post articles about other articles or even worse tweets) that directly compete with newspapers on advertising money and you have a very bleak environment.
I wonder also how much of this ad money isn’t insurance against being treated too harshly by the newspaper.
There are ads in newspapers where I just can’t think of any other reason. Like an ad for EADS (don’t remember if it was EADS or an equivalent). I ain’t going to buy an Airbus airliner in my next sunday shopping! And I doubt airlines make decisions based on ads.
Could be brand recognition - subsidised by the airlines (potentially unintentionally, when the price of the marketing is baked into the cost of an airplane) to make you feel somehow better in flying in an Airbus instead of a Boeing.
My understanding is that Craigslist really killed the newspapers. What funded them was a combo of full page adds and the classifieds. I remember paying $30 to post a garage sale. Since Craigslist expanded you could see each newspaper get steadily smaller and smaller over the years.
Not so. Newspapers reached peak profits in the 1990's. At least, this is common wisdom from many people I know who worked at one at the time. Lots of first class travel and good per diems. This was also the time that lots of papers got bought up by big media companies.
Newspaper profits were also pretty good up through the early 2000's. I've never been convinced that craigslist was immediately responsible for the loss of classifieds revenue (which used to represent %50 of many newspaper's income), so much as the internet made it really cheap to build classifieds ads distribution platforms, craigslist being only one of them.
It’s anecdotal but the advertisements that work best on me are the ones hanging around public transportation hubs (I’m Scandinavian). I would never go to the movies if those spots didn’t inform me there was a new movie running.
> With the dawn of digital advertising, where every view, click and conversion is neatly accounted for, advertisers have come to realize that newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue, even when it was the only game in town. They just didn't have the metrics to prove it.
How does this compare with television advertising? I see them as similar. Is traditional television advertisement per-viewer revenue dwindling compared to the past? I know the subscriber count is reducing and they have alternative income streams via subscriber fees. Is it that the ROI on television advertising remains higher compared to print simply because there are still a significant number of eyeballs?
Related to this, I wish more of Hulu's financials were made public. They have essentially concentrated on growing their ad-supported subscriptions by cutting the consumer price and doing subscription bundle deals with others like Spotify. Sometimes you could get Hulu for $1 per month (when it costs about ~$12 per month for an ad-free subscription).
Is it due to ad supported subscriptions being worth more to Hulu or is it just a subscription count growth strategy?
Hulu's privacy policy[1] is one of the whackiest I've ever seen. Most policies limit sharing of user information to affiliates, service providers, business partners (read: advertisers) and when legally required. Hulu makes no such promises:
> We may share information collected from or about you with third parties as explained further below, including business partners, social networking services, service providers, advertisers, and other companies that are not affiliated with Hulu.
Basically anyone.
But it's probably not that big of a deal if advertisers and "other companies not affiliated with Hulu" can see that you watch Always Sunny with alarming frequency, right? Well that's not the only data they're collecting. Hulu's tracking is just as invasive as Google and Facebook:
> This information may relate to your use of the Hulu Services, websites you visited, advertisements you viewed, and your other activities online. Advertising that is based on information collected from or about you across websites, applications and other platforms over time is known as interest-based or online behavioral advertising.
It's not tracking though, Hulu uses the far less sinister name of "Behaviorial Advertising" in their policy. And the policy repeatedly justifies their practices by pointing to the "Self Regulatory Principals for Online Behavioral Advertising"[2] which are not particularly principled principals. Unsurprising when you consider they were created by the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
Hulu might share information about everything you do online but at least your personal data will be cloaked in the anonymity of "aggregate" data, right? Nope.
> We may share the information collected from or about you in encrypted, aggregated, or de-identified forms
That's a tres commas club sentence. Meaning they'll share your information in the aggregate OR de-identified OR they'll encrypt it. So they might send all of your information and browsing habits to the highest bidder but at least they'll do you the solid of encrypting it first.
And notice they use the term "de-identified" instead of the standard "personally identifiable." That's no mistake. According to the policy, "de-identified" means:
> that the information does not identify you personally
As in, it doesn't have your full name or phone number. Contrast that with the typical definition of PI[3]:
> any information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual's identity
It's no wonder they aren't operating in Europe.
TL/DR: Hulu's privacy practices are significantly more abhorrent than FAANG's.
> why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?
It isn't in a shambles; it's just shifted to a more efficient mode of delivery. Who is going to bother with ads printed on paper that readers have to shuffle through when they can get them delivered direct to the readers' eyeballs online?
As any SMB owner who dabbles in advertising will tell you, you can, in fact, get a pretty good guess as to what the ROI on print advertising is. Look at business when you run ads versus business when you don't.
For stuff like brand uplift, yes, its difficult to measure the value of print advertising. It's also difficult to measure the value of brand uplift on the web.
> What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search.
Which should be a surprise to nobody, given that search implies intent to... Look for something. Often a product.
> As any SMB owner who dabbles in advertising will tell you, you can, in fact, get a pretty good guess as to what the ROI on print advertising is.
Of course! Scientific advertising was published in the 1920s! It's just that Madison Avenue could make a hell of a lot more money by being shy about it. So, nobody was talking.
I would encourage anyone interested to read Edward Bernays (nephew, through both parents, of Sigmund Freud). He lays out why journalism is a loss leader for people who want control. It makes a lot of otherwise confusing market dynamics around media make sense. Making money, directly, on journalism is almost never the idea.
Interestingly (to me), Edward Bernays is discussed a lot in Mario Vargas Llosa's latest book Tiempos Recios (Fierce Times), as the "most influential person in the history of Guatemala" due to his PR work on behalf of United Fruit. Unfortunately I believe it is only available in Spanish currently.
That's a somewhat conspiratorial take. While there are publishers that heavy-handedly tell their newsrooms what to write (i. e. Murdoch), the vast majority does not.
Many publishers are typical corporations, with a large number of shareholders, none of which get to even talk to the journalists.
Even among those owned by individual billionaires, the evidence is lacking. The Washington Post, for example, has broken quite a few (often negative) stories about Amazon. The Seattle Times recently broke much of the 737-MAX scandal, even though they are faily dependent on Boeing. The New York Times doesn't even write much about Mexico, let alone topics related to Carlos Slim's financial interests.
The motivation to own these reputable papers seems to be far easier to explain as a status thing. Kinda like NFL teams, but for the more intellectual billionaires.
I used to think it was a strange coincidence that Bernays was Freud's nephew. But it wasn't. Bernays promoted his uncle in the U.S., so the fame of the two has a common cause.
I also recommend Adam Curtis’s four part documentary “The Century of the Self”, the first episode of which is here: https://youtu.be/DnPmg0R1M04
The first episode deals exclusively with Bernays, and the following three episodes follow a political narrative of impact.
I believe Curtis’s “Hypernormalisation” would be more salient to the narrative here, which discusses the funding of misinformation as an alternative to traditional authoritarian power structures like censorship: https://youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU
All you have to do is read the history of newspapers and journalism. Almost exclusively, they were created by financial, industrial and political elite to influence the population. They were never created to make money.
Alexander Hamilton didn't create the New York Post to make money. Henry Jarvis Raymond (politician) and George Jones (banker) didn't create the NYTimes to make money. Stilson Hutchins (politician) didn't create the WashingtonPost to make money. These newspapers were created to further their founders' political interests.
And in case you were wondering, Bezos didn't buy WashingtonPost to make money either.
While the 50 cents per edition that newspapers charged was not enough to cover their costs, it sent a signal to advertisers that they were getting a certain type of eyeball. An eyeball that had 50 disposable cents per day to buy packaged news in a local market. That 50 cents was an important signal. Newspapers would find other ways of getting those same eyeballs, by striking deals with hotels and airlines and essentially supplying papers at a deep discount, but making it up with the fees they could charge to advertisers based on their access to travelers, who have a lot more than 50 cents to spend. Some publications took it one step further: they covered business and their readers could put the subscription on their corporate cards as a business expense. Personally, it cost them nothing. This is the strategy of the WSJ, the FT, and what the NYT would like to be with DealBook, etc.
Also solved the issue of people walking off with a giant stack of newspapers and throwing them in a gutter, as occurred with some completely free papers.
Is that the 50c really signalling disposable income? Or just that it signalled that the newspapers were being read by humans and not just sitting in a pile somewhere?
To my intuition 50c per day doesn’t signal a useful amount of disposable income even in 2006 dollars.
I thought it was more to do with the type of person that read papers more than any price signal. If I were to generalize my experience with people reading papers it's that the poorest 20% of society never read them, the next 20% read the Sunday paper, the next 20% read it daily and the 20% after that read something like the economist. Through self selection advertisers could target their audiences somewhat. Of course those are extremely broad generalizations.
> The LA times peak circulation was in 1990 when they delivered 1,225,189 papers daily.
Wow, I had no idea that city papers had such robust delivery networks back then.
I can almost imagine an alternate timeline where papers might have survived by leveraging that network to deliver books or other items from a catalog before Amazon.
I suppose their scale was in part only possible due to their consistently sized product and how much abuse a newspaper can take, but still wonder if any papers took a stab at delivering other print products before the internet era.
A local press publisher in Croatia (Tisak) did just that: leveraged their distribution network for overnight package delivery.
The system works better for packages than post, since you send and pick up the parcel at their newsstands (there's always one nearby) at your leisure, avoiding the annoying "delivery failed, pick up at the post office" notices you'd get from the postman attempting delivery while you are at work.
It was also helped by the fact that the national postal service here is notoriously slow and not exactly reliable.
Interesting thought. Although perhaps the network you build to deliver a million identical papers just looks too different to what you'd need to deliver individual items?
The other major distribution network already visited every addressable location and took packages of varying sizes: the postal service.
Newspaper delivery was closer to 'real-time' - it was printed this morning, and arrived for consumption during morning coffee. Many children took paper routes for some cash and delivered on their bikes. You slow down paper delivery when you start sending along multiple shipments, weighing more, for various customers.
I never thought of this angle before, but imagine if a SV startup started a distribution model in 2019 depending on young teens riding their bikes around neighborhoods early in the morning before school. There'd be endless articles shaming them for child labor and for foisting their costs on to vulnerable workers.
Really not sure what to make of that. Other than maybe our outrage triggers have been honed to a razor's edge
Outrage about child labor in the bicycle delivery business is well over a century old, and for good reason [0].
Newspaper delivery, on the other hand, was a short before-school/after-school job (back when evening papers were a thing) that didn't particularly interfere with schoolwork, and had already been displaced by adults in cars in the 90s after our society ceded street space as automobile death zones instead of treating it as public space that children could be expected to ride bikes along safely[1].
And the thing about child paper routes is that they were considered a form of contractor. The newspaper would provide you the papers on credit, at the end of the month you would collect the amount of the bill from the customer, then pay the newspaper the amount you were billed. The billed amount may have been 50% or so, I don't recall the exact amount.
The outrage machine has damaged our civilization, and must be pushed back harshly, by the liberty machine.
I find it handy to evaluate the source of the outrage by this metric:
If they, personally, would not lay down their own lives in defense of whomever they are “protecting”, especially if they disagree with what that person is doing — they are somebody’s shills, and should be harshly disagreed with.
That's true, but I also feel like the "real-time" aspect is what made it so remarkable. Sure Amazon was useful when it just used standard mail for books, but it really became addictive when 2-day prime shipping became available.
Thinking about it though, I do think there's another big difference in that the stealing newspapers and reselling them isn't very profitable to potential criminals. Also, missing a paper delivery due to delivery error isn't the end of the world either.
So it seems like for Newspapers to really make any use of this network, they'd have to stick to delivering stuff that didn't majorly change their format or value, preferably that they could print on-demand themselves.
I guess the Sunday coupon print-outs could be considered an example of branching out a bit then?
I do recall that The Sunday Paper came with a [figurative] metric !@#$ ton of coupons inserted. I'd guess 'branching out' was really just selling slightly different advertising/marketing on Sundays.
When I lived in Solna in northern Stockholm, the same municipality that houses most of Karolinska Institutet one of the worlds top non english-speaking medical schools, I noticed the hospital using the nightly newspaper distributor to deliver letters about appointments and blood tests.
It was pretty sweet getting them at night, leaving the test in the morning and having results in 24 hours from the doctor ordering the tests.
My wife and her brother made pretty decent money as 11-14 year olds delivering papers in their neighborhood. About 80% of houses got at least the Sunday edition.
When I was 11-13, I did the same. I made about $15/hr in 1990, which was pretty baller for a 6th grader. Hell, there are people who wish they were making that today. I eventually took a pay cut to hire my older brother so I could sleep in on weekends. I blew most of my money on gadgets in the radio shack catalog and I don't regret a minute of it.
This is a somewhat obvious take on the decline of paper journalism. Yes, you paid for that newspaper / magazine, but the majority of money is in the ads space. Even that payment? A screening tool for advertisers -- if you don't read the paper or more importantly see the ads, you'll presumably cancel and save the money.
There was a tweetstorm by some journalism prof I can't recall that was basically saying newspapers killed themselves, by consolidation, mergers and over-reliance on classified ads and news-by-wire. By the time Yahoo! news came along started publishing AP news wire feeds, and Craigslist allowed free listings, they had already cost optimized away local news they'd need to compete against new entrants. Perhaps someone will find that twitter thread for me.
> For those who aren’t quite sure why these media layoffs keep happening, or think “it’s the internet!” or “people don’t pay to subscribe,” there’s a lot more going on.
> Classified ads were a damn boondoggle. $500 in a mid-metro to place a car ad. The more expensive your item, the more you got charged. No wonder people rebelled the minute they were offered the ability to do it for free. Newmark didn’t kill classifieds; news publisher greed did.
> Profit margins for companies like Gannett and Knight Ridder were commonly around 30-40%.
> So chains started gobbling up papers all over the country in the ‘80s and ‘90s. They took on debt to do this because with 40% margins, there wasn’t much downside in that model.
> Today, the advertisers see's exactly how many times their ads have been viewed, and pay accordingly. The rise of Ad blockers did not improve the situation.
I eschewed ad blockers until around 2016, when the (relatively mainstream) sites I was frequenting started getting hit with a lot of malicious ads. I'm happy to support content I enjoy, but not at the expense of my own security.
I started strongly encouraging my family and friends to use adblockers around the same time, when nytimes.com was hit by a malvertising campaign.
I understand the economic model of free access with advertising, but I'm not going to put my computer and data at risk for it. Allowing ads to include executable code was idiotic.
It used to be that the "profit" from advertisement paid for journalists to write stories that would get you to look at them.
Now the profit from ads largely goes to engineers to build products for the web, (and shareholders of tech companies).
Both journalism and web stuff provide public good, but we need to figure out how to replace the revenue that financed journalism. The public was getting it for "free" before, and when it moved online we continued to want to get it for free, but the advertising model did not survive the transition.
Journalism is in such a disastrous state, I feel like/hope there's a growing appetite for a source that is of genuinely high quality and has an uncompromising approach.
No ads, no clickbait, no partisan nonsense, no dark patterns, no hit pieces, no mixing of news and opinion.
Just uncompromisingly focused fact-based journalism (of course there will always be some bias and mistakes, but there's a lot you can do to mitigate these things).
I wonder if there are enough people that would pay $X/mo for this to make it viable. I'd happily pay at least $20/mo.
You pay about $20/month today for a digital subscription for one of the global brands like the New York Times, Economist, etc. which still have ads to a greater or lesser degree.
They're doing kinda/sorta OK with digital subscriptions but basically journalism is expensive to produce.
I remember my dad paying subscription for Time magazine since I was a very little (Mexican living in Mexico). I always felt their journalism quality was very good. Are they still doing print?
* https://www.bendbulletin.com/ - because I live here and they're the only ones that always have someone at things like city council meetings, county commissioner meetings and the like.
The rise of Craigslist is one factor. But I'm surprised that nobody is talking about local advertisers vs national. National business and websites are more likely to advertise on a (local) news website, compared to your local business. For example, twenty years ago a local mom and pop pizza joint would be apt to advertise in a newspaper, due to a captive local audience. But today, they'd be less likely to advertise on a local newspaper website. So there goes that revenue. And you're not going to find them pushing ads to the Huffington post.
Also the rise of online business review websites (Yelp, Google Reviews, Trip Advisor, ect) are now more useful and specifically targeted to an audience looking for local eats. (And also killed the Yellowpages.)
Reminds me of the one snark that said "style" is because the journalists really want to be novelists but can't finish a full length one or get published so they slip it into their day job.
In all seriousness it seems like an attempt to fill a minimum word count without much research or math like say percentages of revenue by ads vs consumer sales over time.
I was going to buy a physical newspaper recently thinking it would make for cheap packing material, only to find that the Sunday edition of the NY Times is like $6 now. It's not as fat as it used to be either it seems.
The $0.01 daily paper cost of 1898 would (based on 1913 dollars) today be about $0.26. The US dollar actually depreciated generally through about 1900, though at a fairly gradual rate.
On September 13, 1987, the Sunday Times reached its maximum extent: 12 pounds (5.4 kg), 1,612 pages.
Someone keeps leaving physical papers in my driveway despite me never asking them to or subscribing to anything. They usually go directly in the bin, but I also usually feel guilty that I'm not saving them all for some unknown future project.
The model I've wished for is a large micropayment network covering many to most online news sources charging, I don't know, a penny or two per article. Maybe no charge if you close the page after two seconds. Ad views are worth less than that, and I can easily afford ten or twenty cents a day to read the news across a variety of sources.
I want to pay for news. But I don't have the budget to pay $20/mo each to six great newspapers all equally worthy of my attention, and nor do most other people.
Ten or twenty cents a day is lower than the fifty cents for a paper copy- but the marginal overhead is also zero.
Sure, but I think it's just one local optimum. The price is so high that few people will pay it, which means the price has to be high. But if the price was low and paying was painless, far more people might pay and generate the same or better revenue.
"At the end of the day, the price that you and I pay, whether it is for the print copy or digital, it is only a very small part of the revenue. The price paid for the printed copy was by no means sustaining the newspaper business. It was advertisers all along. And they paid the price for the privilege of having as many eyeballs the newspaper could expose their ads to."
Is it possible to keep a newspaper in business by purchasing subscriptions. Think about that the next time someone suggests subscribing to some popular newspaper to counter the effects of declining journalism.
As an unrelated note to the author if he reads this, it helps readability a lot to not write large amounts with all digits ($3,260,060,000) but abbreviated ($3.26bn). Think what you would do with file sizes.
Most newspapers are just the equivalent of retweets - as mediocre journalists rewrite AP and Reuters reports. These jobs are going to go away. Real journalism costs money. And it will go to the real journalists in time. I predict that in the next 30 years we'll have the Taylor Swifts, Kanye Wests, and the Beatles of journalism suck up all of the revenue while the low-effort rewriters are demolished by machines.
The same is true for TV in most places, shows are/were carefully constructed to maximize the odds that you wouldn't change channel during the commercial break
I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind.
There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up.
So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?
Well, one explanation that people often point to is that there are now many more places to advertise. Back then, newspapers were one of the best places to advertise if you wanted to reach a lot of eyeballs. Now you can advertise on Google and other search sites, you can advertise on any number of blogs and other sites through AdSense and other ad delivery networks, you can advertise on social media, you can place classified ads on Craigslist, etc. So newspapers now have to compete against all these other properties in a way they didn't have to do in previous generations.
But there's another consideration that is just as important and doesn't really get talked about as often. With the dawn of digital advertising, where every view, click and conversion is neatly accounted for, advertisers have come to realize that newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue, even when it was the only game in town. They just didn't have the metrics to prove it.
What we know now is that click-through rates on news sites are really not substantially better than click-through rates on Joe Schmo's random blog -- but they _are_ substantially worse than in certain other business segments, like search.
So the real battle isn't even a battle for advertiser's attention. It's a battle to remain viable even though the advertisers would be better off advertising elsewhere.