Note how the author in detailing their 6-year journey only focuses on their customers without any care for the actual end-users that have to engage with these tools in their final form.
Current situation around ad-blocking is just symptom of the problem. Users try to extract value from the website they are presented with and websites try to hook users into their platform without chance to leave.
The good thing it is only software
Guess whether their reader base has increased or decreased from their heydays.
Most newspapers or magazines have reduced or stopped their print editions.
Subscription model works only for niche audience, willing to pay for the premium content and premium experience. Rest of the audience will not pay a penny - they are okay to use the site if it is free but with ads, and many users will use some adblocker, but if site refuses to show content if it detects adblocker, they will simply go elsewhere rather than paying for a subscription.
The main incentive to have these custom controls I see is anti adblocking
You're not asking for the OS native widget though, you're asking for Apple's native OS widget to support that. The problem is that makes it up to Apple to lift a finger to support it. And Apple does whatever it wants. Sometimes those things are aligned with you as a user, sometimes not. And yes, showing ads is one reason some parties have for this. The other large one though, is codec support. If you're not in the game, codec support seems like such an inconsequential detail that it can't possibly be the real issue, but with money on the line, it's a bigger deal than you'd thing.
The thing is, unless you get in the weeds, the codec support is paid for when you buy the hardware. You don't have to deal with it. But when you're not Mr. Beast, showing videos on the big platforms, you aren't making giant piles of money. Thus, you need to optimize smaller details to make smaller amounts of money.
Which codec is being used becomes material because you can save money there with encoding and you can save money with content delivery as well. It's just about money. So it's not (just) about ad blocking money; it's about content creation and distribution costs.
- No 2FA support, at all. Support says it's not on their roadmap. Not acceptable in 2026.
- Editing subtitles requires a series of API calls, meaning I had to make a mini editor for our staff to change a word.
- Same with editing anything really. Playback restrictions, glossaries etc. There's no UI for doing it in-app. I understand that the majority of traffic is via the API, but having nothing in-app feels like an omission rather than a choice.
- Every video has multiple keys; uploads, assets, playbacks. And it's a pain moving from one to another.
Overall we use them, but I wouldn't choose to use them again.
How do I seek to the exact first frame of a timestamp with mux? I've tried a few things but it seems to always go to the nearest keyframe rather than the first frame at e.g. 00:34. This is sensible default behaviour but bad for my use case.
Some developments in this space over the past few years have been the ability to interact with the actual frames of video being rendered and to output those into a canvas tag. This is under the Web Codecs API.
For a while I was working on a video review tool for eSports teams which required the ability to have frame perfect annotations. I got around the inability to perfectly pause on the same frame by using screenshots of the video which were overlayed over the video but with the codecs API, you don't actually need this. It opens up all sorts of features like being able to play videos backwards for example.
Check out the Omakase player: https://player.byomakase.org/
Newspapers had willing subscribers especially since they had few alternatives. Their subscriber base was not niche at all.
These newspapers were also heavily subsidized by not only advertisements but paid classified ads.
You either caught the local/evening news on TV or subscribed to a small handful of locally delivered papers. Maybe they also deliver major national newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
The willingness to subscribe didn’t go away, the problem is that alternatives quickly arrived that didn’t cost any money.
Free online classifieds ate the newspaper cash cow. People are often still willing to pay for the services that newspapers provided: just see eBay, Autotrader, and Craigslist. The problem is that your local paper can’t match the product that the internet makes available.
The reverse is true actually.
Print-edition newspaper or magazines had better quality of content than online sites or blogs.
But they eventually deteriorated as the consumer market shifted to online.
Most newspaper subscribers canceled their subscription, but it was not because newspaper couldn't match some quality of content. It was because the way we consumed news changed.
Newspapers and Magazines went from content-heavy editions with ads sprinkled in, to ads-heavy editions with (mostly meaningless) content sprinkled in.
There were 3 reasons for this trend worldwide: 1. Google News proved that news can be consolidated from many sources and provided as easy headlines with short summaries linking to fast-loading Google cached (copy of) pages of actual news sites. So people bookmarked Google News as a favorite (and some intrepid power-users even built feeds that could filter Google News to fetch exact types of content they were interested in), as they found that Google News is timely and topical (whereas in the era of such internet-based news and satellite-TV-channel-based news, the newspaper news was already stale). 2. Google Adsense allowed anya website to show ads for some money in return. Advertisers worldwide realised it was more lucrative to integrate into this internet-driven ecosystem for page-views-based ads that could potentially reach millions of users (and every ad clicked could be tracked, hence ad analytics also came to the for3), than to rely on delayed revenue from ads in printed newspapers or magazines which reached only few thousand subscribers. (Soon rivals to Google News and Google Adsense came to the market, and they too did their best to woo away consumers and content providers.) 3. Apple's pioneering iPhone and iPad ushered in the new era of smarter snazzier powerful smartphones which were better suited for content consumption.
To keep the advertisers somewhat happy, the newspapers and magazines reduced content and drastically increased advertisements in their print editions.
Online newspaper editions which were free or non-existent earlier, went to subscription model, citing server & infrastructure costs. But the real reason for such gatewalling by the news studios was to prevent the bots of Google, Microsoft, etc., from scraping their researched news and content from their sites.
Seeing the popularity of automated Google News and how it had been "borrowing" their content without paying, the news editors also started "borrowing" news and content from Google News and such automated online feeds.
So eventually, all the news headlines and their content online started looking similar (compounded by smaller news studios going out of business unable to meet rising costs due to reduced subscribers, and those smaller businesses were gobbled up by bigger conglomerates, which simply syndicated the popular news everywhere).
None of my friends or relatives get print newspapers daily. We all cancelled those subscription long ago, because those daily editions were no longer worth even the cheap money they used to cost.
One sad result of such online trends, is that previous famous good-quality and affordable magazines like Reader's Digest, have become scanty content interspersed with too many full page ads. It simply ain't worth it to buy RD anymore. I love reading high-quality magazines like NatGeo, it is just thrilling to hold them in my hands, fluck through their thick pages, see those beautiful/interesting photos and read the deeply researche content. And I used to get these high-quality magazines at low price by buying them from old books shops.
Such drastic shift from print-to-online have seemingly decimated the old-books shops and small-scale lending-libraries, that used to sell/lend old books and magazines at cheap rates. I hardly see such options in my city anymore (they have become few and far between).
Meanwhile, large-scale bookshops and government-funded libraries are doing decent business as parents and teachers are trying to coax kids into reading books and magazines.
As for classifieds, I feel that even that is a dying trend, even online. People no longer want to know or care who died in the community, as they don't even know who lives in the neighbourhood. They no longer buy used products anymore. They prefer it buy it brand new. Because China's mass-manufacturing made goods cheap (at a lower quality). So if someone wants a laptop, they just buy it new, they don't scour the classifieds to see who's selling their laptop at a bargain.
I think even the nice initiatives ike "yard sale", "flea market" or "farmer's market" are on the wane.
I think online time has made humanity to have become more closed and greedy & materialistic, rather than outgoing and ready to embrace new ideas or ready to reuse the old products.
Facebook Marketplace is huge. eBay is huge. Autotrader is huge. Poshmark is huge. Backmarket and Swappa are big too.
People definitely buy stuff second hand, especially automobiles, which were a huge classified and advertisement pillar of newspapers (local dealership ads took up whole pages with listings of specific cars in their inventory!)
A lot of what you’re saying about content being a race to the bottom is true, there was a paywall catch-22 where you needed site traffic from Google but you needed the paywall to get your subscription revenue.
Your three pillars of revenue were classified ads, advertisements, and subscriptions.
You could only choose one of two for advertisements and subscriptions thanks to the Google aggregator effect (either get clicks with no subscription revenue or get subscribers but no clicks), and classifieds were a lost cause.
Outlets like NYT figured out how to create new revenue pillars, but that doesn’t really work for small regional outlets.
You also had the problem where local newspapers used to re-print national news stories from other outlets but their role in doing so became worthless.