It’s sad. It never occurred to me we’d get here.
If they were smart they would do a Netflix of news where you subscribe to one service and it gives you access to a ton of different subscription news sites.
I've tried a dozen different paywall bypass services including bpc & archive.today and I can't get it to bypass this. I think the Google Rich Text trick might work but I'm on mobile atm.
Isn’t this exactly what Apple News[1] is?
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You paid to read a book. You paid for the paper. You paid to see a movie. Yeah they had/have ads but not ones that retarget and manipulate you.
Think of how much more sane the world would be if you had to pay for Instagram and Facebook.
I say bring on the paywall.
If you have Apple news you can share to that in a similar way.
Sites displayed ads. Then they decided, or found, that ads didn't bring in enough revenue, so they added paywalls.
Paywalls are annoying, they don't scale, and they break the promise of an open web. All that is sad.
Sure, it wasn't as dressed up, but it was joyful and charming.
Not everything is about money, and not everything needs to be done for money. On the contrary; money seems to drain the charm and joy.
Commercial journalism could also be funded with profits from other lines of business. While shareholders might revolt if Disney started streaming World News Tonight ad and subscription free, Michael Bloomberg could remove Bloomberg News paywalls with a phone call.
You get that money through advertising or subscription revenue.
Advertising revenue is gone because everyone has adblock. You couldn't adblock TV or a physical newspaper.
Subscription revenue is gone because newspapers don't monopolize their localities. Anyone that isn't the New York Times is struggling.
> It never occurred to me we’d get here.
My parents were journalists. The business model has been broken before I could read.
What do you mean by this? Do you mean newspapers don't utilize their localities as much as they could, or that they're unable to create monopolies on local information nowadays?
Just genuinely curious, I have a brother in law who's the editor at his small town newspaper, so I'm tangentially interested in this kind of thing.
Not even remotely. Meta made $200 billion in ad revenue last year. NYT ad revenue increasing 25% yoy and they show ads to subscribers.
A free press is important to democracy, so the government should move some tax money to journalists, and then this link could instead be to a taxpayer funded site (like NPR) instead of to a for-profit ad-powered spam-site run by billionaires who pay journalists as little as possible while pocketing as much as they can.
Unfortunately, PBS and NPR are so severely under-funded that they need to run donation drives and can't do journalism of this level.
In other news: archive.ph archive.is are permanently down and the biggest us news conglomerate is blocking the waybackmachine.
They both work for me. Maybe your ISP is blocking them. Usually easy to work around via different dns resolver or vpn
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/14/how-the-rewards-app-freeca...
You'd think Apple would go after the top-charting apps that are leveraging the scam companies (like Monopoly Go and Disney Solitaire) for actively engaging with scams like this to pump their own numbers up...
(https://old.reddit.com/r/FreeCash/comments/1i4132r/monopoly_... - like this. What the everloving hell? Straight up enticing users to shove themselves into a game, expose themselves to ads galore, and then keep goading them into blowing even more money in the partner app under the guise of 'real cash'.)
They would only assign journalists for important or local content.
The daily newspaper was a news aggregation subscription service more than a news creation service.
It was inherently geographical because they had to print the newspaper overnight and deliver it to you every morning.
They would also select different articles depending on what might interest readers, e.g. an Iowa paper might syndicate an article on corn subsidies that a Floridian paper would ignore.
Computers fixed both the distribution problem and the recommendation problem.
The New York Times can distribute news nationwide instantly and simultaneously tailor my feed to my specific interests. They can do so better than local publications thanks to economies of scale. If you do have a subscription, it won't be to the Syracuse Herald-Journal but to the New York Times.
[1] named after telegraphic wire, which is how old this business model is.
When the physical paper is gone and delivery is over the wire, free should in fact be doable.
Perhaps the local news fucked up by accepting Google ads. Had each regional, metropolitan area put together their own ad agency they could have served up local ads and likely kept something closer to their previous business model—likely reaped more dosh?
First, I almost never find subscriptions acceptable, but I would happily pay for downloading anything that I am interested in, after seeing a preview that would convince me that the content is worth it.
Second, the procedure for paying would have to be very simple and more importantly, the prices would have to be very low, e.g in most cases not significantly bigger than $1.
I can easily read many hundreds of articles per month, or even per day. A price of e.g. $30 per article is not feasible, except in very rare occasions, for something unusually valuable. In most cases even $10 would be too much for a single article.
I actually subscribe to a few paywalled libraries, but I frequently prefer to take the content that I am paying for from some pirate sites, because those have much faster content searching and instant downloading, while if I go on the sites for which I pay dearly, I waste a lot of time with inferior searching and especially with various slow and annoying steps for authorization.
They care about people pissing in their ocean.
It's just shocking when you see media company after media company go completely behind a paywall out of the blue when last week I was reading it with advertisements.
Now with news websites most people are running ad blockers. What are the news sites meant to do? Their employees are working, and they expect to be paid for that work. just like I expect to be paid for my job. Where is the money going to come from?
Advertisers are moving away from broadcast along with eyeballs.
The idea is that social media companies offer summaries of news that replace reading the article for most people. Thanks to commenters bypassing paywalls they can get the full article too!
News companies cannot effectively negotiate with large social media companies for a slice of ad revenue due to discrepancies in size.
The government proposed a compulsory licensing scheme where websites with an "asymmetric bargaining position" (i.e Big Tech) that link to news must pay.
Google is paying $100 million,[1] Meta walked away from the negotiating table.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-bill-c18-on...
This isn’t new. The government has been trying to cut funding for PBS since the 60s.
Why would anyone want the government to fund the press? How would you actually expect it to cover government corruption?
An open web, to me, does not imply access to all websites.
> So much of the Internet is pay-walled now.
It’s lamenting that more is behind paywalls. Not that the paywalls exist.
Hard disagree. There are many more websites with paywalls that still exist today vs the ones that relied on ads or donations to survive.
>they break the promise of an open web
The open web was never a thing because it has always cost $$ to even connect to the web.
Sites that began with the question "how can we share what we know?" are what I call the open web. Sites that began with the question "how can we make money from* the web?" are what are killing it.
* I don't have a problem with sites that make money on the web. For all its problems, Amazon is a store that operates online. That's wonderful. But Facebook views the open web as a problem, locking a bunch of it behind uncrawlable access controls and pathologically self-serving algorithms. We used to share the public parts of our lives on our personal websites, usually for free as a part of the ISP subscription that we already paid for. Now all that happens on Facebook, and we've paid a multi-trillion-dollar tax for the privilege of doing what we used to do for free.
I get that it's sad, but I'd gladly pay a monthly sub to use a not enshitified internet, rather than the cluster fuck of ads and data stealing that exists in the modern web. Spending time on the 90s and early 2000s internet and comparing it to this dumpster fire makes me so darn sad.
Perhaps some journalists have made the exact same argument to their landlords and at the grocery store. It probably didn’t go over very well.
Either pay or watch ads, which is it?
Commercial broadcasters tend to lean towards entertainment (needs ad revenue), so news becomes entertainment too.
It works as long as the state and public believes in democracy, accountability, etc. It’s very vulnerable, but everything in democracy is. Democracy and free press can only work if the population also defends it, which is what is failing in the US. The majority of population does not want to defend democracy.
But I think the hard on for PBS that conservatives have is that PBS admitted gay people exist.
Back in the 60s PBS was controversial partially because it showed black and white kids playing together on Sesane Street…
Press that does not need to be profitable is extremely valuable to a democracy as it can openly talk about any issues without a conflict of interest.
Good democracies have that funding and no meddling of politicians with the content enshrined in their constitution.
Even until the 80s it was legal to arrest a homosexual couple for having sex in their own home based on “sodomy” laws.
Today women are dying because doctors are afraid of performing medical necessary abortions to save their lives because they might go to jail
They have been trying to get rid of funding since at least 1969 when Mr. Rogers himself went before Congress to try to keep it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKy7ljRr0AA
It amazes me that anyone who knows anything about this country actually wants to give it more control of the media or any increased power .
If government actually funded news in the public interest, it would mean that Democrats were in charge. Sure, Republicans could always cut funding or pressure publicly funded news if they returned to power. It would be our job to make sure that didn't happen. Publicly funded media can't work under corrupt Republican administration.
But, it's also true that commercial media is being bent under pressure from the Trump administration. Republicans will try to break anything which they perceive as limiting their power. Your narrow focus on publicly funded media seems to miss that big picture.