I doubt there is much of a market for a conglomeration of local new outlets, which usually carry primarily local news. And those outlets aren’t competing with each other. If, on the other hand, you are looking for competing national and international news sources to get together in a scheme like that, that’s a pretty big ask.
I blame advertising creators for a lot of this problem. They mastered print ads, they mastered radio ads, they mastered TV ads, but for internet ads all they can think of is the equivalent of flash-bang grenades, or else stealth theft of your privacy. Or both. I’d like to see something that creatively draws one’s interest without being obnoxious.
All of those can be defeated by deleting their cookies, then reloading the site.
Takes about 4 more clicks, but other than that, nothing else.
Personally, although I am often tempted to pay WSJ, Washington Post, NYT, etc., for their usually excellent content, I treat the situation as a challenge. They can try to get my money, and and I can try to keep it. If I win, great. If I can’t, they lose: bye, bye, site. Most news is available elsewhere for free (Al Jazeera, are you listening?), anyway.
WSJ/NYT/Post: $10-20/month? No way! But for $1, I might subscribe! Think about it.
Many excellent ideas here already. Some I already use, a couple I’ve copied for future use.
Another is to simply hit ctrl-A, ctrl-C the moment you pull up a link a you want to read. Then move to a Word doc and hit ctrl-v to read at your leisure. The majority of sites will have pulled up the full article before the blocking ad or subscription demand comes up. Those which don’t can generally be accessed by adding "page02"or “02” or somesuch to the end of the URL. It’s just a matter of figuring out which one works. Usually the obnoxious pop-ups are only coded on the first page.
OTOH, I have yet to find a major news story I couldn’t get for free on reuters.com. So usually I just go straight there if I want to know about something.
Yeah, I got a $30 offer for a year of Washington Post and took it because it was worth that to support them and not hassle with paywalls or deleting cookies, etc but I’m not shelling out $100+ for it. This isn’t like the old days where I’d get the paper and read through it, check the local columnists, do the crossword and read the funny pages; now I might read an article or two a day and that’s not worth a hundred bucks to me. And, even if I was going to pay that, I’m not going to do it again for the NYT and again for WSJ, etc,
I pay a $50/yr subscription to Political Wire, not because it blocks the ads (they’re pretty minor) or because of a paywall (only maybe 5-10% of the content is “premium” paywall material) but because it’s become a site I visit 5+ times a day to keep up on political news and the $50 feels like a fair price for that.
If I can’t view a webpage without ads, I avoid that page. I find ads of all kinds very unpleasant, and they are dangerous to your computer. It’s not like the advertisers will pay if they infect my computer with ransomware or the like.
I use Adblock and the other day I opened the Drudge Report and for the first time in about nine years, it started showing me ads. I refuse to use any web site that forces me to read their ads providing there are any similar sites that the ad blockers will block the ads.
But can anyone pls tell me what happened to Adblock? Was it changed to allow ads on Drudge? Or did Drudge somehow change its settings so that it would show ads regardless?
The only other explanation is that I messed up somehow and changed a setting in Adblock. But I can’t see where anything was changed. Maybe Firefox somehow implemented a change?
I’d really like to know why I’m seeing these ads now. I really don’t want to see any ads - even if I have to use a diff site to read national news.
Charlie: Adblockers usually work because ads are served from specific web addresses and adblockers have lists of tens of thousands of these addresses which they block. So if the Drudge Report started getting ads from a new address that list might not have been updated yet or you may not have updated the list on your computer yet. Perhaps someone can give you the details of how to make sure you have the latest updated lists and how to add the specific ad sites.
As I recall AdBlock changed so now they – surprise! – allow ads from “trusted partners” or some nonsense. I think you can turn that off in settings (but I still don’t think it’s 100%) or else get ad blocking extensions, such as uBlock Origin, that remember their own core function.
The obvious solution for those who don’t want to pay for content, even indirectly through ads, is to only get their “news” from the websites of extremists, crazies and conspiracy theorists (excuse the redundancy).
Those sites are unlikely to attract ads (not impossible though), so one can have a blissful browsing experience, while complaining about all the Fake News out there. :dubious:
Jackmannii: the advertising industry and websites have brought the problem on themselves. Very few users would have chosen to use adblockers if web advertising was just like newspaper advertising. But instead web advertising is filled with malware, popups, intrusive sound and video, scams.
You might respond: the majority of sites are not like that. But it’s too much work to differentiate. And of course with malware it can easily be too late (our computer is infected before we know there is aproblem).
Even for the nominal “good” ones, they had their chance. They blew their trust with years of pop-unders, pop-overs, screaming banners and malware scams pasted all over their sites. The only reason why it got reined in is because easily-installed ad blockers started coming out and getting popular.
Now it’s “Boohoo, why won’t you look at out innocent little ads?” Screw that; let your guard down and it’s back to punching monkeys for iPods.
To me, the web is a print medium. Sure, sure, it can be use for other media, and I use those other media. Primarily, however, I’m on a print web site, such as this one.
Thus, when an ad or some other page element decides to add motion or sound to my desired environment, then I certainly will use the ad blocker.
Print ads in print publications didn’t need to track me. Magazines used to have those cards you could return with advertisers checked off, so some of them got your address if you opted in. I’m fine with print ads in a print environment, but there are none, because they’re all tracking me.
You would, I would, Da Jungle don’t – full price if I want it. No exceptions even for managers.
I do get 10% off most things sold directly by us up to a total of $100 in discounts per calendar year so that is something. I got my new AirBook from “us” N-OS at a silly low cost and saved another $70 which covered tax, shipping and more. Every so often we get short-term trials of Prime (like a week) and the Old Wench will go nuts in the Pantry but to be frank we still mostly shop mom&pop places way more than online.
I gladly pay subscriptions to the NYT and WaPo, as they’re excellent publications, and I’d pay to subscribe to paper copies if there were no internet. I’m not about to subscribe to the LA Times, though, or the WSJ.
The system I’d like is one where I could pay a modest amount (say, .50-$1) per article. Let me read the first paragraph or two, then ask for my money via PayPal or some such. In return, I’d get no ads and access to the full article. Win-win.
I fear that would result in, instead of clickbait headlines, clickbait first paragraphs, that disappoint later. Kind of like those sites that make any story multiple pages so you have to score lots of page hits for them to get to the end, and then at the end there is nothing much.
The pi-hole has been revolutionary. I am annoyed so much with ads on my iPhone whenever I leave home that I have completely stopped browsing or even playing games not behind the pi-hole. I’ve stopped watching the statistics but it was insane with how many requests were being blocked.
That being said, I do always allow ads from some sites like NYTimes, straightdope, etc. where I want them to get the ad revenue. I can’t recommend the pi-hole highly enough… even though I don’t want anyone else to do it so that the ad companies don’t start engineering work-arounds!
My favorite funding model is “pay what you like”. I support NPR, Wikipedia, Firefox, my adblocker, and a few more sites and pieces of software that way. I also subscribed to the New Yorker, even though I never exceed the three free articles per month. I know I don’t, because despite subscribing, I had trouble logging in. Oh, and a also support a couple of people on patreon. I’ve also thrown some money in the hat for music and ebooks. I really do like the “pay what you like” model.
I pay for the wall Street journal, the Washington Post, and two local newspapers. I subscribed to the New York Times, but I’m letting that lapse at the end of the month.
I use adblockers, but I set them to “allow well-behaved ads”. I rarely whitelist a site on my ad blockers, but I have done that. The well-behaved ads are, and I don’t mind that as a funding mechanism, either.
I object to ads on principle, granted we use my definition of “ad” which means manipulative and/or dishonest. Some “ads” are just informative – “Bill’s Shoes, selling men’s, women’s and children’s shoes, boots and sandals since 1982. 123 Main St., Anytown USA” – and I don’t consider them advertising at all. But they are the vanishingly tiny minority of ads. Most are psychological warfare directed against the consumer populace and designed to part people from their money using any underhanded tactic the soulless vampires on Madison Avenue can come up with. They are frankly quite disturbingly evil and they’ll never get my support. If I could drop a bomb on the entire advertising/marketing industry, I would, and I don’t just mean metaphorically.
It’s not my job to suggest other ways businesses can make money. If businesses were out there killing people for their income I would do anything in my power to stop it, and I wouldn’t owe them an alternative business plan either. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong, and it doesn’t matter that it’s the only way they’ve figured out how to make any money. If you can’t figure out a way to make money without constant psychological manipulation of the entire population, then don’t make money. It’s no skin off my nose. Plenty of honest businesses have figured out how to do it.
That said, yes, intrusive, tracking, distracting, spying, malware-adjacent ads are far worse than just text or image-based passive ads. I lived through the 90s and watched plenty of TV and read magazines during that decade, so I have some tolerance for advertising and I recognize that we have it way better in that department than we used to. Nowadays I actually click the occasional unobnoxious ad that has been targeted to me, because it’s something I think I’ll want and it didn’t try to fuck with my mind or outright lie to me to get me interested. Targeted ads are great because I am informed of something I want that I didn’t even know existed, and I didn’t have to sit through hours of tampon and adult diaper ads to see it. So not only do I see far fewer ads than I used to when I was younger, those ads are a lot more likely to be something I might want rather than completely obnoxious and irrelevant.
But I also recognize that things have improved significantly because we have so much more power to avoid or block ads now. I want to see this trend continue, not backslide. The power to control what ads people see should be kept in the hands of the people themselves, and that power should continue to increase.