Thursday, October 5, 2017

Google May Soon Bundle Information Like a Cable Television Company



Google has unveiled measures to help publishers sell more digital subscriptions, after concluding that advertising is not enough to sustain news operations, writes the Financial Times.

Richard Gingras, Google’s vice-president of news, said the changes would
improve the “sometimes painful process” of buying or renewing a digital subscription, adding that “advertising alone can no longer pay for high-quality journalism”.

The company has been in discussions with News Corp, the New York Times and the Financial Times.

I blame the wacko ad-blocking movement, like  Target Liberty, The New York Times and the Financial Times run unobtrusive ads, yet many block them as somehow a problem.

This results in a real problem for online digital news providers: lower revenues. No one is going to provide this service for free. Thus, the coming paid for news channels.

Their coming.

  -RW

3 comments:

  1. This doesn't seem like a bad thing! The feedback on the type of news consumers desire will be much more immediate. The relationship between the newscaster and consumer may be healthily restored.

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  2. Unfortunately this will not rework the piss poor ad model in any meaningful way as a revenue stream. The content fire hose creates such a high noise threshold that any revenue will be sporadic and inconsistent at best.

    Subscriptions will not work because it is a limiting value proposition for readers that will be tied to mediocre occasionally read sources at best.

    Until a widely accepted micro-payment platform is tied to all major content where you invest change on the dollar for reads, (ironically like ads<) its all a wildly unpopular pipe dream for even a behemoth like google.

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  3. “advertising alone can no longer pay for high-quality journalism”.

    Since when did (((Google))) or any other (((media))) outlet provide high-quality journalism?

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