I really dislike ad driven publications. I’m not opposed to paying for quality news publication, but for something like NYT, there’s only a couple articles a month I come across that I’m really interested in reading. There problem is that there’s 4-5 other paywalled publications where I have that same issue. I’m interested in their content, I just can’t justify the subscription price for the small amount of content from them I’ll actually consume, and I really can’t justify paying subscriptions for 4-5 publications at once.

I would pay $5-10 a month for a news aggregator for paywalled publications. It could be set up in a way that the publications get paid per view of their articles, it could be opened up to independent writers as well (e.g. integrate your substack with it). Maybe even an additional fee that includes digital magazine publications as well.

I can’t imagine it would be worse for the industry (unlike Spotify), as it already seems like journalism/news is hovering above collapse. They would be making money off of people who weren’t providing revenue previously.

    • qooqie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I use this, it’s quite good. No complaints about it, no ads, reading articles doesn’t feel like a chore. I definitely recommend it

      • alucard
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        1 year ago

        Mostly… the advertising is disguised as top 10 articles with Amazon links. 50% journalism 40% articles 10% Reddit copied BuzzFeed “articles”

    • carnha@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I’d love to try out Apple News, but as far as I can tell you can only access it on an Apple device, there’s no web access :(

      • berkeleyblue@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Also it’s not available in Switzerland so I can’t use it unfortunately…

        The same btw goes gor movies in my oppinion. Why do I have to have 3 Streaming services for a couple hundred movies when I have 70 Million songs on evey streaming services? I hope this will eventually change…

        • candybrie@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Movies and TV used to be 1 streaming service. So careful what you wish for. We might end up with a streaming service per record label.

  • Izzgo@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    It should be noted that, in the US at least, your library card will often give you online access to many publications.

  • schaeferpp@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    This. Is. Exactly. What. I. Wish. For. A. Very. Long. Time.

    Nowadays every news site has paywalls. I’m willing to pay for good work, but if I pay a single news provider, I’m missing too much. Nobody is willing to pay for every publisher. Even if an article is just a few cents I neither want to be annoyed with the payment process nor do I want to manually keep track of how much I spent for news in a month.

    We really need a platform providing a news flat rate, aggregating most larger publishers.

    • Sparky678348@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      No they can fuck off with the charging me money to read their article thing. I would prefer that they load that shit up to the gills with ads that I then block

        • Sparky678348@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Nope you’re spot on, of course they don’t. Something something ability something something need, gating information except to those who can afford to support their organization should classify them as something other than news media.

        • Sparky678348@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Clearly people are willing to pay for it. NYT is profiting 50 million a year.

          My buck a week isn’t going to have any impact on whether or not they can run the paper, I can’t fathom making the argument that someone who can’t afford to contribute to the already massively successful paper should have zero access to it.

  • Toby_2222@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I mean this isn’t exactly the answer you’re looking for but in the UK we do, the BBC doesn’t have ads and the cost is covered by taxes rather than paying a “Spotify premium” subscription

  • brechmos@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I recently found ground.news. it is an interesting news aggregator sight in that it combined multiple sources for each story. It doesn’t really answer some of your needs but for each story it shows you which sources are pay-walled and which ones aren’t.

    • Lorela@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Omg this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. I do a lot of media monitoring for work and have been using MBFC to try to measure how reliable my current Google Alerts are, because it throws up some weird and wild news sources.

  • 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    You’re use of spotify as an example is a good reason. Journalism isn’t making money and Spotify’s royalties are (or at least were not long ago) the lowest amongst the music streaming services. The ads on their own sites pay a lot more than any aggregator would give them.

  • wolfpack86@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think this would actually drive shittier quality.

    Current models, like the preceding model of physical paper delivery, have a relatively fixed income stream from the subscriber base. They make the same amount of money whether the news day is “Japan Attacks Pearl Harbor” level or whether the most interesting story is that a German Shepherd won the AKC dog show.

    Under a service that aggregates and pays a minor amount per click, how does NYT stand out above WaPo? Or Ap or Reuters? Click bait headlines and incomplete stories so they can write multiple and get more clicks, because each click is not worth very much.

    I think the better model for NYT et al would be to offer a punch card like option: 10 articles, $15… or whatever. They should have enough data to determine what the average number of articles read is, per subscriber, to determine what the tipping point is, and capture some new pay-as-you go subscribers.

  • what_is_a_name@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I agree the convenience would be great. But the reason it’s rare is that the business model does not work out for the newspapers.

    This would lead to reduced revenue for the newspapers.

    We already live in the world where news is behind paywall and disinformation is free. This would lead to collapse of more newspapers and further deterioration of the landscape.

    We need a better model than Spotify to apply to news.

  • ilickfrogs@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Because good journalism is expensive and the space is so much more competitive in the digital age. Also greed, usually it’s greed preventing us from having good things.

  • Dave@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It could be set up in a way that the publications get paid per view of their articles

    This is idea behind the BAT token and the Brave Browser¹. Unfortunately it won’t break through paywalls, but ad blocking is pretty good and in theory is less guilt.

    ¹ although, there is this