Subscription Fatigue
Subscription Management
I have active subscriptions with about a half-dozen with about a half dozen software tools, but sometimes using a VPN or web proxy across different web browsers makes logging in to all of them & clearing cookies for some paywall sites a real pain.
If you don’t subscribe to any outlets then subscribing to an aggregator like Apple News+ can make a lot of sense, but it is very easy to end up with dozens of forgotten subscriptions.
Subscription fatigue is turning into subscription stress. Something alarming, guilt inducing about having 40+ reoccurring charges each month.
Financial death by a thousand cuts
Winner-take-most Market Stratification
The news business is coming to resemble other tech-enabled businesses where a winner takes most. The New York Times stock, for instance, is trading at 15 year highs & they recently announced they are raising subscription prices:
Times is raising the price of its digital
Subscription for the first time, from $15 every four weeks to $17 — from about $195 to $221 a year.
With a Trump re-election all but assured after Telemarketing for Mortgage Leads the Russsia, Russia, Russia garbage, the party-line impeachment (less private equity plunderer Mitt Romney) & the ridiculous Iowa primary, many NYT readers will pledge their #NeverTrumpTwice dollars with the New York Times.
If you think politics looks ridiculous today
Wait until you see some of the China-related ads in a half-year as the 2019 novel coronavirus spreads around the world.
Arresting a doctor who warned about the outbreak
Doesn’t have good optics, particularly after hundreds of other deaths piled up from it & when he later died from from the virus.
The optics keep getting worse.
How does a broad-based news site compete with the user generated Tweets in such a zone?
Chinese authorities
Are now WELDING DOORS SHUT to whole apartment buildings, as well as residents inside – to impose #Coronavirus quarantine. #Wuhan pic.twitter.com/feclKC— AS-Source News (@ASBreakingNews) February 8, 2020
And any widely known individual journalist who builds a large audience might get disappeared.
Twitter recently surpassed $1 billion in quarterly revenues, but time spent on Twitter is time not spent on other news websites.
McClatchy filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Outside of a few core winners, the news business online has been so brutal that even Warren Buffett is now a seller. As the economics get lead generators international uglier news sites get more extreme with ad placements, user data sales, and pushing subscriptions. Some of these aggressive monetization efforts make otherwise respectable news outlets look like part of a very downmarket subset of the web.
Users have thus adopted to blocking
Ads & are also starting to ramp up blocking paywall notifications.
Some of the most popular browser extensions are ad blockers & tracking blockers like Adblock Plus, Ghostery & Privacy Badger.
Apple has made tracking their users across sites harder with their Intelligent Tracking Prevention, causing iPhone ad rates to plummet: “The allure of a Safari user in an auction has plummeted,” Rubicon Project CEO Michael Barrett told the publication. “There’s no easy ability to ID a user.”
The Opera web browser comes with an ad blocker baked in.
Mozilla is also pushing to protect user privacy in Firefox.
Google recently announced they wil
Stop supporting third party cookies in Chrome in the next couple years. Those who
invested into adopting AMP will have to invest into making yet more technical changes to manage paywalls on AMP pages.
Each additional layer of technological complexity is another cost center publishers have to fund, often through making the user experience of their sites worse, which in turn makes their own sites less differentiated & inferior to the copies they have left across the web (via AMP, via Facebook Instant Articles, syndication in Apple News or on various portal sites like MSN or Yahoo!).
A Web Browser For Every Season
Google Chrome is spyware, so I won’t recommend installing that.
Here Google’s official guide on how to remove the spyware.
