Thought of the day: how could you rebuild the news industry without ads?

or just subscriptions?🧐 related: opencollective.com (not saying blockchain on purpose)

Have you seen what The Athletic is doing for sportswriting? Seems to be pretty successful so far. Could possibly be some cues there.

Wish you’d start building again. Svtble should’ve only been phase 1.

Combine it with something else so that it doesn't need life support.

Do sponsors count? That is, people who know what you do and want to support it in exchange for some promotion, instead of anonymous ad-spot bidders?

You need to create strict pay walls or become solely subscription based. Unfortunately, even then I don’t think you could match the revenue of what an advertise or is offering.

Cut to the chase and swap the panels to WWE style royal rumbles (cage matches?)

Working on it. @Join_Civil

in-browser micropayments w/crypto Make it slick, then OS people will get creative

Sounds like @brave

Substack. on.substack.com/p/a-better-fut…

501c3, donation based org. Only news no ads.

Site that aggregates multiple existing news sources into one page. Allows for views from each side presented in an Apple Reader type style, clean text nothing else, that links back to original sources. Neural net used to pull sources and curated by humans. Funded like Wikipedia.

social micropayments

Don’t sell “news”, sell “understanding”....the people who are the best explainers should make the most money

They can’t be owned by people who need profits to increase in perpetuity

teach people, that will pay to learn facts, facts. facts are a competitive advantage. bonus: compel people to “want to learn facts”.

The news used to be the only source for info. Rule has been more content + sensational + cheap to prod = good. Now we drown in info, most of which is garbage Great value in deep, verified research, clearly explained & w/ import connected to & tracked w/ other contemporary info

Form a cooperative.

Quora for news, upvote to surface most relevant updates

By being honest and writing news w/o headlines.

?

Subscription models seem tenuous. How about a tax? You tax everyone for news, and distribute cash based on viewing habits.

Been done

(No comment)

Make society appreciate knowledge and education. Make people appreciate good news over controversial news. Make people want to know more about scientists instead of movie stars. Make a society that prefers entertaining information more than numbing ignorance.

(No comment)

Perhaps unpopular opinion — most news wouldn't be worth rebuilding. The good stuff is already on Twitter, or from specific people that I do/would happily subscribe to (like Stratechery, Praxis, Destroy All Software, etc)

narrate the news as fiction.

Add it on to something bigger like amazon that doesn’t need ad rev from news to survive.

Subscription or donations.

Seeing how @adamcurry and @THErealDVORAK run their news analysis show solely on donations (“value for value”) and make enough for it to be a full-time job is inspiring. I often wonder how easily the concept could work with breaking news and other more time-sensitive concepts.

Our secret: Make an outstanding product first.

Often the solution lies in addressing the real (hard) problem Solving for fake news, click-baity headlines, biased inaccurate coverage problems will lead to a solution which also solves for (right kind of) monetisation as well

The short answer? BRAND -> community ->value ->subscriptions

Ask Bloomberg? 🤣

"news" imply the "new" aspect is the core it's hard to compete here, because realtime news are a commodity imo replace the word with insights and the question feels very different.

I think one of the biggest current issues is “this article was originally published on...”. For me that’s what ruins the news industry

Bundling + Subscription

Reputation (ex. Reddit, SO, etc.)

Multiple revenue streams. Merch, events, subscriptions...

Maximum Fun is a good example.

is doing is quite well

Wiki tribune ?