The answer may not be pleasing, but it's true: because "paid subscribers" represent a valuable advertising demographic/segment. They are nearly certain you are human traffic, and you have enough disposable income that you pay for news.
You can pretty much make this argument for everything - Ferraris should be plastered by LCDs with ads then. Business class airplanes filled with blinking video ads. Entrances to highend butiques crowded with people pushing ad leaflets into rich peoples hands....
This does happen in other places. Do you ever notice that your in-flight magazine has ads? You've already paid for the flight. Your in-theater movie kicks off with trailers and previews -- you have already paid for the movie ticket. And so on.
This happens in the back of cabs in a lot of places I seem to remember and it’s incredibly difficult to switch off... we essentially are heading for some super weird dystopian sci-fi film right now. It’s terrifying.
This already happens on Air Canada (although at least the ads are not personalized). Before each movie or show you play on your IFE screen in economy class, they make you watch two 30 seconds ads. I was very annoyed, especially since AC tickets are already overpriced (little/no competition on domestic flights in Canada).
If there IFE system is like all the others that I've experienced so far, you'll lose more time trying to find the start of the movie than you'd lose by letting the ads run :(
Passengers in airline seats seem to make advertisers drool as you can't get much more of a captive audience and for that long in nearly any other situation.
I know for a fact, this is all coming and has already started, and is going to get even more invasive.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the security theatre before boarding and advertisement brainwash after getting to the seats would start to provoke fury sprees among some at least passengers.
Don't worry, they'll be monitoring your sentiment during boarding and passengers that appear agitated will be calmly denied access to board. And you'll be monitored in your seat as well during the flight.
It's not Orwell's imagination anymore, it's reality. Only privacy law can stop it, maybe.
> they'll be monitoring your sentiment during boarding and passengers that appear agitated will be calmly denied access to board. And you'll be monitored in your seat as well during the flight.
Disappointing is that this is the more likely outcome, rather than easing the sensory overload, stress, and discomfort.
To be fair, there are attempts at this being made too. But they come in a weird fashion, for example - seats get smaller but are higher quality. Air quality on airplanes and lighting has generally improved but flights are getting longer.
It’s an interesting balance but it always reminds me that flying through the sky in a tin can is not entirely natural.
Of course, some of the security measures are for your comfort and safety as well. It’s just where the line is between for your good and for theirs that is tough to identify.
The single most awful thing about flying with Hawaiian Airlines is that they sold out years ago to advertisers. The flight attendants read commercials to the passengers during the safety brief. And lately, there have been some credit card companies advertising this way and so the flight attendants will literally walk up and down the aisles giving every passenger a credit card application. It is foul and atrocious. Just charge $10 more per seat, you goblins.
Ads on the back of he seat in an airplane are very common in European airlines. One of the most obnoxious, intrusive, literally in-your-face ads as it’s 40cm from one’s face with no real option to get away from it.
Not on RyanAir flights you can't. Not unless you're using earplugs. It's hard to sleep when you're constantly being upsold something, including over the announcement system at least 3 times per flight.
Use a page from the inflight magazine (or the safety card) to cover the screen. I do this on flights that insist on keeping the screen on no matter what.
Ryanair wouldn't pay for the screens to show you ads ;)
They do, however, upsell you in person by making some hate-my-job contracted flight attendants go through the cabin no less than three times trying to sell various things to you.
Public media and TV in Europe, including the one with the largest budget on the entire planet - German, play and display ads even though are sponsored from compulsory per-household fees.
The BBC often congratulates itself on not showing ads. Instead, every radio show is 50% 'trailers' for other BBC things which you'll hear half a dozen times by the end of a workday.
Swedish public service TV is the same. Guess all the 1-hour shows are down to 27 minutes of content or so, leaving huge gaps needing to be filled with some .. air.
Is this actually a market inefficiency? Maybe this is an opportunity to discover how humanity can still make information known about products and services without having to make our entire cultures about consumption.
I mean, advertising is about information sharing in a way. Can it be more efficient without clobbering art and media?
Ads are less about "information sharing" and more about manipulation though.
If I think about "information sharing", I'd imagine that the information is the thing of value to be shared and the goal is to enable the recipient to perform their own decisions with and increased base of background information.
However, ads work the other way around: You start with certainly outcomes that you would potential customers arrive at in their decisions and then think which information you can deliver to them to reach that outcome.
Good points. So what does an ad that doesn't have a behavioral component look like, and can they be presented in a different way? And could we still make that effective? Or is it a class of ad that is ethical vs not?
I know I'm way off in the weeds here, just brainstorming.
"Company X sells a product Y which is meant to solve the problem Z, and does so through features A, B and C."
That's it. The ad just informed consumers about existence of a particular company and product, made it clear what the product is for, and listed its important qualities (especially differentiating from other similar products).
That's what you do when you actually care to inform, and not manipulate, customers. Since pretty much no ads are like this, I call bullshit when someone says advertising is important because it informs people.
Well, I don't think it would be an ad anymore, because if the goal is to inform a consumer, the goal can't be to promote a particular product/brand/company.
So maybe something like independently ran price comparison sites would work?
So what does that mean? That we need to be shoved ads in our faces at every step of our life even if we pay for products? Just because someone wants to make even more money? What's your takeaway here?
The takeaway is that advertisers don't care what you think and do in fact believe that they should shove ads in your face every step of your life, even if you pay for a product.
Welcome to the world. Half the users of this site are actively perpetuating the corporate dystopia we inhabit.
I'm sure they'd start caring if everyone started blocking their ads instead of accepting them. Maybe one day we'll have augmented reality glasses with built in ad blockers; I wonder how they'd react to that.
Talking about advertisers, I think the main qualities we can credit them is grit and smarts.
Block their ads on the web ? you still have them on billboards if they’re local. They’ll mass DM whole regions if it makes economical sense. Your Netflix drama series will start mentionning them in passing. They’ll make ‘news’ pieces with a product CEO saving a baby chimpanzee that was not endangered in the first place.
You know they’ll find a way to your eyeballs by whatever mean, as long as it makes any sense to them.
Assuming we have sufficient control over our augmented reality glasses. If someone like google, MS, facebook, etc corner the market then I'd expect them to insert ads into reality.
I don't have a "takeaway", but the Bezos quote, "Your margin is my opportunity," comes to mind. We live in capitalism, and in this system, "good user experience" only matters insofar as it is profitable for whoever is providing that user experience. If ads for subscribers are so annoying that people stop subscribing, then companies might stop advertising to them. But if they are not annoying enough to affect those numbers, then it isn't that surprising that they try to earn more revenue from their attention. One other way to look at this: perhaps by advertising to subscribers, these publishers can afford to offer a lower subscription cost to their customers. Let's also remember that most publishing companies don't have massive digital revenue scale or growth, compared especially to the big tech companies. And let's also remember that big tech companies like Amazon and Google monetize customers "on the side" six ways from Sunday.
I guess what you are responding to with outrage, I am responding to with a shrug.
It's true - most news and magazine publishing companies are in a place of desperation. The internet has impacted the legacy publishing revenue model so severely that there hasn't been any clear model to pivot to despite two decades of attempts. Many major publishers have folded, many more will fold, and those that survive will eek by on meager subscriber revenue (which isn't as robust or easy to come by as some may think) and increasingly obtrusive programmatic advertising.
> If ads for subscribers are so annoying that people stop subscribing, then companies might stop advertising to them.
It also matters if there is any actual competition that does tings better. Cable TV is having a bad time, in large part it is because of ads, but it is only happening because of the streaming services.
Airlines are a competitive service, but newspapers are not.
In the Ferrari case, you just got one huge expensive advertisement of the company. Just because you are not famous. If you'd be famous, then the Ferrari would pay you for wearing their logo. If you are not, you have to pay them lots of money for the same.
Re: Ferraris - Part of the product is the aesthetic and function. The other part is that there are other vehicles just as sexy or cool looking as Ferrari - meaning, if there aren't good alternatives that don't have the advertising then they perhaps could get away with it; what an advertiser would be willing to pay a single fixed ad on a vehicle doesn't really put much of a dent in the cost of that vehicle, however ad revenue in digital form certainly covers a much higher portion of the cost of serving web content. Content that requires a lot of effort to produce however fits less of a Facebook average level of post content. It seems the answer is creating a competitive environment for investigative journalism, and then people will have options - if content is equal - to pay a platform that doesn't have ads.
For free products online that have an ad model, it's the VC complex perpetuating that model heavily - where the money is available initially and to scale quickly (because it's an easy calculation). The mantra isn't just "Move fast and break things" but also seems to be "if I don't do it - someone else will get there first" as part of the desire to be first-to-market (by any means) as a means to reach/capture a few of the main defense mechanisms of economies of scale and network effects; you don't need defense mechanisms if you have a good product however, and have a reasonable cost structure - it sure will be more profitable in the short-term though, not sustainable however. Facebook, Cambridge Analytica et al, perhaps needed to happen to wake people up to understand the importance of accountability and of community, moderation, and such.
TBF, the Ferrari IS the ad - for Ferrari and whatever aggregate-lifestyle-image you are promoting.
"Hey everyone, look at how I have succeeded to the point where I can drive car [X]"
Not that there is anything wrong with that, though.
For example - I like to wear the same hiker-couture gear everyday to feel comfortable, functional and good about myself appearance. I am an advertisement for my thinking and decision making capability.
I don't know if Ferraris sold here have this, but many cars sold in Poland have licence plate frame with dealer's name and contact even though you have no agreement with them to advertise their company when you're buying new car. For some (Mitsubishi iirc) they put some kind of semi translucent sticker on your trunk with dealer's name about 2 x 3 inches.
People generally let the dealer sock them with an additional $500 to cover car registration for them (so they don't have to go to the DMV themselves). When this happens, the dealer gets to install the plate for the customer, and they'll throw on the dealer frame at the same time.
After this point, customers don't have much reason to remove the plate or frame unless they really hate the ad, happen to be self-installing a rearview camera or are selling the car.
My car was from a dealer that went bust "Ward Subaru", after a service at a non-dealer service centre it came back with "Doncaster Subaru" frames on it!
Most dealers in the US do this via the license plate frame or stickers on the back. I think most people don't realize that you can remove them (and should). There should be some kind of rent payment for having it on your car.
Those are race team sponsorships. People pay the owner of the car to put those ads on the car. That’s the exact opposite of the point under discussion: the owner is getting revenue by choosing to put ads on the car, that is much different than Ferrari putting ads on a car you buy in order to make more money for Ferrari. Those sponsor ads make money for the owner of the car/team.
> Because your point is pretty shallow, to be honest. The simple fact is that such tactics do happen in virtually every situation you described.
Not to the same extent. That’s the point, and it’s an interesting question why this happens. What economic factors account for the differences in advertising between these two markets? It’s not “shallow” as your own shallow dismissal alleges.
> Your point really doesn't add much to a conversation, since its premise is faulty.
People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.
Also I think Enzo Ferrari would argue that the F1 cars and team are the real Ferrari porduct. The road cars are just ads and merchandise for the race team. =P
We have to decide as a society to not support platforms or organizations who attempt to extract all possible value. This of course creates opportunity for competition, however with perhaps more difficulty once an incumbent has reached large economies of scale and has strong network effects.
This seems to be a re-occuring pattern: have ads on a free/cheap service, introduce a paid service, place ads on the paid service, then hope if you hold out long enough people will forget there was a time when your paid service was ad free.
Newspapers and magazines have always included ads along with the subscription price. Difference is more that online ads are way more trashy and distracting and terrible for privacy so there’s more reason for pushback.
If you're a subscriber, you're the most valuable advertising target. You've shown a willingness to pay for stuff on the internet. Furthermore, advertisers are targeting people who read those publications regularly. Subscribers are those people.
If you wanted an ad-free subscription, it would cost substantially more than you currently pay to made up for the lost advertising revenue.
Even if, let's say, you WERE to pay substantially more than what you currently pay, the vendor might see fit to extract the maximum amount of value from you, so serve you adds they will. The only way I think they would not serve you adds is if they would lose more money (customers) if they were to serve adds.
But people have proven they are mostly OK with ads, they don't mind them (since so many services online are fueled by them and people use them).
That's absolutely not true. You could just not use the service. I think what you mean is that you have no way to get the service without the ads, so you're willing to put up with the ads to get the service. Which is the whole point.
> I think what you mean is that you have no way to get the service without the ads, so you're willing to put up with the ads to get the service. Which is the whole point.
Well, that's what I mean. You often can't get the service without ads, as competitors show the same amount of ads.
Hell, these days you can't do anything, be it on-line or in meatspace, without being exposed to a steady stream of ads. There is no choice for ad-free life, unless you take the word "choice" so literally you accept moving to some remote location and living off land as a viable option for regular people.
>If you're a subscriber, you're the most valuable advertising target
Back in the 90s my dad used to buy shit from mail order catalogs. The volume and variety of catalogs he got in return was obscene. Seemingly every day he'd get a new catalog for something.
There are ads in the paper newspaper I subscribe to as well. Real reporting and quality writing don't come cheaply, and that hasn't changed just because the delivery method did. Probably neither the author nor I would be willing to pay for a subscription without ad subsidies.
It is also quite disrespectful considering the tracking etc. that comes with it. How many more subscribers would they get if they didn't treat them as garbage?
It seems unlikely that the foregone revenue would be more than about 10% of the regular subscription price.
This is based on other posts in this thread that talk about a $84/year subscription and $4-$15/year ad revenue. Since that was a reference to Facebook revenue, I imagine it would be a decent upper bound.
It reminds me of how people say that it's impossible to provide fresh produce without paying people below minimum wage. In lieu of common sense, it depends on numbers, which don't need to be precise, but you can't just handwave.
I'm inclined to believe the true story is simply, as others state, that no matter what the ad revenue is, it's X% more and nobody wants to give it up if they don't have to.
That’s unlikely to be true, some publications such as Ars Technica let you pay for an ad free tier.
What’s more likely is that the subscription price does in fact cover costs and that advertising revenue is seen as a nice benefit on top that can be grown creatively without any accountability or backlash.
Nobody has a problem with paper or paper-like ads, aka ads don’t stalk you, that the newspaper has actually vetted, and is happy to have its name associated with.
The problem is that web ads are nothing like that. They are orders of magnitude more scummy, can’t be vetted in advance and stalk the shit out of you in order to serve you “better” ads next time, whatever the hell “better” means in advertiser’s perverted minds.
"Probably neither the author nor I would be willing to pay for a subscription without ad subsidies."
There are a lot of counter examples to this. Hulu, Spotify, Ars Technica, YouTube Premium, etc... People are willing and able to pay for ad-free content.
Because there's a difference between reading professionally produced news and watching contributed videos? Is there a reason you think they are the same?
I think once it's shown that people are generally willing to pay for the services they use to be ad-free the onus goes back to you to prove why news is a special case to which that trend does not apply. Otherwise we get into an argument black hole where you could infinitely claim the things in question were different than the counter-examples given.
According to the New York Times latest earnings call, subscriptions account for 2/3 of their revenue. So ballpark roughly 50% more than the current subscription price would be necessary to maintain revenue at the same subscriber count sans other revenue streams.
Revenue = subscriber revenue + ad revenue from ads shown to subscribers + ad revenue from ads shown to non-subscribers
The suggestions was to eliminate the middle piece and increase the subscription price to make up for it in the first piece. That's still leaves the last piece.
This argument is getting really tired, it's true of literally every service online. Yes there are loopholes, no they don't matter. The barrier is just high enough that a great many people just pay up.
The above article also states that digital advertising revenue only accounted for 37 percent of total advertising revenue. So that means digital advertising revenue is at most 12% of total revenue. Furthermore, it is unstated how much of digital advertising revenue comes from paid subscribers vs unpaid visitors.
If we assumed, for the sake of argument, that half of digital advertising revenue was from paid and half unpaid, then cutting ads for paid subscribers would be doable with only about a 10% increase in price.
basically nothing. if you never click the ad you are making them a fraction of a cent each view. I doubt one person would even make the site a dollar after a lifetime of reading.
>Real reporting and quality writing
unfortunately I rarely see either of those in any news outlet. Most of it is regurgitated press releases and things that I don't care about.
Digital-only subscription revenue in 2017: $340 million
Digital advertising revenue in 2017: $238 million
Obviously some digital advertising is shown to print subscribers logging in too... but if we ignore that for simplicity, without ads your NYT digital subscription would be 70% more expensive.
At $195/yr. for digital-only, it's already my most expensive subscription by a significant amount. If it were 70% more, or $331.50/yr, I imagine subscriptions would drop by a lot -- that's a lot of money for news.
So... that's presumably why there are still ads. Gotta pay the reporters somehow.
On the other hand, the New Yorker bugging you to subscribe is just lazy programming, and I hate it too.
$46.7m digital advertising revenue (37% of total advertising revenue)
$126.2m total advertising revenue
If you cut digital advertising completely, not just for subscribers, you could make it up by increasing subscription price by around 10%, assuming 100% of subscribers would bear the new price.
The interesting statistic that we don't have is how much digital advertising revenue comes from paid vs unpaid readers.
Not sure I follow. If you're using 46.7/260 that's an 18% increase (not 10%), but that's all subscribers (including print), not just digital.
So a yearly print subscription would go from $422.50 to $500 here in New York.
I'm not sure print subscribers would want to subsidize digital readers like that, especially when their own print edition is already chock-full of ads.
So maybe they should offer a premium subscription, 70% more expensive, with absolutely no ads.
Sort of like how Tidal Music have $10 / month compressed music, $20 / month uncompressed.
Good point. But since there's a paywall of 5 articles per month, while a subscriber presumably reads 100's per month (e.g. even just 5 articles a day = 150/month), it seems reasonable the majority of advertising revenue comes from subscribers, or close to it.
Sure there are viral articles that get bigger traction, and it's a "soft" paywall when coming from social media or search, but they're been significantly increasing restrictions on the soft paywall over the past year to impose both daily and monthly limits.
They ruined any trust between advertisers and consumers through deceptive, bad faith tactics, and reduced the entire equation to pure game theory. If an advertiser can figure out how to get their ad copy past my sophisticated filtering attempts and get into my mind in a memorable way, then more power to them. Otherwise they don't have any "right" to exist and make money off stealing my time and resources, both mental and compute.
It’s the problem with news websites/magazines/paper. They live because there are ads in it.
And so would they criticize companies that put a lot of cash on them ? Perhaps. May be not.
In France, we have a news website [0] which is totally independent, and only accessible for paying subscribers. It took them a few years and now they are earning money.
You might or might not agree with their editorial line, but the fact is that they can investigate any company without hesitation.
It’s hard, but I think it’s the only way to have an independent information.
When I was young my family paid for cable TV when the rest of the neighborhood still had antennas on their roofs because pay TV didn't have commercials.
Now I pay for cable TV and it's jammed full of commercials.
The idea that free online services aren't really free because we pay with our attention and with our data is only half true.
Paid online services also take our data and increasingly interrupt us with advertisements, just like cable TV.
I want to know, how much does it truly cost for the same content without ads. What would the actual pricetag be, if we built in the overhead added by advertising and marketing into the fee for the product or service itself?
The content itself doesn't cont much but that isn't what people are after. Most of the budget goes towards branding to build trust in the content. That is what you are really paying for - the feeling that your sources are credible.
Because not showing you ads would be "leaving money on the table" and that just won't do.
If not showing ads wasn't part of the deal, ads will be shown. If not harvesting your personal data wasn't part of the deal, personal data will be harvested.
The restriction on the number of articles is how the news publishers incentivize subscriptions -- subscribing unlocks more articles per week/month/whatever. They are going to advertise either way.
Paper newspapers always had ads too. Subscribers didn't get a different version of the paper without the ads. Ads have been a deeply ingrained part of the news business for over 100 years and they aren't going to stop now.
If newspapers could have a woeking business model without advertising I'm sure many would. The theory on the web is that if you take away ads for paid subscribers you'll not be able to ever add them back. Personally a cheaper subscription with an ad-lite, or tracking-free(GDPR opt out style) experience and a full price subscription for no ads seems like a fair deal. Thoughts? Disclosure: I work at a comscore 50 publisher. We are currently ad only and designing a subscription product so feedback is very welcome and timely.
Hulu, to me, has the perfect model: limited content for free, full content with ads for a subscription fee, full content with no ads for a (slightly) higher subscription fee.
To everyone making the obvious point: yes, obviously, there is potentially money to be made from this richer demographic. But that doesn't explain why they have to make the ads so intrusive or site-breaking.
Remember, something stops Ferrari from blanketing the dash with ads. Why doesn't that same dynamic apply here?
This type of thing is the thumbprint of management by sociopathy. "Why does nobody subscribe to us and leave us so ad dependent!" They cry. Just like complaints about lack of employee loyalty after they do stuff like layoffs to inflate quarterly earnings and look at pension funds as piggy banks and refuse to give raises. Then complain about people leaving for career advancement when they won't even give Cost of Living raises. The same pattern regardless - do something for short term gain that creates a long term problem and try to pass the buck. And it wasn't their fault because they were entitled to the short term gains. They are incapable of understanding why trying to get paid twice for the same thing is a bad thing or why you should never trust anyone who attempts that. To them trust is something they are entitled by position to regardless of how they mistreat people.
In my opinion the best thing to do with them in response is banish them. Don't invest in them or patronize them as much as possible as they are clearly out to screw you over. If you are in management of a position to do so oust them as soon as possible. Sadly they are a goddamn plague and hard to oust.
We have a systemic problem though. This kind of sociopathy is pretty much legitimized, and being specialized in it is treated as respectable occupation.
It's still sad that those companies can't offer the most basic, ethical option - providing value in exchange for money. No, the choice is only between getting crap shoved at you for free, and getting the same amount of crap for money.
That's a car review, not an advertisement. If you actually read it, they don't even like it much.
>Meh.
All-in-all, the Lexus NX 300h is an uninspiring car. If you like hybrids and want to drive one with a luxury badge, the NX 300h is worth looking at. I would have liked the option to suck the battery dry before the internal combustion engine kicks in (à la the plug-in Chrysler Pacifica hybrid). Instead, EV Mode in the NX 300h is limited to low speeds.
The very publication you’re subscribing to also shows ads to it’s print subscribers. I don’t think ther was ever an implicit promise that subscriptions remove ads, I’m not even sure why you’d expect that from a publication that’s been doing it that way for decades...
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing…kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can." --Bill Hicks
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