Giving Scroll a Shot

Posted in biz by Adam

30 May 202012 October 2021

Trying out Scroll—an attempt at an alternative revenue model for journalism sites.

Scroll is the latest attempt to monetize news sites without advertising. It’s another variation on a theme, as there is demand for a better model and there is some amount of reader money sitting idle, and there are very annoying ads to not be served.

Their model is $5 monthly and they say they give a cut to the sites based on how much you read. So their model is really about like cable television: if they can match enough readers with enough sites, it works. You won’t read every site, and so it’s a numbers game of hitting the right mixtures to attract enough readers.

My preferred model would still include a per-article split, plus some way to influence the split if you really enjoyed a particular article on a particular site. But it’s worth a shot.

There are a few things I hope will eventually happen, regardless of this iteration of pay-news’ success. First, some kind of standards for advertising is obviously needed. Readers should be able to set what kind of ads they find acceptable, whether that’s text-only, no-animation, no-video, no-sound.

Sites should be prohibited from replacing ads after the page has loaded. The Washington Post has been bad about that for some time, and Ars Technica does it, too.

Sites should not shift text while loading ads or while you scroll. It is a mortal sin to pull text out from under the reader’s eyes. Anyone in the business of putting words in front of readers should know better.

The other thing would be a better relationship between readers and news sites. There’s a kind of hostility by the sites (I don’t interact with the readers, so maybe there’s hostility there, too), where using an ad-blocker or trying to read a one-off article is met with a kind of creepy store clerk hovering on you as you browse. “What, you don’t want to see our obnoxious (potentially malicious) ads?” “You know, you can’t come in the store again if you don’t buy something.”

Probably the big problem will be—for now—lack of selection and lack of easily knowing which sites are which. I tend to read articles on sites I’m more familiar with, because I know what to expect ad-wise. Will a random site be a clusterfuck? Happens often enough. So I’ll actually search for an alternative site with a similar article, if I think it’s less trouble than clicking through to a mess of a site.

Which is the other thing I eventually hope to see: standards of content display that go beyond advertising standards. Most dead-tree newspapers had pretty similar formats. They were built for reading, and they did it with minimal nonsense and minimal stylization. But the web, every site has to be overdesigned. That’s one of the reasons I’ve mostly given up on customizing styles on this site—hopefully it makes things a bit more standard, a bit less of a bother to whoever the heck reads this.

Anyway, for now I’m giving it a try. I don’t actually read most of the sites in Scroll’s list, but some of them were excluded because of their paywalls. So maybe now I’ll read them some more and see what’s what.

Caring for Your Republic

Posted in unAmerican by Adam

13 July 2013

Questioning whether the missing piece of American politics is direct support.

What is a republic? It is a state with the power resting in elected representatives.

Ah, but how many representatives, elected by whom? Would a single dictatorial position elected for life constitute a republic? Would every single vote for whomever you choose counting to elect them as representatives constitute a republic?

What do you do when the representatives choose to represent nothing like your interests? What do you do when the so-called fourth estate (journalism) does the same?

It seems plausible, if you assume that they have both done so, and for the same reasons, that the solution is the same for both cases.

It seems that the reason the representatives fail to represent stems from their reliance upon corporate donations and fund-raising to win reelection, and the reason that the journalists fail to deliver sufficient information to the electorate stems again from their reliance upon corporate support for operations.

The most straightforward manner to remedy this would appear to be to replace the payer. We would expect media that relies mostly on individual subscribers for support, rather than advertisements or corporate subscriptions, would provide the best information. We would expect those districts where the least corporate funding of representatives occurs to align most closely with the constituent interests.

But it gets more complicated. Districts aren’t drawn by formula, but by state representatives. So once again there’s the opportunity to inject high pressure corporate dollars into… there’s the chance for money to spoil representation.

Likewise with journalism, the best journalists in the world cannot really prosper without enough readership/circulation. And so they must go to the large markets, and the large markets attract more advertising…

Large markets are historically where the math works out for reader-supported journalism. But the Internet looks poised to support it, too. It may take some time, and it will take trust-giving by the journalists, convincing people they will get their money’s worth.

We can’t just up and decide to fund a new representative to congress, though. Diverse interests, historically underrepresented, can choose to fund and support particular candidates.

As yet we have not seen a major political upheaval via the Internet in the United States. But that owes itself more to the fashion/culture of American politics than any sort of contentment with the status quo. Barack Obama raised a large amount of funds through the Internet, but he was a mainstream candidate for a major office.

The change that’s being watched for is a swath of congressional elections or state elections to be upset by third party candidates funded via the Internet. And the question is how long after will they be controlled by corporate donations once more.

If the cultural/political change that’s needed is direct support of journalism and candidates, we need a definite understanding of that to convince the majority to begin direct support.

Comment on Comments

Posted in hyperweb by Adam

14 May 2011

I’m encouraged that the Knight Foundation and Mozilla are working on enhancing the role of journalism on the web, and I am definitely looking forward to finding out what sort of innovations come from it. This post looks at some possibilities regarding comments.

I’ve been following the Knight-Mozilla Challenges (Drumbeat: Knight Mozilla News Technology Partnership), and the second challenge is about improving online commenting and discussion.

Comments are Normal

In thinking about that challenge, the first thing that occurs to me is that the quality of any given comment will follow a normal distribution. Most comments will be of an average quality. Some will suck. Some will rock.

Many of the solutions that exist today focus on changing the output. They basically seek to filter the whole set of comments so that the shape of the curve for the visible comments changes.

I question if that’s the best approach. Can and should sites seek to improve the quality of the average post instead? That is, if they could constrain the input in some ways, to elicit better comments, would that be better? If so, what would that look like?

It might take the form of a series of explicit prompts for comments. Instead of having (only) a general discussion, you would have some particular aspects that you could comment on and discuss. The idea would be to frame particular discussions around more specific aspects, to avoid the drift that occurs in more general discussions.

You might give users a choice to create a directed discussion topic or participate in an existing one. You would give only a small group of users the opportunity to create directed discussions to avoid an overabundance of them and have them simply become roots of threads.

Non-comment Participation

If you seek to participate online, that is almost entirely restricted to a two basic tasks. One is commenting directly. Another is curating comments of others (via either direct voting, rating, moderation, or linking).

It seems like that misses some opportunities. My hunch is that there are other participatory means that would enhance commenting, but also some opportunities aside from commenting that could be added. One possible idea in that vein is paraphrasing.

In visiting a story, I read and comprehend it, and any comment on it will reflect my own interpretation. One opportunity that is separate to comments but related is paraphrasing or summarizing the original content. That would give users alternative interpretations to read before commenting. It might better-inform the discussion, provided the summaries were strictly non-commentary.

As above, the idea would be to only have a small fraction of the users to provide summaries.

Commonality in These Ideas

Both of the ideas above express a common theme of moving away from general discussion threads. They focus on subtly shifting the discussion toward less self-directed content. This isn’t to say that people can’t self-direct their comments, but it’s an extraneous step in many cases.

By moving a small number of users out of the comment pool and into a different layer of the discussion/participation system, you provide an opportunity for different behaviors to emerge. That harkens back to the initial point I made: shifting the quality of the comments rather than filtering the whole pool. There are too many users stuck in the same behaviors of commenting, and the web offers an opportunity to focus on diversity of activity.