The Daily Mail added a paywall today, joining other news sites such as CNN, Fox, NY Post, etc. creating barriers to reading the news and requiring cash payments or at least forking over your email so you can be spammed to death.
Supposedly touted as for just a few stories, it appears the majority of Daily Mail articles are now paywalled.
News sites started carpet bombing their web pages with so many ads it caused many to run to get ad blocker web browsers.
Then the sites started adding “news stories” which are really just affiliate articles pitching products for you to buy for which the news sites gets a commission.
For paying the Daily Mail do you get to avoid ads (without using an ad blocker)?
NO.
Unbelievably, they say for your payment to read articles you still get ads – but supposedly fewer ads.
What a deal!
Seems to me the news model is broken.
But it also appears from a quick search online that the Daily Mail’s chairman is compensated more than $10 million per year and other executives are paid $5 million and up.
Maybe that’s where some savings could be found.
Prediction: the paywalls will be a failure as few signup and it just causes a loss of eyeballs and traffic to the website.
I don’t know what the solution is for news sites, but I doubt paying a monthly fee to get the honor of seeing ads, with articles themselves just being disguised ads pitching products to buy, doesn’t seem like a enticing deal designed with the consumer in mind.
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