Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 17:34 UTC (Wed) by fredrik (subscriber, #232)
In reply to: Firefox adds tracking protection by default by peter-b
Parent article: Firefox adds tracking protection by default

The obvious answer is that subscriptions pay for journalism.

The Guardian have a great option wich allows you to support them at any level, you pick the amount you want to contribute monthly. Many papers ask for at least 10€ / monthly, which maybe isn't much by itself, but quickly adds up when you want to get your news from multiple sources.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 20:45 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

I subscribe to the Guardian. I prefer their content to the Washington Post. I also prefer their stance in how they monetize their content. The Guardian invited me in, while the Post lied to me by claiming tracking protection was ad-blocking.

So sure, journalism paid by subscription makes sense to me. But some behaviors encourage me to subscribe, and some don't.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 6, 2019 12:15 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

> The obvious answer is that subscriptions pay for journalism.

I don't think it's obvious that's a sustainable business model, although it may be less bad than the alternatives. The Guardian still gets 45% of its revenue from non-digital sources (physical newspaper sales and ads etc), and is barely breaking even after years of losses and cost-cutting, so it couldn't survive on just its digital revenue (subscriptions and voluntary contributions and online ads).

They don't say how much of that digital revenue is supporters vs ads, but they do report "163m unique browsers and 1.35 billion page views" in March 2019, and "over 655,000 monthly paying supporters", so something like 0.5% of readers choose to pay for it. Presumably ad revenue from the other 99.5% is still significant. Now it's a race to increase readership and increase conversion rates, fast enough to make up for the death of print and for the increasing portion of ad money being consumed by ad companies like Google and Facebook instead of going to the content producers. It's still not clear who will win that race.

(Personally I started subscribing to various sites when I considered how much time I spent reading them, vs how much money I spent per hour on books and games and TV and movies and other forms of entertainment. "10€ / monthly" doesn't sound unreasonable in that context.)