this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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I would also like to avoid ads, and pay streaming services rather than cable or anything with ads. Oddly, this hasn't been the case for any online news sites. The Indy Star is begging and pay walling for subscribers and for some reason, I don't want to. But I don't want ads. I admit it's unreasonable to have neither. They need to pay people like anyone else.
I think it boils down to the difference in how we consume these things. You typically go directly to a streaming service with the intent to browse and consume its content, but few people directly consume news sites. More often you'll either end up on a particular site from a web search or from a link from an existing content aggregator like facebook, reddit, or lemmy. Since you don't seek out a particular news platform for regular consumption you feel less inclined to pay an ongoing subscription.
That does raise an interesting idea to me though. What if instead of a normal month to month subscription a news service offered a pre-paid per article account. So, say 25 cents an article say and you can purchase 40 articles for $10, then each article you view deducts from your account. When you get low on remaining articles it can prompt you to top up your account or you can have it auto-renew. Personally I think I'd be far more inclined to something like that because the cost would scale based on how much I actually used the service rather than being an ongoing monthly cost for something I use very sporadically.
This is great problem solving and a creative idea. I would support this concept for sure. I mentioned in another reply how I keep resisting paying a local news agency a subscription, mostly because of what you said. Frequency.