Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

So 15 minutes of entertainment time to you (the time spent consuming a WSJ article) is worth 5 or 10 cents? Imagine if you were compensated at the same rate for your work.

I suggest you try to find a substitute for those entertainment pennies. If you can, and that item is "free", good for you. But I doubt 5 or 10 cents gets you much.



A Netflix subscription is around 30 cents per day.

Not to mention that 15 minutes is a very generous estimate, the median is probably closer to 3-5 minutes. Given that the article isn't written for me, that sounds rather fair for accessing it. A print subscription to the WSJ is $400/yr or $1.30/issue, and if I spend an hour reading it that comes out to 6 to 11 cents for a 3-to-5-minute article.


That's probably more expensive per article then the print product, which included costs of physical production.

Journalism has always been about advertisers and scale. The problem now is lowered barriers to entry drove up supply, reducing advertising $ available to "real journalism" and entities like nyt and wsj still have vestigial anchors pulling them down further.

Couple that with growing adblocking and it's a bad recipe. How do you put that genie back in the bottle? The net effect has been lowered standards by former standouts in a race to the bottom. I don't see a fix, much less an easy one.


If my work could be simultaneously consumed by millions of people and they all wanted to pay 5 or 10 cents, I'd be totally ok with that.


I speed read. Usually I'm done in less than 30-60 seconds. There's so much filler stuff in there, often.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: