this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2026
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I mean in fairness, the models are the failures. Say you run a journalism site. You pay a good salary for the journalist, Then obviously they need researchers, maybe a legal expert to look over and make sure none of that opens you up to lawsuits etc... Then you've also got at least a bit of bandwidth etc...
So now you've got to weigh your options of which evil you need to actually make all those payments. Untargetted ads aren't even going to come close to breaking even. Everyone's going to riot and boycott if you dare to paywall it. tracking and targetted ads are also evil of course.
Now obviously there are some evils that decide "OK lets skip the research, lets let an AI write the articles, lets ramp up the tracking.... and then talk about if we can feasibly use a paywall without losing everyone.
But, even the most ethical company on earth has to make some choices, and there's a pretty set amount of evils necessary just to break even, and the worse part is, bringing costs down is also a pretty big evil as, most of those costs are what make it worth reading at all.
I want to see something that works similar to (the way they claim) YouTube premium works.
Get a bunch of these journalism sites together and use a single sign on that catches what I actually view and pays out my single $5-10/month rate to the sites that I visit based on proportionality.
I realize that a privacy-focused community like this isn't going to love the idea of some company tracking all the news/journalism sites they visit, but it really does seem (to me) like the best way to balance the fact that these journalists deserve to get paid and also the fact that I'm not going to give even $2/month to 20+ different sites, just because I refuse to keep track of all of those.
I mean I guess there's always things like Patreon if those sites want to offer a like, $1-2 tier for full access, but they don't because they think their stuff is worth more.
This raises a good question: If a website's business model does not work and they do not even break even, should that company even exist? What purpose/content/utility is it providing that justifies it continuing?
And that's all websites. Even now the operating costs for this Lemmy instance and the Fediseer instance you are on and the Kbin instance I'm on is increasing just by us discussing this. Storage creep is a constant headache for the maintainers. It's an ever increasing bill even with caching or offloading to S3 buckets or whatever.
So, I totally get the needed evil idea and it's not wrong.