Local news publishers, Karolian told Engadget, almost entirely depend on selling ads and subscriptions to readers who visit their websites to survive.
Then it’s time to change your business model. Ad driven journalism has shown it’s limits decades ago, this is just regurgitating what other press agencies write and adding some ads over it.
It used to be you’d search for something, click on the results and load the ads on the page with the info.
Then google started adding their snippets with direct answers, and yes, there has been an uproar from content sites about that. But some fraction of people still click through for more context.
There is a reason why RAG and fine-tuning are big topics in the field. General foundation models are good for general low risk info, but if people really care its generally not enough.
The electric company. AI’s reading articles written by other AI’s. Everyone trying to figure out how to squeeze more revenue out of it. But everyone’s paying the electric bill for all these servers and the electric company doesn’t have to give a shit about any of it.
Perhaps you once wrote a piece called “Making the Most of Paywalled Articles”. Unfortunately, Google can’t find it. Let’s just ask Bing.
Hey Bing, please summarize the article “Making the Most of Paywalled Articles” by Evotech.
Copilot Certainly! The article titled “Making the Most of Paywalled Articles” by Evotech discusses strategies for accessing articles that are locked behind paywalls. Here are the key points:
Yeah… I think we can skip the “summary”. Don’t get me wrong. This stuff is amazing and I love it. But it is what it is. I really hate that MS and OAI don’t communicate the “limitations” properly.
I mean, yeah. I signed up for a year of Prime last summer. They just decide to put in ads? At least wait for the subscription to expire before pulling this crap.
Every time they do something like this, I wait longer and longer to resubscribe. It’s just been getting worse, not better.
Bezos, just go to Mars already with the rest of the billionaires. Guess how much taxes you’ll save up there. We don’t need you.
Back in the day, before streaming was a thing, there were lots of people saying that they’d gladly pay for content if it was served to them in a convenient way. But why would you pay for a worse experience (at that time physical media, often at lower quality, and lower availability) when you can get a better one for free?
Along came streaming. Lo and behold, piracy decreased. Where the fuck do you even go to pirate music anymore? All the big sites have shut down. Video piracy is kinda still going strong, probably mostly due to bullshit concerning exclusives, but it’s way less than it used to be.
Its their platform, they can do whatever they want with it I guess, but this trend is definitely gonna be a big boost to piracy.
It never went away but lots of people I know who did all that stopped bothering.
When the range in netflix went down, fees went up and everybody launched different services, I was really thinking of sailing but it was Netflix blocking sharing that was the final straw.
Back in the day, before streaming was a thing, there were lots of people saying that they’d gladly pay for content if it was served to them in a convenient way.
It wasn’t just people saying that, it was backed up by studies.
Music piracy just kinda gets ripped from official sources. Be it Spotify with an Adblock script, or downloading the song from YouTube.
If you want super high quality stuff, you can find groups dedicated to it. But for most users, just modding streaming services to give them what they want for free is enough.
Meanwhile I get support for both completely ad free with infinite selection on my Jellyfin server… What on earth are these companies thinking, you literally get a superior product by not paying for it. I would gladly pay a small fee per download of DRM free files if that were an option.
The easiest way forward is to take that and couple it with something like this for near instant access to a shit ton of content.
Edit: If you are using Set Top Boxes or Smart TVs like Roku / Google / Samsung make sure there’s a Jellyfin client available for your device. You may need to use something else like Plex or Kodi if a Jellyfin client isn’t available for your environment.
Jellyfin, kodi, openelec, emby and plex are currently the best self-hosted media streaming platforms. Just attach some hard drive with your vacation videos, ripped dvds/blurays, other owned content and you can have your own service that is only available in your local network at home, for free, with whatever quality you want. One benefit is that this will still work in the rare occasion that your ISP screws up and knocks your neighborhood offline. The downside is you have to have sufficient storage and need to acquire your media yourself.
Prime was a reasonable value for me a decade ago. The streaming side was never the main draw but it was a nice added bonus, especially when Netflix started to lose a lot of the content I actually wanted to watch.
Unfortunately, Amazon’s been flooded with worthless trash, and they made the conscious decision to make searching and filtering as useless as possible. It’s actually impressive that they’ve so degraded their service that it’s usually more convenient for me to go shopping locally than to try to navigate the unending mine field on Amazon.
So of course they try to ruin the last thing keeping me subscribed. I’m done, they can fuck off. I’ve got a jellyfin server, I don’t need these assholes.
Unfortunately, I’m sure they’ll make an obscene amount of money with this move, because apparently the world is full of people who will pay good money to bend over and take it.
I don’t regularly watch anything on APV so this specific action doesn’t really effect me -but- the uninhibited profit seeking by the Entertainment Industry is out of control. As a high income household we’ve silently absorbed the rate hikes and content splitting in order to keep enjoying content but the latest industry moves around account sharing and charging extra for basic stuff is getting to be too much. The former because I’ve got kids in College and I shouldn’t have to pay for extra"accounts, even with Student Discounts, so they can watch things and I definitely shouldn’t have to pay for simple add-ons like HD, Vision, and Atmos!
I’m lucky enough to be able to stand up a Media Server (Plex in my case) and am currently integrating that with “Arrr” services so I can hop off this carousel of rent-seeking insanity.
Just cancelled my prime subscription today. It was set to renew on Friday. I’ve been with prime for close to 10 years.
I don’t see any value. The price has nearly doubled since originally signing up. The free two day shipping was nice but more and more 2 days is 3-4 and I can get free shipping anyway on any order over $35 without prime so I’ll just build up my cart and be patient or order from another place.
The video content was nice but they’re fucking joking if they think I’m going to watch ads or pay $3 more per month to not have ads. I can easily pirate most content including live sports and they’re making it far less convenient to be part of their ecosystem.
I get my books from the library and store my photos locally.
The literal only downside i see is my buddy won’t get his twitch prime subscription from me every month so I guess I’m costing him like $2/month but he’s got several hundred so he’ll do without.
Same, just cancelled today, as well. I don’t buy nearly enough stuff on Amazon anymore to justify the free shipping, the prime video app is fine enough, but if I have to pay more for HDR/surround, well the line has to be drawn somewhere.
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