We’ve begun to put our articles behind an email registration wall. We tried to articulate why this is:
- AI stealing our articles
- AI spam destroying discoverability on search
- Fracturing of social
- Collapse of programmatic ad market
We are actively working on a solve for paid subscribers who use RSS, or ways for real humans to tap into a full text RSS feed
@jasonkoebler Video games tried that a while back with DRM to prevent pirates.
The lesson our industry learned was an important one: Don't punish legitimate customers because of the actions of vandals and thieves.
@LouisIngenthron @jasonkoebler The issue with video games are fundamentally different. They're data, which can be torrented and made available for years; whereas a newspaper is more of a service. A groundbreaking piece of investigative journalism is probably going to be in a dusty filing cabinet in a couple of decades, but the video game will still be worth about the same.
People aren't pirating news articles: they're plagiarising them. I've only seen a video game plagiarised once, ever.
@wizzwizz4 Well, both of those points are blatantly wrong.
(A) Games absolutely lose value over time. Especially multiplayer games, which become worthless when their audience moves on and the servers shut down.
(B) Games are plagiarized so often that there's a specific term coined for it: "asset flip".
But that's all besides the point, which is: Making the experience worse for legitimate customers in order to punish or deter illegitimate ones is bad business.
