Monday Note

I think there's an understandable case to be made for the spending (when your future hinges on your digital properties, you can't really blame management for being scared and wanting outside advice - and lots of it.)

But it's hard to see how the Times can work this out, and it's worth remembering that the paywall is a desperate attempt to do this. Desperate people tend to pay more for even the simple things. There aren't any models worth using - if the Times is to get this right, it has to invent one on its own dollar.

Is there hope? Monday Note's Frédéric Filloux thinks that the NYT can be a digital-only enterprise:
http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/03/27/the-nyts-melting-iceberg-syndrome/

Let’s stop a moment and behold the printed New York Times’ true gem: its Sunday edition.
It changes everything in our look at the paper’s digital equation:
- Sunday circulation is 54% higher than on weekdays (1.35m vs. 877,000).
- It’s an expensive package: $5.00 in New York, $6.00 elsewhere in the country.
- Sunday copy sales bring five times more money than any weekday.
- Advertising-wise, some analysts say the Sunday NYT accounts for about 50% of
the paper’s entire advertising revenue.

He suggests that it cuts out its daily paper, keeps the SundayEedition cashcow, and switch everything else to digital-only.

But it takes a lot of courage to do something so drastic. Till then, $40 million seems regrettably understandable - the price of being scared and unsure of one's…

The irony is that this was built so Facebook can be more compliant with GDPR.

They hinted this January that they would release this soon:

> “We’re rolling out a new privacy center globally that will put the core privacy settings for Facebook in one place and make it much easier for people to manage their data,” Sandberg said at a Facebook event in Brussels on Tuesday.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-sandberg-privacy/facebook-to-hand-privacy-controls-to-users-ahead-of-eu-law-idUSKBN1FC1Q6

So I guess the takeaway here is that privacy regulation works?

I also just love how they put it in their post:

> People have also told us that information about privacy, security, and ads should be much easier to find.

Really, Facebook? People have just told you that? Are you freaking kidding me? People have been telling you that for a god damn decade. But you chose to ignore it, because you didn't care - until this major scandal was created that forced you to do this. It wasn't because "people told you" and as a company that "always listens to its users" (ha! good one), you decided to actually do that. Come on.

Facebook's tone throughout this entire scandal has been nothing but condescending. And yes, they really do think we're all idiots (as proven by how they responded on every other past screw-up and how they typically come out and lie about it):

https://mondaynote.com/mark-zuckerberg-thinks-were-idiots-638c64dfab12

Remember how they outright lied about the datr…

I use Feedly / NetNewsFire for feeds, rather than newsletters, but in reality they're the same, just different consumption methods. Just interesting to see NNW was in HN recently. These are the most interesting things I keep in Feedly.

acoup.blog - A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry - frequently linked to HN already. He's a great history writer, covering everything from Roman logistics, to analysis of current games and movies - eg. LotR battles.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC364qOwWXAzgRruHhhFMhVg - Croker vs Rover. A New Zealand guy restoring a 70s Land Rover. It's a Youtube channel, but both hilarious and informative. Infrequent too, so easy to cruise through at leisure.

Atlas Obscura - https://www.atlasobscura.com/ - interesting history/geography mix.

https://www.numberphile.com/ - Mathy easy-access but complex topics - mostly videos on Youtube. Very accessible, but interesting for a mostly non-math person to see real math at work.

https://waynehale.wordpress.com/ - Wayne Hale - NASA flight controller. Interesting views and analysis of current space / incident management topics vs how it was done for the shuttle, along with some other commentary. Infrequent and interesting.

https://computer.rip/ - Deeply geekly telco / 50s-70s computer history with some cold-war fun. Pretty in-depth, and a fun read.

https://www.cringely.com/ - Cringley - weekly-monthly tech posts on bigger tech strategy with an Appleish focus. He's been around SV for years. Was early at…

Related, this[0] Monday Note is interesting as well:

Last November, in a rather blunt way, I expressed my reservations regarding Blendle’s model (see The New York Times and Springer Are Wrong About Blendle[1]). My concerns ranged from the abundance of free content available on the web (especially in English), to the damage inflicted on the “cross-subsidy model” in which baseball coverage pays for the Kabul bureau, to the risk associated with the “unbundling” of news (and its impact of publishers’ ARPU).

To their credit, Blendle’s co-founders Alexander Klöpping and Marten Blankesteijn seized on my questioning and engaged me in an ongoing discussion focusing on business models that could ensure the survival of quality journalism. This could be a crucial factor in Blendle’s fate: this company has been created by journalists who fervently defend quality journalism and believe that great editorial must be paid for.
In spite of my initial reluctance, the more I explored its model, the more I came to believe it should be tested and carefully analyzed, essentially because it is much more sophisticated and carries more potential that a first look might lead one to believe.

[0]: http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/10/05/blendle-is-up-to-something-big/

[1]: http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/11/02/the-new-york-times-and-springer-are-wrong-about-blendle/

This feels cynical to say, but I don't know whether to listen to Gassee wholeheartedly or to take his perspective with a grain of salt. On the one hand, he has deep experience with Apple and great knowledge of the computing industry, but on the other, he is an elderly technologist who was pushed out of Apple decades ago [1] and is no more relevant to M1 than anyone else in the industry.

In either case, I tend to disagree with Gassee's attack on the Morehead review, and I don't believe that there is any need to connect Morehead's M1 opinion with his 64-bit iPhone opinion. M1 should indeed be judged on its instruction set limitations because that is one of its major differences versus x86. It would be careless to consider personal computing hardware while forcibly ignoring the sofware ecosystem that it supports.

I also think it's a cheap shot to accuse Morehead of choosing his opinions based on a financial interest in the supremacy of x86.

[1] https://mondaynote.com/50-years-in-tech-part-13-firing-frankness-3d17e207d1cf

> Youtube Premium is only ~$10/month, does Google really make that much more with ads?

Yes! Already their average per-user revenue was 21 USD per user per month in 2018 (couldn't find newer data) [0]. Furthermore, the first people to sign up would be the richest folks, those who are the most interesting to advertisers. Meaning: they are worth way more than 21 USD per month to Google.

To compensate, the price would have to be even higher. If only 5% of Google's userbase signed up, and those 5% are, on average, worth to Google 5 times as people from the general population, then you'd have to pay 100 USD per month for getting rid of ads across all Google products. That number would also have to grow at least as quickly as the ad revenue for it to make sense for Google to do it.

[0]: https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-everybody-else-e5b02a579ed3