The legacy publisher is betting its business on advertising—and its brand.
Time removed its paywall in June 2023, resulting in a rise in advertising revenue but a loss of digital subscribers, with traffic remaining relatively flat.
The decision was influenced by broader industry trends and the publisher's focus on working with advertisers and leveraging its brand equity in other ventures.
Time aims to achieve profitability by expanding its direct advertising and sponsorship business, growing its global events slate, and exploring new ventures like connected television.
Probably because the overwhelming majority of people see crypto as a scam, and the market share for its use is trivial and better facilitated by actual currency. As well, it’s extremely volatile and the flagship coin recently halfed itself. It’s probably one of the worst things a company can accept in exchange for goods or services.
The old perception is reality, while your not wrong, still means decent institutions are losing out on funding options.
Credit cards were seen as a scam at one point because scary digital currency. Same with torrent protocol. To be honest I'm suprised lemmy doesn't accept it for server donations.
So its either stay with the current model which is visibly dying or find another way
Why would it have to be a crypto donation? Their bank accounts are in USD. Most of their readers have USD. People can transfer USD. What does some arbitrary crypto thing you want to pretend is money add that makes it better for those "most people"?
The problem is that Time and every other news outlet think they are the cats pajamas and deserve your subscription. They suffer a similar problem to streaming platforms except news is not exclusive.
If these companies could organize and build a "pay once, get access to everything everywhere" model, they would see subscriptions go through the roof and get more money. But since the owners of these news outlets want only their own subscribers to go up, it's never going to happen.
I'm not going to pay for 5-10 news subscriptions no matter how great the reporting is.
But I'd be willing to pay $20 or so a month if that meant I can access any article on any news website.
I use (paid) Apple News, and I really enjoy it. Are there no other “pay once” platforms out there?
My only complaint is that some articles still show ads despite being subscribed, but that’s taken care of with DNS-based ad blocking (though you have to also block a a hostname pointing to an Apple DoH server which I find funny).