I don't see "spotify of media" really solving the problem with low-quality mass media.
A subscription with pay-per-view revenue share cuts out advertisers as the money middle man, but it still rewards clickbait headlines and easy to consume top lists over deep investigative journalism.
The core problem (or "problem"?) of journalism today is that what people actually want to read is very different from what is "good for the society" for people to write and read. You can't fix it with technology that optimises based on market economics.
Some of the ways newspapers financed deep journalism in the past were classified ads (now split into separate businesses like craigslist) and the inability to track the readership of individual articles. Now that each click is tracked, it is obvious that a Top 10 List article costs $10 to write while bringing in more revenue than a $10000 months-long investigation.
So to "fix" it, you first have to decide that you are going to deliver people journalism that is "good for them" rather than what they want, and then find a way to subsidise producing that content above its natural market value. I think that a "rich billionaire owner" willing to lose money to earn reputation as an owner of a serious newspaper is actually a more promising funding model than spotify for media.
The reason why it solves clickbait vs investigative journalism is because its an apportioned revenue share. click bait is easy to write and has more competition if a user reads loads of clickbait the revenue the author makes from that user will be low per article. On the other hand if you have a user who reads "investigative" high brow content its more expensive so there is less of it so you would expect the per user revenue would be much higher per view.
Imagine if spotify paid artists based on minutes listened apportioned based on each users listening habits instead of a fixed rate of N cents per listen.
So one user listens to Nirvana exclusively all month on spotify you would expect 100% of the 70% rev share to go to the owners of that nirvana content.
How do we decide that "high quality" content gets more per view than "low quality" content? We would need a human who makes subsidy decisions. Or if it's just an equal split of each user's monthly payment, then:
* I'm not sure that readers of "high quality" content read fewer articles in total,
* I'm not sure that they completely avoid clickbait, maybe just read a bit of "high quality" in addition to the "low quality" ones. Often I just read comments on HN or browse pictures on reddit instead of a long thoughtful article, because after a long day of work that feels more relaxing,
* The number of people who click on those articles is still going to be a small fraction of the whole population.
So, this can finance a small number of national or even global sites with sufficient readership. Just like the Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, etc still survive on advertising revenue today.
But how do we make sure every small 20k population town weekly paper can afford similar articles on local issues? How do we encourage or guide people to actually read them instead of looking pictures of cats? How do we make a "good for you classical music collective" get paid 10x more than Nirvana when everyone wants to listen to Nirvana?
Investigative journalism has always existed in conjunction with "low-quality mass media" and has always been funded by advertising.
So it seems little hard to believe that for some reason it's impossible to produce investigative journalism with ad revenue.
If you think newspapers were unaware that flashy headlines sell more paper than political op-eds because they couldn't track clicks, you're delusional.
If you think you're going to fix the "problem" by changing what people want, you're even more delusional. To paraphrase a famous saying, you can deliver people journalism that is "good for them", but you can't make them read it.
This is why I put the "problem" in quotes - I'm not sure if it can be called a problem. If we believe in people's freedom to choose what they want to read, then it isn't.
When people talk about bringing back the good old days of journalism, they dream of the time when cigarettes were unfiltered and you could make a living researching a single story for three months. Or this Request for Startups talks about making mass media write stories that are good for the society (as opposed to people's immediate reading preferences).
I don't see any good technical solutions for achieving these goals, because these goals require changing people's preferences, and require funding that goes against people's preferences.
I also wish YC gave more details about what they mean when they talk about improving society. What's the metric?
I'm not really sure about the relevance of the concept of "mass media" today when people get their news from more and more fragmented sources.
And the idea that the polarization of media is bad also seems highly questionable. In fact, one of the leading researchers on the question of media bias showed that competition between media (which leads to polarization) could reduce bias (http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/BiasReputation.pd...).
A subscription with pay-per-view revenue share cuts out advertisers as the money middle man, but it still rewards clickbait headlines and easy to consume top lists over deep investigative journalism.
The core problem (or "problem"?) of journalism today is that what people actually want to read is very different from what is "good for the society" for people to write and read. You can't fix it with technology that optimises based on market economics.
Some of the ways newspapers financed deep journalism in the past were classified ads (now split into separate businesses like craigslist) and the inability to track the readership of individual articles. Now that each click is tracked, it is obvious that a Top 10 List article costs $10 to write while bringing in more revenue than a $10000 months-long investigation.
So to "fix" it, you first have to decide that you are going to deliver people journalism that is "good for them" rather than what they want, and then find a way to subsidise producing that content above its natural market value. I think that a "rich billionaire owner" willing to lose money to earn reputation as an owner of a serious newspaper is actually a more promising funding model than spotify for media.