this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Similar feel, no need to understand german. Its a calculator by a newspaper to figure out if you would be considered middle class, but the whole thing is paywalled.... https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2023-07/soziale-ungleichheit-einkommen-armut-reichtum-rechner
I did once test the paid version for 1€ per week for the test period. I still had ads on their app and would need to pay another 9€ to disable ads. Maybe the test month isn't a full experience until you pay 9€ a month regularly but I understand it as you pay 9€ for exclusive articles and 9€ on top to remove ads.
I don't see how this business model works out for anyone.
Judging by what I read about Germany's newspapers, it doesn't. Which is kinda scary? Even if these papers clearly have issues, we really do need local journalism (and it's even more dire for media that isn't targeting the national market).
Those prices feel so expensive, too. Like, does the news cost more to produce than full length movies and TV shows? Cause all the streaming video apps are far cheaper than 9€ a week. The only thing 9€ is cheap for is if you would have been buying a newspaper daily. Incidentally, newspapers have ads despite being bought, so that might explain why they kept ads in the web version too?
A price like that may have made sense in the pre internet days, when a newspaper was a big chunk of my daily reading due to general lack of alternatives. But these days? I probably only read a single digit number of articles per day about the biggest headlines. And since I get lots of news from social media like Lemmy, it crosses many websites, which is unconductive with subscribing. Plus it feels like a sizable chunk of news articles are just quoting AP or Reuters these days, anyway.
Mind you, I'm also Canadian. We have a fully publically funded news service (the CBC) that isn't paywalled and generally high quality.
Can middle class people afford paywalls? That’s how the calculator works.
Exactly, it answers itself automatically :)