I will glance at zerohedge maybe 2x a week when bored, but I cannot understand how they could possibly come up with a non ad premiul service for 30 dollars a month. they even say less than a cup of coffee! lol oh and they said your comments will be unmoderated!! yeah thats worth 30 a month. first of all i make my own coffee for maybe 30 cents a cup! second of all you wanting people to pay 30 dollars a month not for zero hedge but for open comments and some other stock service! i find it sad that instead of saying we will make zero hedge better with the added funds or cut off some articles in the free version that they just want you to pay 360 dollars a year for unmoderated comments!!! lol. no thanks! will still look at the free version from time to time. The idea of paying for a premium service means i get premium content not paying for my comments!! jusy wanted to vent about how free blogs n news services are trying to monetize at high prices. what would i pay to support zero hedge and be add free...well maybe 2 bucks a month which would be 10 visits a month for me or roughly...20 cents a visit for me. thats what is pay. 24 bucks a year. look what i get with netflix for 15 a month! most of these companies will come to the realization that the only reason they have anyone visiting is because it is FREE
You are totally right. Not talking about ZH, but other "news" content who are copying twitter tweets...someone even asks 300$per month... WSJ is 50$per year...exclusive content...
Don't think anyone regularly reading ZH as a main news source is going to excel at investing, it's far too unbalanced and peddles negative emotions. Yeah, we all know The Crash Is Coming (TM) but until then we got to respect the market.
Ok, several points. And this is coming from someone who has been in the financial website/advertising business for 23 years. 1. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to run a profitable news operation like ZH these days on Google ads alone, especially considering that they only get paid when users click on an ad. It's obvious right from the start that this is true because the first thing that ZH is offering in exchange for the subscription fee is no ads. But the important question to ask is... when is the last time you visited ZH and also clicked on an advertisement you saw there? The answer is probably never. So your value to them as an occasional lurker is essentially zero. And there are probably a lot of people like you out there. 2. You can't compare the monthly subscription cost of a service like Netflix to a monthly subscription like ZH because Netflix is a mainstream service, meaning that everyone on the planet can find and enjoy content on Netflix. They can afford to keep the price low because they make it up on volume. Last time I checked, Netflix had almost 200 Million subscribers. The market for a paid niche news service like ZH is nowhere near that big. Not even close. 3. Financial and political news is everywhere online, so ZH has tons of competition out there to deal with. So realistically they can only expect to capture a small percentage of the overall demand, especially since a lot of the news available out there is still free for end-users. The Wall St. Journal is an old and respected publication so if anyone can make the subscription model work before anyone else, it will be them. But again, the WSJ is competition for ZH, and the only way ZH can compete is if they can publish niche articles that provide content that the mainstream media doesn't provide. But unfortunately, the more niche a publication becomes, the smaller the audience becomes. So that's why you see the higher monthly prices they are wanting. It's really the only way that the business model works when you consider the fragmented and small size of the market they are going after. 4. The primary reason you are seeing so many blogs and news services moving to a subscription model is because Google and the other ad networks are essentially black boxes. In other words, Google takes a significant cut of the ad revenue and then passes along whatever is left to the publisher. But the publishers have no idea how much Google is scraping off the top, but it is significant. That's why you see Google raking in billions and the blog/news publishers are barely able to survive and thus need to switch to a more profitable model of doing business.
I’ll save you the $30- “Fed blows bubbles. Market is about to crash. The dollar will be worthless soon.” - Every ZH article ever
When the market is up a lot or down a lot, I can go there and quickly find out why. The news articles tend to get right to the point. I also like the market close summary that they post...good summary of what happened for those like me who don't watch the market all day. They do have a negative bias, no doubt about that. But since I'm always positioned net long, my risk is to the downside and that's what I should be more concerned about. I've always suspected ZH of having a Russian bias or perhaps supported by the Russian government. Every now and then they post an article by Strategic Cultural Institute which reads like pure Russian propaganda. But if you know what you're getting and there's value on the site elsewhere...I don't see the harm in reading it. I think the $30 comes with some other services outside of what ZH offers, Newsquawk and something else. I'm not sure that ZH is really alone in their pricing. IB offers many subscription services and I don't see how most justify their cost.
That's similar to how I tended to use them - another source to check that I didn't miss something major on what's going on. I don't think that's too far fetched, and it's good you're on your guard. Most people aren't aware of the extent the western social media sphere is a playground for Russian (and increasingly Chinese) divisive propaganda. The fact these well funded state actors can influence nearly everyone in western countries as they sit reading in their homes is very powerful. I have some examples of this in Sweden as well that makes me take it very seriously. Newsquawk has a relation to ZH? Interesting. I used to have Ransquawk delayed 1 min (good enough for my purposes) but then they dropped delayed stream and increased price to beyond what's worth it given my trade size (this was at the time they rebranded), so I switched.