Misleading pricing:

Using the billing period as the header and showing the price for the billing period… except for monthly—which shows 1/4 the price and says “every week” in smaller, gray text.

Punishing non-subscription payments:

Adding a $6.50 (1400%) surcharge for wanting a weekly one-time payment instead of a recurring subscription.

Charging more for longer periods:

Monthly billing, once you remove the dark pattern and convert it to its actual price, is $2. There are 12 months in a year, meaning it would cost $24 to maintain that subscription for a year.

Why is the yearly subscription $29, then?

If you want to verify this for yourself, you’re going to need to clear your cookies and reload an article a lot. They do A/B tests and show different subscription requied modals. This one was the worst.

  • cobysev@lemmy.worldEnglish
    175·
    1 day ago

    I still don’t understand why anyone would ever pay for access to news articles. There are plenty of free and legitimate articles on the Internet, and public access TV still broadcasts news. You never need to pay anyone.

    Honestly, putting a price on access to news just makes me not trust that organization. It feels like a scam, like paying for bottled water when water is one of the most abundant resources in the world.

    Paid subscriptions are only a thing because people bought into it and normalized it instead of boycotting it. That’s why everything is a subscription nowadays and no one can just buy and own a product now. We have to spend our lives paying a regular fee for access to something we never own.

    • Libb@piefed.socialEnglish
      4·
      18 hours ago

      Google offers things for free, see the shitty stuff they’re doing?

      Personally, I’d rather keep on paying for my newspapers and have them not do, or not as much, shitty things. And that’s exactly what I do (plus I like to receive my news in print knowing no one is tracking what I’m reading and how) ;)

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zipEnglish
      16·
      1 day ago

      See, the problem is, free news has to make revenue from somewhere.

      If they aren’t taking subscriptions, then they are probably showing ads, so their content is at the mercy of their sponsors.

      Even if they are taking subscriptions, they are probably showing ads. That makes it doubly bad.

      The alternative is secondary sources (i.e. social media), where theres already a bias by whoever is curating it.

      We are amidst an actual information war. Like, there are at least two totally separate realities existing on the US right now. A reliable source of news is important, and capitalism has destroyed all of the old outlets and left us skeptical of the new ones. Good job, everyone.

    • ultranaut@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      1 day ago

      I pay for access to the local newspaper and a few other things. I agree it isn’t ideal but the people producing the content need to eat.

      Also, having a subscriber base directly providing funding can potentially make a news org more trustworthy. Being reliant on your subscribers for funding provides a mechanism of accountability to them that a news org dependent on advertising doesnt have.

    • pivot_root@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      I would understand paying for online news as an alternative to ads, and only if the news organization does actual reporting free from political or billionaire interference.

      Off the top of my head, I can think of exactly one news website that seems to meet that criteria at a surface level.

      For everything else, fuck 'em— archive.is :)