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Best Buy limits sales of NVIDIA RTX-Series GPUs to Totaltech subscribers
Best Buy restricted sales of NVIDIA RTX 3000-series GPUs, including the RTX 3080 and 3090 models, to members of its $199 per year subscription program.
Squarespace is getting into video subscriptions
Another big platform is adding video to its offering.
Google expands its News Showcase program to Canada
Google has signed agreements with eight publishers in Canada for its News Showcase program, including major publishers like The Globe and Mail.
E3 2021 organizers confirm the all-digital event will be '100 percent free'
E3 2021 will be '100 percent free' according to its organizers, with no paywalled content.
Twitter jumps into newsletters with Revue acquisition
Twitter wants a piece of the fast-growing newsletter industry. Today, the company announced that it’s acquired Revue for an undisclosed sum. In a blog post, Twitter argued that newsletters were a natural expansion of its platform.
Squarespace now lets customers add paywalls to their sites
The “Members Area” is available now as an add-on to any Squarespace subscription, with plans starting at $9 a month.
YouTube limits experimental features to paid Premium subscribers
If you’ve used YouTube recently, you likely know that it really, really wants you to sign up for a paid Premium subscription. Now, Google is providing another incentive by allowing Premium users to try out experimental features still under development.
Google will pay publishers for 'high-quality' news and absorb paywall costs
Google has announced that it will start paying publishers to license “high-quality” content in an upcoming service it’s describing as a “news experience.” The announcement appears to confirm rumors from earlier this year that Google planned to launch a news site much like Apple News+.
Criterion will stream notable titles by black filmmakers for free
Criterion Collection announced a few steps it’s taking to fight systemic racism, including lifting the paywall on select titles from black filmmakers.
You can get around Medium's paywall by clicking on twitter links
Medium is putting a gate in it paywall for Twitter users. Company CEO Ev Williams announced that users who are directed to Medium from links on Twitter will not be subject to the standard limits of the paywall. They will be able to read stories for free with no monthly cap.
Google's AI-powered News app arrives on iOS
A redesigned Google News for iOS was a notable inclusion at the Google I/O keynote last week. Today it rolls out officially, replacing the existing Google Play Newsstand, which launched on iOS in 2014 as a news and magazine subscription hub. The app has been completely reimagined, designed to handle the ever-evolving way we consume news, and leveraging existing AI and machine-learning technology to create a personalized and curated experience. Most importantly, it draws from a variety of sources to deliver packages of opinion, analysis and fact-checked articles focused on specific newsworthy events, giving users a solid platform from which to make up their own minds about current affairs.
New York Times reduces free article limit to five per month
Back in 2011, The New York Times made a decision to limit the number of free articles any given user could read a month. After 20 articles, people without subscriptions would hit a paywall. That was reduced to 10 articles in 2012. Now, according to Bloomberg, the Times is reducing that number to just five articles per month.
Medium expands its reading subscription to any author or publisher
Last March, publishing platform Medium introduced its Partner Program, a Netflix-style subscription model that gave members exclusive pieces of writing, access to features before anyone else, an offline reading list and an ad-free experience. The program left beta in August, and it expanded to more media partners like The New York Times, Bloomberg and Rolling Stone last month. Now, though, CEO Ev Williams has announced that Medium will allow any publisher or author to join the partner program, essentially democratizing its paywall and merit-based rewards system.
Google to stop penalizing paywalled news in search results
Google is relaxing its rules on subscription news stories in a bid to thaw increasingly frosty relationships with prominent media giants. Previously, under Google's "first click free" policy, publishers such as The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal would have to provide users with a number of free articles every day, or be penalized in Google's search results. Publishers argued that this affected sales and slowed the take-up of online news subscription services at a time when many relied on revenue from content hidden behind paywalls.
Facebook will allow news subscriptions on Instant Articles
In the face of mounting pressure from publishers, Facebook is launching a news subscription service. The new feature will essentially allow news outlets to erect a paywall on top of Instant Articles. That way Facebook keeps readers locked to its site, while media companies earn a bit more cash from their content. The social network will begin testing the service in October, according to its head of news partnerships Campbell Brown.
The New York Times is free to read for the election
Some things are more important that profit. This election is one of them. As such, the New York Times announced on Thursday that it will eliminate the paywall to its website from November 7th to 9th. This move will give the entire internet, not just NYT subscribers, access to the site's reporting. The promotion will run 72 hours, from 12:01am Monday through 11:59pm Wednesday. During that time, the NYT plans to broadcast live election election coverage, as well as a Facebook livestream on election night and a call-in show hosted by the crew of the The Run-Up podcast.
Blendle's pay-per-article service is available on mobile devices
If you use Dutch startup Blendle to read all your news, you're in for a treat: The previously desktop-only app is going mobile for both iOS and Android for simpler enlightenment on the go.
Blendle brings its pay-per-story news hub to the US
If you've ever thought that it would be wiser to pay a few cents to read a paywalled article than shell out for an expensive subscription, you're about to get your chance. Blendle is launching a US beta for its news aggregation service, which lets you pay to read individual stories from outlets like the Economist, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. Prices start at as little as 9 cents a pop, and you can even ask for an instant refund if you think you've been stiffed. At the moment, the only big catch is that you have to sign up for a waiting list to get in -- you may be twiddling your thumbs for a while.
Apple News is reportedly getting subscription articles
Apple is getting ready to bring paywalled articles to its News app, sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters. If true, this would signify a major change in the service, since it would provide publishers with paywalls (such as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal) a new way to display their entire content. Currently, these publications can only provide excerpts from articles to Apple News users, and the app doesn't support account logins for subscribers. That's very different than the full reading experience offered by free, ad-supported publishers.
Artist pays you to read the news hidden behind online paywalls
Don't like that many of the big, traditional news outlets hide the online editions of their stories behind paywalls? Neither does artist Paolo Cirio, who designed Daily Paywall as a protest against what he sees as an attempt to limit your access to information. The website uses scripting to automatically scoop up articles from The Economist, Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, making the stories available to anyone who visits. Moreover, Cirio has set up a crowdfunded money pool that pays you to read -- answer a quiz about the story you just finished and you'll get a dollar.
