The article is about a news organization offering its paper for free and only 44 signing up.
Speaking for myself, I don't trust "free". Being offered a subscription newspaper for free, I'd think it was a lie or that there was some kind of gotcha down the road since I know they cost money to produce.
I can believe a free newspaper but it's probably going to be more ads than content and 95%+ regurgitated content from other media and official announcements.
This is what I recall when I lived in an area and time that got a free newspaper. The daily papers often just sat in the driveway until they took the trash out, then they threw the papers away.
Exactly this. Or I'd question what this 'news' really is. Someone has to be paying for it and what is it that they want or get of me reading their paper? It's theoretically possible that its a benevolent benefactor who genuinely wants to make the world better by funding journalism. But I doubt it.
But it sounds like you read the linked article - a news report - for free before commenting?
Plenty of cities have free newspapers given away at train stations and suchlike [1] - they're packed with adverts and owned by sketchy billionaires, of course, but so are most newspapers you pay for.
Yes. That's not new. There's a well-established business model for free weeklies: Advertising. Not adtech, which includes tracking, but simple advertising space sold to companies who want to reach the head-shop-and-granola crowd. Is this actually new to anyone? I can't imagine it is.
Being "the product" is only horrible if you're being infringed upon (tracked, for example) in the process.
Our local newspaper is free to read. It sells advertising. Its advertisers are trying to reach a specific demographic. But they do not know every reader's shoe size, car problems, diet prefs, etc.
I am reminded of watching Geritol ads as a youth. That was the price of enjoying The Lawrence Welk show. Saturday cartoons were paid for by Tony the Tiger.
TV commercials were broadcast at a significantly higher volume than the content they were embedded into. They knew you were leaving the room during the commercial breaks.
I think that most people don't mind that level of targeting or the printed ads in a newspaper. I agree with you that it becomes intolerable when the advertiser gets to know if you personally are leaving the room to run to the fridge or to run to the bathroom.
Your grocery store is probably collecting data about you and making money from it. If so, then yes, you are the (or, more accurately, a) product.
But at least you can foil a lot of that by putting your phone into airplane mode before getting anywhere near the store, paying in cash, and not using "loyalty" cards.
