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Deterioration of the Washington Post’s subscriber base continued on Tuesday, hours after its proprietor, Jeff Bezos, defended the decision to forgo formally endorsing a presidential candidate as part of an effort to restore trust in the media.
The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik.
A day earlier, 200,000 had left according to the same outlet.
The numbers are based on the number of cancellation emails that have been sent out, according to a source at the paper, though the subscriber dashboard is no longer viewable to employees.
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Fuck bezos
He’s getting exactly what he wanted; to corrupt and neuter another stronghold of journalistic integrity, and turn it into his propaganda network.
He doesn’t care whether it makes money or not. He’s already richer than god, makes more profit than its entire worth every single week, and if Trump wins his personal tax cuts will be in the tens of billions.
Just like Elon and Twitter
even so, these are people who are realizing it isn’t a valuable publication tuning out because this isn’t when he got what we wanted. he got that a while ago
Direct your money towards better journalism.
I suggest ProPublica.
This is key. Follow journalists and editors who leave WaPo and support them wherever they go.
Otherwise this may just be playing into the hand of Bezos to cripple yet another outlet that speaks truth to power.
ProPublica does phenomenal work.
To him, I’m sure it’s an acceptable loss.
If Amazon Prime and AWS cancellations hit a significant level over this, that would have more of an impact.
Yup, he’ll lose more revenue than those 10% WaPo subscribers under Harris. If Harris raises Amazon’s taxes half a percent, this loss would become rounding error. Bezos wants Trump to win and wants to be Trump’s friend for his own financial gain.
What drives someone with as much as Bezos to still want the high score to keep going up? This motherfucker should have to spend a month in a tent city.
You don’t become a billionaire by thinking of others. It’s such a mind-boggling amount of hoarded wealth that most of us can’t even properly comprehend it…
He also knows most companies won’t cancel their AWS
So not only has he quite literally decimated their readerbase but he’s also made every other newspaper run the story that they were going to endorse Harris anyway, instead of likely just limiting that information to the handful of Washington Post subscribers that cared enough to check. Great quash, Jeff, you really shut that one down.
It’s good to see the system working like it should for the free press for once; they made a terrible decision and they’re paying for it. Now, if we can just collectively turn our backs on all the disreputable sources and start promoting the reputable ones, we might fix a broken system.
A little like it should. Maybe it culminates in at least a temporary drop to the tune of 15-20%. Maybe $50 million dollars of lost revenue a year, assuming people stay pissed (and they frequently get over it, or some MAGA people decide to reward the outlets refusal to get behind Harris). Let’s get super pessimistic and assume it totally tanks, and the first number I could find was about $600 million in annual revenue, so Bezos is out a bit over half a billion if this completely blows.
Just one of Trump’s tantrums cost Bezos $10 Billion in revenue for Amazon. Burning the paper to the ground would be worth it to spare Bezos Trump’s wrath moving forward.
I have commented how that decision led me to cancel my WaPo subscription which then snowballed into cancellations of Audible, Kindle Unlimited, Prime Video (ad-less), Amazon Photos, etc. Today I was chatting with my wife and she has now discarded the idea of using Blue Origin’s satellite based internet access over Starlink. That’s fifteen mobile response units where Jeff’s space junk won’t be considered.
Wait… your wife is ditching Kupier, which doesn’t exist yet, because of a single stunt Bezos pulled, but Starlink, run by the guy funding Trump’s election campaign, is still in the running?
Ditching the idea of transitioning to Kupier once available, yes. For now, most of the units are suspended (zero cost) until needed. My hope is that other options become available.
Oh man wait until you learn about Buc-ees
Bucees going into satellite internet? I’m lost.
Giant squirrel satellites with glowing red eyes staring down at Earth
Isn’t Starlink Musk’s outfit?
Yes, and we are desperate to ditch it. The idea was to switch to
Blue OriginAmazon’s Project Kuiper as soon as it became available. Now it’s fucked if we do and fucked if we don’t.That said, fourteen of the Starlink units are suspended until needed, which means no monthly payments.
EDIT: I mistakenly called the satellite project Blue Origin.
Totally fair. And there are definitely reasons to dislike Bezos but on the which of the two is worse… Going Musk over Bezos feels a little.like the folks claiming trump will be better for Palestineans. Bezos didn’t let his paper endorse trump, Musk is full on bribing people, campaign rallying for trump etc.
But to each their own, like I said, plenty of reasons to dislike Bezos.
Yes, it is. It is very hard to escape having relations with capitalist conglomerates in most sectors, in some it is impossible. That is why having political control of the State is the only way of the working class to control the billionaires, if the economy side of society is not radically altered.
We need to go back to guilds. Imagine a worker owned and managed rocket guild
Blue Origin isn’t planning any satellite internet projects.
There is Amazon’s Project Kuiper, which aims to bring Starlink-like Internet using a constellation of 3,000 satellites, but currently they have zero satellites in orbit (and the two prototypes they launched were ULA launches).
If/when Kuiper matures, Bezos owns less of Amazon than Musk owns of SpaceX, so if your goal is to keep as little of your money out of these men’s hands as you can, Kuiper might be the way to go.
Great information, thank you. My use of the Blue Origin name is my mistake. Regardless, the original goal was to ditch Starlink. Hopefully we will be able to do so.
Besos wipes his ass with those 250K subscribers. What he needs is to be stripped of his wealth.
Sure he needs to be taxed into dust. But he doesn’t own the WaPo because it’s making him rich. He runs it because it’s a propaganda machine for him.
He lost 10% of his subscribers, almost immediately, when he tried to use it that way openly. Which says:
- it’s now a 10% less effective propaganda machine (and that number will keep growing)
- it’s possible that it was never effective in the first place
Given those two propositions, he might just unload it, which would be nice for the rest of us.
Yeah, its just I can’t believe I’m living in cyberpunk shitty guilded age 2.0
Nationalize Amazon. It is a marketplace now
Hell yeah
I really wish his wife had gotten the WaPo in the divorce.
Billionaires never do anything benevolent. I speculate Bezos is refused the endorsement in case Trump wins and holds a grudge.
Nah, Bezos wants Trump. Lower taxes, less regulation. He knows the backlash would be even worse if he forced an endorsement.
It really is all about the fuckin money.
This was a potential explanation as to why Bezos did that https://lemmy.haley.io/post/1058450
Do we really need an explanation as to why capitalists are okay with supporting fascists?
Yes, liberals would be democratic socialists if they understood.
Hopefully…
But not necessarily for the reasons you think.
It was pretty much exactly the reasons I thought.
Note the other facet is not just the odds being close, but the consequences being different. If Trump wins, these people know he will be vindictive. In his first term he killed a $10 billion deal with Amazon due to WaPo’s coverage and taking it out on Bezos at large. If Harris wins, then she’s expected to be more proper, so kowtowing to Trump wouldn’t have a downside. So bad behavior to a point is rewarded even in a good outcome, because the good behavior response doesn’t call to be all pissy over this sort of thing.
Of course, would be mitigated if huge businesses chock full of ulterior motives didn’t outright control big journalism outlets.
I forget the exact name of it, but there’s a game theory problem adjacent to but not exactly the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Everyone votes yes or no, and if yes wins, everyone loses $20, but everyone who voted no loses $200. If no wins, nothing happens.
This is basically a variation of that problem.
Finally some good fucking news.
should be paired with Amazon Prime cancelation for the double punch
I don’t imagine they thought that this would literally decimate their subscriber base.*
- ~yes I made the same joke twice in two different communities. It’s not often you get to use the literal definition of decimate.~
Unless the former subscribers were executed, that’s not the literal definition of decimate.
Historically (dating back to the 1600s) it could also be used for tithing or taxing one tenth of an amount too. Are you executing their money?
No, but WaPo is not literally paying a tithe or tax.
I can honestly count myself as one but also never using prime again either.
So not only do they loose the direct revenue from the subscribers, but because the readership has fallen significantly & publicly, advertisement revenue is going to fall, too, as the advertisers know the paper isn’t reaching as many readers.
