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Salon.com Editor Looks Back At Paywalls
Techdirt pointed out an interesting retrospective by Scott Rosenberg, former managing editor of Salon.com, about their experiments with paywalls and how repercussions can last a lot longer than some might expect. "More important, by this point the public was, understandably, thoroughly confused about how to get to read Salon content. It took many years for our traffic to begin to grow again. Paywalls are psychological as much as navigational, and it's a lot easier to put them up than to take them down. Once web users get it in their head that your site is 'closed' to them, if you ever change your mind and want them to come back, it's extremely difficult to get that word out."
You don't have to pay to go to Salon? News to me. I haven't visited that site for at least a couple of years.
I wouldn't know, because after dealing with the fucking thing several times I just gave up on the goddamn site. Seriously-- when they started gating their bloody comics section, and the second half of already pretty poor articles vanished behind 'day passes' and interstitial video ads, my interest in dealing with them as a site vanished.
Is that a hairstylist blog or something?
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Keep it to yourself, will you? If Rupert Murdoch gets wind of this, he might change his mind about cordoning Fox News off from the rest of the Internet!
Actually, probably not.
The paywall didn't bother me at all - it gave me time to get a cup of coffee or eliminate a previous cup of coffee.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
The money's going to run out, paywalls won't save you. I make the same argument about energy risk management: unless you spend the resources now to transition, by the time you need an alternate source, you can't exploit it. Someone else will take that opportunity for you.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
More important, by this point the public was, understandably, thoroughly confused about how to get to read Salon content. It took many years for our traffic to begin to grow again. Paywalls are psychological as much as navigational, and it's a lot easier to put them up than to take them down. Once web users get it in their head that your site is 'closed' to them, if you ever change your mind and want them to come back, it's extremely difficult to get that word out.
Oh man, that's rich. So, users are just "stupid" and "hard to reach"? I think "pissed off" is more like it. Let me reword that for you, Salon:
"More important, by this point the public was, understandably, thoroughly confused and annoyed as to why they had to pay for Salon content or watch ads when they didn't have to anywhere else. It took many years for our traffic to begin to grow again after we finally realized Paywalls are like trying to charge people for air or sell refrigerators to Eskimos. Content is plentiful and none of our articles were special or unique enough to justify the cost or trouble for viewers. Once web users find your site requires them to do more than just read content, if you ever realize you were completely stupid and want them to come back, too bad, because they already found other free content they like, and you already pissed them off."
Please help metamoderate.
Man! I never knew. Went, there once back in, what 1999?, and got slapped in the face and never went back. Coulda knocked me down with a feather! Fancy that! Salon, no pay wall! Why I never heard about it before?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I go to their homepage only to see headlines such as "do women need affordable botox?". Yeah, I think I'll still avoid salon.com.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Everyone here is surprised Salon had dropped the pay wall and is reacting to that. It seems the solution is to have a meta discussion about the effects of dropping your pay wall as a means to spread knowledge that it was dropped in the first place.
Wow, you found Salon too far to the left? Not surprising you didn't mind the paywall.
..that Salon had come back. When I see 'em in the status bar, I don't bother clicking because I assume the article isn't really there.
And that's kind of interesting. Their name got known. That's half the battle. Too bad they got known in a bad way.
BTW, you know who actually got me to pay? Phoronix.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If I have to read another “funny” comment saying “what! salon.com dropped their paywall?”, I think I’m going to scream.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
If www.ExpertSexChange.com dropped their paywall, how long would it take for anyone to start using that?
(I’d never even heard of salon.com, but expertsexchange is something more along the lines of what a geek would understand, I think.)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Salon.com is still in business?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I like to think of FOX and Salon like Wikipedia: Occasionally they point you to something interesting but you'd better verify what they say elsewhere.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
salon.com had a paywal!?
As much as I don't like it as a user, I believe the "paywall" approach would work if there was one dominant way to pay for a "pass" (or a micropayment account) that would unlock millions of sites.
I have no interest in paying for a Salon (or a Slashdot) subscription, but I could see myself paying $7/month to "Google Paywall" if it unlocked millions of sites for me.
Of course, it is IMPOSSIBLE for anyone to compete with the psychology of "free", and I would hate the privacy implications of having to identify myself to every site I visit, even if it were trivially cheap...
I used to go there all the time. Assumed there was still a paywall or equivalent. The psychological thing is interesting -- even if it's perfectly open now I'd have to overcome some kind of habitual negative association to start again. The other thing, of course, is that everybody that didn't want to pay found good-enough alternatives in the meantime and don't necessarily want to put another name on their dance card. Rosenberg has the psychology exactly right.
People keep saying that, but can you point even a single article on wikipedia which is outrageously incorrect and has been this way for more than a month that it might take to notice vandalism. Fox news on the other hand...
The reason Murdoch doesn't do anything is because doing it on his own would hurt him. The Sun, Sky News and Fox news aren't aimed at rich people, like the WSJ. They're aimed at the lower class who aren't going to pay if they can help it. So the only way Murdoch will grow an balls to lock up his sites is if he can get everyone else to do it and hopefully that won't happen.
What I don't understand is paywalls that seem to have been erected without any sane business model in mind. For instance, here is a physics paper that I needed to look up today. It describes a particle-physics experiment from 1979 that, as a side benefit, ended up producing one of the classic high-precision tests of special relativity. I teach at a community college, so we don't have scientific journals at the library. My wife teaches at a university, so she has electronic access to journals, but the access to this particular publisher's journal only goes back to 1995. So I find the article online, behind a paywall, and I'm all set to pay $10 for a copy, just to avoid the hassle of going to a university library and photocopying it. I click through on the link to buy a copy, and they want $31.50. That's just crazy. Since the price was insane, it motivated me to get in the car, drive 20 minutes to a university library, and find the article down in the basement stacks where they put old journals.
To me, this seems like totally irrational behavior on the part of the publisher. For any product you want to sell, there has to be a price that optimizes your profit. Price it too high, and you don't get enough volume. Price it too low, and you get volume, but not enough of a profit margin. I simply can't believe that $31.50 is the sane, profit-optimizing price for a single academic paper from 1979 -- especially not when it's electronic, so the marginal cost of distribution per copy is essentially zero. My guess is that some of these traditional print publishers simply have their heads in the sand. They believe that the advent of digital music has decimated the music business, so the lesson they take home is that anything digital is like dog poop -- don't touch it, or something bad will happen to you and your business.
Find free books.
let the paywalls go up.
i'll be the one to write a firefox extension that double underlines all paywall sites. And we all know by now... you don't dare even mouseover double underlined text.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
It's the problem paying for each news source separately. What people definitely not want to do is get all their news from one site, like they did in the days of newspapers. And $5/month subscriptions to 20 different sites are not going to be cost effective. Come up with a system where one pays a flat fee, has access to practically everything, worldwide, and the money is distributed in proportion to time spent on each site and people will not be averse to paying. In fact most ISPs would probably bundle the access fee to simplify life for an average user who just wants the site to work with no extra steps.
1) their site is specialized enough
2) it is probably a business expense for a lot of people
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
God as my witness, I didn't know they were free.
It really is that long-lasting.
Salon thought they were the Wall Street Journal.
Kriston
I use a custom google search. Experts-exchange.com is one of the domains I have permanently filtered out of any of my search results.
A significant amount of their content is lifted directly from Microsoft's KB articles, technet, etc. Other answers can usually be found elsewhere on reputable sites.
How would I know where to point unless I'd done what the previous poster suggests, and verified the information elsewhere?
For important things I can't think of any single source I would trust without seeking a second opinion.
Fast forward 10 years to the present. I would gladly pay 30 dollars a month if all the stuff I read online was written by a professional with classical training in english or journalism. This web2.0 junk means we're all crappy authors who, as I am right now doing, stream their consciousness into textarea boxes, never a second glance at the same sentence for proofediting; rushing to the submit button to beat my peers in the subtle effect that I will feel smarter than everyone who posted thereafter.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Take a look at the more politically focused pages.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
He never said the users were stupid, or even implied it. What he said was once they left, there was no way to let them know it was free again.
Free Martian Whores!
If you can get past the left-right paradigm then you'd see that MSNBC and CNN are on just as bad as Fox.
As for Wikipedia I've seen a peer-reviewed scientific article deleted from an article because it gave "undue weight" to a "fringe theory."
The Franklin Scandal, according to wikipedia was a "hoax" because one state senator called it a hoax. I was banned from wikipedia for simply pointing out that the person pursuing the case was also a state senator and thus changed it to "controversy."
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
So, can you link to a politically focused article which is factually wrong in the key facts presented?
The Franklin Scandal, according to wikipedia was a "hoax"
[citation needed]
Andrew Sullivan used as a reference on Sarah Palin. How can he be considered a credible objective source for her wikipedia article after his Trig meltdown?
Spelling and grammar mistakes specifically left in to give the grammar and spelling nazis a meaning to their life.
This is known as Ad hominem fallacy. Can you show how the entry on Sarah Palin was factually wrong in the key facts presented, rather than just casting suspicion on the sources?
David Horowitz used to write for Salon. Camille Paglia still does, and frequently defends Sarah Palin. The trouble with Salon's subscriber base was that it was mostly liberal, and offended at the notion of paying to be insulted.
There was an article? News to me. I haven't looked at an article for at least a couple of years.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
seems pretty well supported to me.
Indeed. How does this square with Jimmy Wales's attestation of himself as "objectivist to the core?"
I just tried Salon, got their main page, then clicked on an article that looked interesting. A few seconds into it, a large black empty rectangle appeared with a tiny message about clicking on something to proceed in the upper left corner of it. Thankfully, it only took two clicks of the browser Back button to make it all okay again.
A 1990 grand jury report concluded the allegations amounted to a "carefully crafted hoax," although the alleged perpetrators of said hoax were never officially identified. Allegations of a coverup have circulated since, including several books and a documentary film.
Wikipedia doesn't claim that the scandal was a hoax, only that grand jury reached this conclusion in it's report. Do you have a reference to the actual report which contradicts the quotation? Wikipedia entry itself references New York Times.
The Second Amendment page.
It was kept intentionally wrong for a long period of time (specifically with respect to the capitalization of 'people') It may seem silly, but it was an important point of debate for anyone interested in the topic.
For a long period of time, any changes to the capitalization were instantly reverted back and blamed on 'vandalism'
I think I actually sparked off the discussion on the fact that there was something to the topic when I linked to the text and an image of the original Constitution in the National Archives and even THAT was reverted as 'vandalism'.
They finally got around to putting in some discussion regarding the fact that while the original in the National Archives uses the lowercase 'people', copies sent to the states had an uppercase 'People'. But getting to that point took several attempts to change it.
Now, you probably know my opinion since I advocated using the wording of the original from the National Archives, but that is beside the point. The point is that any article in which people have a motivation to see one side presented more 'equally' than another side, is going to have some factual fudging going on.
And even more to the point:
When looking at Wikipedia, especially scientific articles, you don't have experts on hand who are immediately able to tell if a change is 'correct' or not. I could go into some biology article and say that some obscure process results in a slightly different output of a chemical and no one would easily be able to counteract me without being able to understand the topic, and the 'study' or source I used as my justification.
It is mutable, and unless you completely trust every author and trust that any errors were caught, wikipedia is risky.
Car Analogy: You trust you won't get into a car accident, but that doesn't mean that it isn't possible for them to happen.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
And your argument is a bait and switch. No one is arguing factual information, but if you source someone who made up a conspiracy about a person as a reliable, then you have to look at the credibility and judgment of the editors. As far as I am concerned that example proves the original poster's point:
"Occasionally they point you to something interesting but you'd better verify what they say elsewhere."
If you want credibility you don't source Andrew Sullivan for Sarah Palin facts just like you wouldn't cite Rush Limbaugh for Obama facts. It shows very poor judgment on the part of the editors.
Spelling and grammar mistakes specifically left in to give the grammar and spelling nazis a meaning to their life.
It was kept intentionally wrong for a long period of time (specifically with respect to the capitalization of 'people') It may seem silly, but it was an important point of debate for anyone interested in the topic.
Are you saying that this was/is the most significant inaccuracy in this rather detailed article on a contentious topic? This gives me even more confidence in using wikipedia for most of my information needs.
My favorite weekly column, Ask the Pilot by Patrick Smith, is on Salon. I think a lot of us geeks would enjoy his anecdotes and perspective. I look forward to it each week, but I wouldn't have gone past a paywall for it.
How am I "advertising a product or service at an unprofitably low price, then reveals to potential customers that the advertised good is not available but that a substitute is"? My post was:
People keep saying that, but can you point even a single article on wikipedia which is outrageously incorrect and has been this way for more than a month that it might take to notice vandalism.
To which you replied:
Andrew Sullivan used as a reference on Sarah Palin. How can he be considered a credible objective source for her wikipedia article after his Trig meltdown?
So instead of showing that Sarah Palin entry on wikipedia is factually incorrect, you are attacking one of the sources without proving the falsehood.
Then Talbot left and whatshername took over. It's more like a lipstick magazine now. I still do read Salon and did during the paywall stuff. My firefox ad-block + worked fine at blocking the ad for daypasses. I waited 30 seconds (switched to my /. tab lol) for the blank screen to show the 'enter salon' button and proceeded.
If you can get past the left-right paradigm then you'd see that MSNBC and CNN are on just as bad as Fox.
Really? Please point out to me the anti-government rallies that MSNBC or CNN organized and sponsored, so that they could report on them.
Many, many paywalls have huge holes in them. I read Salon.com for years without paying -- I just told them I was Googlebot. Works for tons of sites.
The distinction is important because it emphasizes the difference between "the people" being a reference to individual gun ownership vs "the people" being collective (militia/police etc.) in nature. However, you need only look at the revision history of the democratic party page as an example of the editing wars going on behind the scenes at Wikipedia. The fact remains that fact checking the articles from any source, Wikipedia in particular, is vital to being properly informed.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The editor has shown poor judgment in sourcing someone who hates her. It doesn't matter if it was correct or not.
So wikipedia says Sarah Palin supports an exit plan.
The actual source is a blogger commenting on an email quoting an article from a magazine interview with Sarah Palin and the sourced blogger questions whether Sarah Palin still believes what she said two years later.
This is an example of a high quality source? Do you really have to wonder why Wikipedia has low trust? Was it too hard to quote the actual article that doesn't contain any opinions but the actual words of Sarah Palin herself in raw interview form?
Funny thing was you asked for one example, I search Palin and Sullivan and not only found a crappy source, but the source itself disputing the fact wikipedia took from his blog. If that doesn't make you want to verify the rest of the information I don't know what does.
Spelling and grammar mistakes specifically left in to give the grammar and spelling nazis a meaning to their life.
Wall Street Journal is the same way... I see an article, I go for it.. wait.. WSJ? don't even bother opening up the tab. It's closed before I know/care whether the content is there or not.
I've yet to see a WSJ headline that has enticed me enough to actually look for it elsewhere.
I don't know if the free receive-only email service I used to register still works reliably, so I won't mention their name, but I haven't had to update the nytimes registration in a few years. You do definitely have to register if you want to comment on articles.
You can always try bugmenot.com. Perhaps the Slashdot "login=anonymous password=coward" works there?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
(I don't actually know if they carry here live or not. I mainly read Doonesbury there, plus articles where some other source points me to a link at salon.com.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
http://salon.com :-) I mainly read Doonesbury there, plus articles other sites refer to, because I also stopped going there routinely after the paywall hit, and haven't looked at the front page (except for just now...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Paywalls are bad, so are Register Walls.
What is a Register Wall? The kind of nonesense you get if you go to the New York Times website.
I have no idea if they still require me to login to view their content, but they used to.
The fact that I have no idea if they still require me to login shows just how entrenced the damage to your reputation is..
I simply won't visit the New York Times website because I don't want YET ANOTHER PASSWORD to remember. Any site that wants me to register just to view content, I don't join.
Apart from Amazon, any site that wants to create an account just to purchase, I pass. I recently tried to purchase "Getting Real" but Lulu.com wanted me to register to make a purchase.
Why can't I just provide my name, address, credit card info, etc, then purchase? Why do I need to waste time creating an account, then have that information stored by them forever?
They did not get the sale. Their loss. I can read Getting Real online for free.
Sheesh. Honestly. They capitalized "People." Call in the Firemen. I'm a university prof (biology), and we're pretty famous for being fussy, but even I wouldn't have thought that somebody objecting to facts in Wikipedia could mean something so picayune.
And by the way, I fix errors in biology articles when I see them. In two years, that's been some four edits, only two of them rising above the level of typo. I use Wikipedia all the time. It's quite good for science.
Shut the fuck up! Murdock is about to institute pay walls! We want him gone! Please please shut up!
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
The same is true with software. Years after Opera dropped the registration fee and ads and went 100% free-as-in-beer, there were still people who thought you had to pay for it or suffer through ads in your toolbar.
Salon, like others have mentioned, was on my radar at one time. Then came the paywall ... then came "I'm never going there again."
When click on a link and that link goes to anything annoying, I just close the window with a quick finger-and-thumb key combination and move on. Paywalls are not the only kind of annoying page that gets that response, or even the most common [*cough* flash *cough*] but it's now an entrenched part of my surfing habits to leave and never come back when the site fights me.
I always load my browsing session with links that load behind the main window, and there's always other on-topic pages there when any particular one closes. With Google searches, I choose the more relevant dozen or so links from the first five pages or so, loading them behind the Google search results page, before I start checking the pages Google sent me to. If I have to kill a page, there's either another relevant page right behind it, or If somehow the pages all seem weak, I do a revised search.
As for Salon, I'm still on the "never going there again" because, well, I understand what "never" means, and a promise is a promise, even if it's just to myself.
It seems as though perhaps the paywall was some kind of experiment. Well, the experiment failed, apparently. Perhaps they somehow forgot that writers would rather be read than ignored, which is not quite the same thing as 'writers would rather be read than paid', but you can see it from there. If people read and like you work, you will eventually land a paying writing gig. If no-one ever gets to the "read" part, the money isn't coming. Ever.
I wish Salon luck in whatever they plan to do next. If they want me to hear about it, I suggest posting another /. topic. Otherwise, I'll never hear about it.
The one news site that is actually worse than Foxnews.com
"They confiscated everything, even the stuff we didn't steal!"
Paywall went down ages ago, and I probably was one of the few paying subscribers. I thought it was great, and it still is. Now all that greatness is hidden behind their atrocious frontpage layout. Worse than a paywall...
I could probably check to see if they still have a paywall, but fuck that.
You've hit on the what I think is the central problem of micropayments. I'm not going to register my credit card or Paypal details at dozens of sites. But if I can pay thru 1 middleman, there's a lot of content online that I might buy.
Apple managed to do this with the squabbling, web-phobic record labels by creating iTunes. But no one has yet done it for newspapers and magazines.
I've often thought that the most ideal system would be to have your ISP do the billing -- they're someone you already send money to every month, so adding on a few bucks would be like adding a bit to your cable bill when you buy a premium movie. (Your internet bill may in fact BE your cable bill.)
But Google, Amazon, Paypal, or some other company with a broad reach could do this too. It would be best if there were at least a few of them, all broadly accepted, to avoid a monopolistic situation.
The entire article can be summed up in the Slashdot replies whenever there is a new release of Opera. Half of them complain about how you have to pay for it, or that it's filled with ads. Salon's editor is not being insightful here, not any more than the collective insight gathered from /. comment content.