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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."
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.
You think you've got troubles... try finding service manuals for A/V equipment. I'm not doing this professionally; I'm just trying to keep useful gear out of the landfill (and in my living room :)
90% of the links are robot-generated spam pages. 10% of the links are pirated versions of the service manuals... behind paywalls, and the prices vary from $10 to $50 for the pirated copies. Most manufacturers are beginning to make the content available, but their prices aren't much better (yes, the legit prices are usually around $30ish) than those of the pirates.
And then you've got middlemen like scribd -- which is sometimes where the service-manual hosting sites store "their" content. Great, here's a 100-page manual that explains everything I need to know to revive this dumpster-dived flat-screen! But it's not in PDF, it's in Flash. And the "print" button works just fine, but if your print spooler isn't done in 60 seconds, that's all you get. (Seriously -- a 100-page manual, 15 pages of which would print-to-PDF on a slow machine, and 80 of which would print-to-PDF on a faster machine. The only common ground was that there was a 60-second timeout in the Flash, which was so rifuckulous that I didn't believe it until I googled it and found that link. Scribd isn't even in the business of charging for content -- all their content is user-uploaded. The YouTube analogy would be that you can watch any video you want, as long as you consume fewer than 10 CPU-seconds of system time to render it. WTF?)
Part of the problem was also part of Salon's strength: they were started and run by writers. Old-school, ink-and-paper writers.
And their writing was and is very good, some of the best online. They raised the bar on the quality of online writing in the late 90's. I still regularly read some of their columnists (especially Glenn Greenwald, and their film reviews are among the best anywhere.) The intersection of the literati who would follow Salon and the tech-geeks who populate Slashdot is pretty small, so I don't expect this to resonate with many of them. They haven't fallen off the web; they've largely recovered from the hemorrhaging of readers from the paywall-period, but they won't get back the revenues they've lost in the meantime.
And their writing was and is very good, some of the best online.
I just went to their front page and I don't see it. They look pretty tabloid to me, with not much good writing to grab me.
The intersection of the literati who would follow Salon and the tech-geeks who populate Slashdot is pretty small
I suspect many of their natural readers are just now getting their very first home computer.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
a single academic paper from 1979 -- especially not when it's electronic, so the marginal cost of distribution per copy is essentially zero.
This probably isn't true in this case: unless they're popular, single academic papers from 1979 are likely to have few readers, and you might be the only person to pay the cost of translating said paper over to an electronic format. That wouldn't cost $32 to do, of course, but it's not as close to zero as the cost of a popular song or software package. I think your suggested $10 would be much more reasonable. The real reason for charging is to get university libraries to pay for the entire archive, but surely evne a $5 or $10 price point for older articles would be enough of a nuisance to convince libraries to buy archive access.
A suggestion if it hasn't occurred to you (if you'll pardon my gall in offering advice to a complete stranger): you might be able to get electronic copies of papers through ILL via your community college library. If not, you might try to get an affiliation with that university down the road: that may give you online access to those journals through their library. If that university isn't game, perhaps an alma mater would be willing to extend affilation to you. I did this while unemployed and while teaching at a community college, and it was very useful.
Funny thing is that a couple of years ago, a friend sent me a link to a couple of their political comic pages, and I've been following a few of them since then, checking them once or twice a week to see if there's anything new. But it never occurred to me to try salon's news pages, because I thought they would just block me. Guess I didn't get the message that this had changed. Actually, I'm not sure I'd bother even now, because I've mostly been following links via google news, and I don't recall ever noticing a salon.com link there. Maybe I'm just not paying attention, or maybe just have a low page rank in google's database so their articles don't get listed. Or maybe salon doesn't publish articles about things that attract my attention.
There are so many interesting news sources now that's it's hard to feel sorry (or at all) for a site that intentionally drives away their readers. (OTOH, if they're being blocked by ISPs or government filters, that tends to make them interesting and worth searching for. Sorta like how if you forbid a kid to look at something, it becomes fascinating. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.