Slashdot Mirror
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.
Read TFA. (I know, I know, slashdot). He isn't blaming users. He said that after the 9/11 attacks, no advertisers were paying because they didn't want their ads next to 9/11 stories. Salon, after rounds of layoffs before the attacks even happened, was hurting for cash. They used a paywall for some content, which brought in new cash in the short term. However, there wasn't much room for growth since nobody but the current subscribers could see the content to decide if they wanted to subscribe.
You cherry-picked the summary in your little tirade. They put up the 30 second ad "day pass" thing as a way to bring in new eyeballs, but it was so convoluted and poorly executed that users just quit coming to the site. He didn't blame the users, he blamed 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.
Yeah, god forbid I say I don't want to read a website that runs stories I'm not interested in.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
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.
Actually, if you ever read TFA, you'd see that the paywall - while it made their future success a lot more challenging - was the only thing that did save them when the money ran out. It was basically put up a paywall and live, hurting, or don't and die out due to lack of revenue (which makes future developments moot). They did what they thought they had to do to survive, and survived, giving them the chance to painfully recover once they were able to drop the paywall.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
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.
Sorry, the GP is correct. Salon's decision to go behind a paywall pissed me off to the point where I wouldn't even bother thinking about going. The generally poor quality of the articles and editing didn't help, either. They're sort of a amateur-hour Wired.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
Actually, ya gotta use both. They check the referrer, and put the real answers after the ads/fake answers if the referrer is Google.
If you bookmark a page and visit it later, the answers are gone.
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
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/953 ;)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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
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.
So, can you link to a politically focused article which is factually wrong in the key facts presented?
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.