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."

Comments

What?

[KefabiMe]

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.

Re:What?

[cashman73]

I think Salon's business strategy is like this:

1. Put content on web.
2. Put content behind paywall.
3. Remove paywall and go with advertising model.
4. Post article to Slashdot about doing this, hoping that some sympathy by a bunch of nerds will get them some increased traffic.
5. ????
6. Profit!

Re:What?

[V50]

Yep. Last I remember of Salon.com was sometime in 2000 or so, they had some decent stuff. Then the paywall went up ages ago, and I forgot they existed. Except for a few times throughout the decade where Google led me to an article of theirs, only to end up being blocked of by the paywall.

Half of me thinks this is just them screaming "LOOK WE DON'T HAVE A PAYWALL ANYMORE". That is, assuming they actually don't.

Did Salon drop their paywall?

[Bieeanda]

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.

Re:Did Salon drop their paywall?

[Toonol]

The point is that the overwhelming majority of people don't care enough to look. They just leave, and never come back. Unless Salon is streaming lesbians, nobody's going to go even minimal effort to get around a paywall.

salon.com?

[bl8n8r]

Is that a hairstylist blog or something?

Re:salon.com?

[uniquename72]

Just because you know about something doesn't mean everyone else does.

I'm too young to remember Jaws, Howard Cosell, the Dick van Dyke Show, James Cagney, flappers, and ragtime, but I know what all these are. It's called "cultural literacy", and without it, much of the world WOOSHes by you. Reading helps.

Salon hasn't been relevant in a long time, partially because of the paywall, but I still see regular allusions to it in the media.

Sshhh!

[dswensen]

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.

Re:viewers weren't stupid, they were pissed off

[Maestro485]

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.

paywalls without a sane business model?

[bcrowell]

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.

Re:paywalls without a sane business model?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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?)

Re:paywalls without a sane business model?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

You miss the point. You're not the costumer. The universities are. By charging an outrageous per-article price, the publishers muscle universities into subscribing to entire catalogs.

Of course, in our trying times, university libraries are dropping journal subscriptions left and right. Once this happens enough, the most prominent researches stop publishing with those journals because they know nobody will read their work if they do.

It will be very interesting to see where the equilibrium settles with this.

Try me

[fulldecent]

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.

fast forward 10 years

[digitalsushi]

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.

Re:God as my witness, I didn't know they were free

[Lemmy Caution]

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.

What?

[mutube]

There was an article? News to me. I haven't looked at an article for at least a couple of years.

And what about Register Walls?

[PipingSnail]

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.