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Prepare for the New Paywall Era (theatlantic.com)
Alexis C. Madrigal, writing for The Atlantic: If the recent numbers are any indication, there is a bloodbath in digital media this year. Publishers big and small are coming up short on advertising revenue, even if they are long on traffic. [...] In a print newspaper or a broadcast television station, the content and the distribution of that content are integrated. The big tech platforms split this marriage, doing the distribution for most digital content through Google searches and the Facebook News Feed. And they've taken most of the money: They've "captured the value" of the content at the distribution level. Media companies have no real alternative, nor do they have competitive advertising products to the targeting and scale that Facebook and Google can offer. Facebook and Google need content, but it's all fungible. The recap of a huge investigative blockbuster is just as valuable to Google News as an investigative blockbuster itself. The former might have taken months and costs tens of thousands of dollars, the latter a few hours and the cost of a young journalist's time. That's led many people to the conclusion that supporting rigorous journalism requires some sort of direct financial relationship between publications and readers. Right now, the preferred method is the paywall. The New York Times has one. The Washington Post has one. The Financial Times has one. The Wall Street Journal has one. The New Yorker has one. Wired just announced they'd be building one. (Editor's note: CNN is building a paywall, too.) Many of these efforts have been successful. Publications have figured out how to create the right kinds of porosity for their sites, allowing enough people in to drive scale, but extracting more revenue per reader than advertising could provide.
And it won't work this time. You're just looking at a ton of closures and maybe some consolidation between whoever is left standing
This is a problem that needs to be solved. Since copying content has become easy, how do the people who create content get paid? How do news organizations pay reporters to investigate stories?
There are no easy solutions.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I may sign up for one subscription, but I'm not going to get $10/month subscriptions for 20 different websites that I occasionally visit.
Maybe the reason that the internet is devolving is your unwillingness to pay. I pay for the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, and The Washington Post. And they are well worth every penny. I have no idea why anybody would expect to get their news for free. Real journalism is a resource-intensive process that has to be funded. Now I don't *like* the current paywalls in that I often get blocked from content I've paid for since I haven't logged in on a particular device or linked a publisher to a specific account. But having the price for quality news set at zero is nonsensical.
I've been flogging this horse for maybe 20 years... central micropayments site for the media providers. Joe Surfer makes a deposit. every news site he now hits, there is a deduction to the provider to pay for the posting. why in hell can't they do this, and be assured of a wider, non-PO'ed audience providing cash?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Easy and simple are not the same thing. Easy was letting 3rd party companies manage advertisement sales (and of course get a cut) for the publisher.
Simple is going back to direct-sales marketing management. Let bloggers and YouTube use 3rd parties, NYT, WaPo, and more should be selling their valuable screen real-estate directly and reaping all the money from that.
I mean... damn people. Its not complex, just more work. Since the YouTube Adpocalypse many YouTubers have started doing sponsored content (many more than were before all the kerfluffle). Even controversial left- and right-wing vloggers are managing to put together advertising deals to support themselves. And most of them are idiots!
I've been on about this for years now, because this lack of managing one's own content is terrible for everyone, even investors. 3rd party ad networks are garbage. Advertisers have little control over where their ads are displayed (because its not about the content of the pages, its about the person looking at the page). Content creators have little control over what is advertised on their pages for the exact same reason! And this is the world its leading to, with more and more people choosing to block ads, with more and more "controversies" over ads being shown next to controversial content.
Paywalls are just a great way to stop growing your audience. Sure, you can cannibalize your existing audience and survive on them for a while, but they are nothing more than life-support for a failing business. Go back to the old ways and find better ways to modernize them. Put people back into the system for a while, and make sure they stay there, because AI is simply not going to catch up anytime soon, and the people running the ad networks care as much about content creators and advertisers as the guy in India cares about any of the 7 corporations in the US he's answering the phone for. Ad networks need to show more, and get more clicks, and to do that, they cheat. Just like that call center in India wants you off the phone as fast as possible to take the next call because they get paid by call volume and no other metric.
People will continue to read a headline for free, make assumptions based on their beliefs, and convince themselves they know what the article talked about.