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Prepare for the New Paywall Era (theatlantic.com)

Posted by msmash on from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.

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.

6 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. A problem that has no easy solution by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:A problem that has no easy solution by JohnFen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think this is a good idea too. NYT's paywall is $15/mo. I presume Wash. Post is similar.

      This is the current problem with such sites -- that's too expensive. Back when you had to subscribe to newspapers, they didn't cost that much even with the additional expense of printing and distributing physical paper.

  2. Problem by religionofpeas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Problem by ZorinLynx · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is the problem.

      It would be nice if there could be some sort of "online news bundle". Pay $10 a month and have access to a dozen or so newspapers. The system would distribute that $10 as appropriate to the papers depending on which ones I read the most.

      I don't want to have 15 different subscriptions! This is already becoming a problem in the streaming video world, with every company starting its own streaming service. I don't want it to become a problem for newspapers too.

      I have this desire to support the industry but don't want to have so many subscriptions. Find a way to bundle things and I may bite.

    2. Re:Problem by SeaFox · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      The problem isn't really the number of sites, it's the per site cost. I'm willing to get multiple subscriptions, but most websites have a VERY inflated sense of what their content is worth.

  3. Re:Until it backfires ... by edtice1559 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.