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.

Comments

Problem

[religionofpeas]

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.

Re:Problem

[ZorinLynx]

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.