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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.
If there's one thing 2017 has taught me, it's that national and international news is not essential information.
Too many people were using the HOV lanes in my state and tax revenue from gas sales dropped too low. Now they charge to use the HOV lanes, and no one uses them.
I can't see this turning out any differently.
Jake Surfer here... Not sure I can speak 100% for my brother Joe, but if I have to think, "Gee... I wonder if I'm just gonna get scammed out of half a penny with a bunch of clickbate if I follow this link," you can bet I'd be following a whole lot fewer links. Also, why am I giving someone an interest free loan so they can hold onto my money and deduct some of it for every piece of clickbate I get fed?
The problem is less lack of payment mechanism and more lack of quality / necessity. There are no shortage of places that provide reliable, relevant news. The supposed "journalistic integrity" that I might be willing to pay for gets eroded a little bit more every time ${majorNewsSite}.com parrots the prevailing party line without even a scrap of effort to contradict obvious lies and policy 180's.
There will be a lot more digital blood to bathe in before anything of value is lost.
I don't mind paying, but I do mind paying AND being annoyed.
I dropped my NYT subscription because it showed the same unstoppable video, the same annoying adverts and the same Nicholas Kristof whining. I expected the latter but not the former.
And quit pestering me to get a gift subscription to somebody else.
Absolutely tasteless. So no money to them.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You're joking, right? The internet devolved into a shithole of ads, malware, and scams from the very first days of Flash, popups, and those goddamned "punch the monkey" ads. And it's only gotten worse.
Over time, the degree to which you need to block 3rd party javascript, analytics, and other crap has gotten insane. I'd say the average web page has around 10 external parasites ... and I'm sorry, but I didn't sign up with them and didn't agree to their terms of service, which is why I block them ruthlessly.
Trusting any online entity with your actual name or financial information is just making you a target for getting your information stolen when they inevitably get hacked.
Sorry, but the greedy douchebags and assholes started this, and the reality is they've pretty much fucked up the whole game for everyone else.
For now, there's a remarkable amount of national broadcasters around the globe with good quality free content to let you get different editorial slants. But most media in the US these days is increasingly owned by a hand full of rich assholes, who I have no intention of enriching.
So, you'll forgive me for not giving a fuck, when ads have been a source of malware and other bullshit for almost as long as we've had web browsers. Kill off some of those parasites, give me an internet I can trust, and sites who I can rely on to have some decent security, and we'll talk.
But incompetent idiots with shit security are just the icing on the cake as far as why the paid internet can go fuck themselves.