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

A problem that has no easy solution

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.

Re:A problem that has no easy solution

[DickBreath]

Easy solution: Build a wall around the paywalls and make the paywalls pay for it.

Re:A problem that has no easy solution

[gtall]

I think this is a good idea too. NYT's paywall is $15/mo. I presume Wash. Post is similar. That just two sites for $30. One quickly runs out of money to pay for a reasonable collection of different editorial stances and investigative journalism.

The current situation also means small sites that do not need much to spew their "contents" have an oversize influence. They do not have to pay for investigative journalism, or quality op-eds.

Re:A problem that has no easy solution

[JohnFen]

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.

Re:A problem that has no easy solution

[brewthatistrue]

In 2001, NYTimes increased newsstand prices in southern california to $0.50 with $1.50 for sunday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02...

I have no idea how much a delivery subscription cost at that time.

That's $0.50 * 52 weeks * 6 days = $156.

Add Sunday for $1.50 * 52 weeks * 1 day = $78.

Add those and you get $234.

A $15/mo subscription is $180.

I am not sure how much of the NYT's costs come from the printing and distribution of phyisical newspapers, but I would have expected the prices to go down as a result of the digital editions.

Then again, as someone else said, their costs are subsidized by advertising, so they aren't really passing the straight costs onto their users anyway. That's why many sites still have advertising even for their paying subscribers, which is a deal breaker for me.

Re:A problem that has no easy solution

[WheezyJoe]

Then again, as someone else said, their costs are subsidized by advertising

Their costs were also heavily subsidized by classified ads. Huge source of revenue for any newspaper, large or small, now completely gone thanks to Craigslist, e-bay, etc. etc. That's a large part of the revenue that has to be made up since the glory days before the Internet.

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.

Re:Problem

[SeaFox]

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.

The amount of news I need to see has decreased

[Anonymous Coward]

If there's one thing 2017 has taught me, it's that national and international news is not essential information.

Re:The amount of news I need to see has decreased

[tattood]

If there's one thing 2017 has taught me, it's that national and international news is not essential information.

Thank you for your valuable input, Mr President.

Re:Until it backfires ...

[edtice1559]

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.

Re:to make it work, go micropayment exchange

[Aaden42]

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.

Re:Until it backfires ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the reason that the internet is devolving is your unwillingness to pay

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.