Journalists: Pay Walls are trying to Kill You
Recent developments in reïmplementing “the Pay Wall” have been fascinating: The Economist will restrict the number of free articles available to readers. Steven Brill, The AP and others want readers – rather than advertisers rather than solely advertisers – to pay for the news we consume. Rupert Murdoch is going Pay Walls for access to all content he owns – and he’s the largest publisher of English-language news in the world.
For specific, quality information, this may be a good move for Dow Jones and News Corp in the short term; it can replace some revenues they’ve lost to the advertising downturn. As a journalist working for one of these pubs, however, is this a good thing? More money in the pockets of those who cut you checks is good, generally, but if that additional revenue means significant shrinkage in your audience, for how long is it good?
Image via Wikipedia
Take the example of News Corps’s The Sunday Times very-popular Jeremy Clarkson:
The thinking is that, even if a pay wall cuts Clarkson’s traffic, there are enough fanatical Clarkson readers who will pay enough to make a paid Clarkson more valuable than a free, ad-supported one. But the problem is for Clarkson: Murdoch’s potential gain is Clarkson’s loss. It’s an almost intolerable loss—most of your readers (and their constant and addictive feedback). “When we opened the Times site to free international traffic,” says Peter Bale, “suddenly our columnists were getting speaking engagements in Milwaukee.” At The New York Times, it was the op-ed columnists themselves who objected most of all when a paid wall choked their readership and notoriety.
Rupert to Internet: It’s War! – Michael Wolf in Vanity Fair
Regarding the first sentence of the quote – “make a paid Clarkson more valuable than a free, ad-supported one” – “to News Corp” is presumed. News Corp makes no direct money from speaking engagement its journalists have in Milwaukee or anywhere else. The journalist, though, does.
Does it diminish the value of the journalist, then, to have their work behind a pay wall? Here are simpler signs:
- Google (and Yahoo! and Bing) can’t readily find their work behind a pay wall
- Facebook friends and fans can’t easily get to their work behind a pay wall
- Promoting that work via Twitter will aggravate all those who click through and are prompted not just for a registration, but a credit card in order to read their work
How could a pay wall not diminish your value as individual journalist? The pay wall is antithetical to building your brand outside of your publication.
Scenario: If even 50% of a non-paying audience becomes a paying audience, you’re working just as hard for half the audience. (And it’s not 50%.)
This is not a u-/dys-topian “Content wants to be Free” argument: your audience will shrink in size if only those who pay can read your work.
That being the case, how can this not also eventually devalue – via further commoditization – News Corps’ properties? The declension seems obvious:
- Put up Pay Wall around your publication
- Collect revenues from some fraction of former readership
- Diminish value of individual journalists by making their work more difficult to read and respond to
- [Individual journalists of value leave to pursue more open means of communing with a wider audience]
- [the Pay-Walled publication hires another journalist to fill that vacancy]
- [that "replacement journalist" stays behind the pay wall until her value rises to where it's worth seeking more openness and community]
- [repeat ad nauseum et commoditization]
This is not to knock making a buck from journalism and publishing. This is not begrudging the smart people working to keep afloat an industry that is known, appreciated, admired. There are new ideas, business models, players that will emerge and succeed. Pay Walls, however, are no longer the best solution for journalism, journalists (especially), or the longer-term viability of the Publishers working to build them.
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I like the – up to now not much discussed – argument under 4: [Individual journalists of value leave to pursue more open means of communing with a wider audience].
I think it isn’t true right now (because of the “safe haven” most newsrooms still offer), but it should be and it will be.
Thanks, Bart –
Agreed re the “safe haven.” It’s been very much the double-edged sword as the haven engenders at least some lack of “urgency” on the part of individual journalists and publishers. A bit more urgency seems appropriate.
In response to another comment. See in context »Why would you write something about what I “want readers” to do without checking? That’s a great journalism standard that you are setting. I don’t want readers to pay for content “rather than advertisers.” At Journalism Online, we’ve repeatedly stressed that we will enable publishers to maintain their advertising revenue while building a second revenue stream from the small portion of their most engaged readers. By allowing sampling, sharing, and other avenues for free content, most visitors to a publisher’s website will still be able to read for free. It would be nice if before you pontificate you bothered to get your facts right.
Steve Brill
Good to hear from you, Mr. Brill. Thank you for participating.
In the text of this post, there is a link directly to the Journalism Online page outlining JO’s value proposition. I have read that page and others on and about Journalism Online. If you do not “want readers” to pay for publishers’ articles, then I misunderstand Journalism Online’s goals.
If you do “want readers” to pay for publishers’ articles, even some of them, the primary thrust of my post remains the same: putting a journalist’s work behind a wall diminishes that work’s audience. By extension, it diminishes the value of that journalist.
In response to another comment. See in context »Nice try, Mr. McNally. You said I wanted readers to pay “instead of advertisers.” Which misses the whole point — that we are trying to re-establish a circulatin revenue stream along with an ad revenue stream. Why don’t you just admit a mistake instead of going through all this back and forth? And why wouldn’t you call someone first for comment?
Steve Brill
In response to another comment. See in context »Understood. I have updated the post to read “instead of solely advertisers” to reflect the fact that Journalism Online intends to supplement ad revenues with fees from readers. With hope, that is sufficient admission.
Can we agree, too, that this supplemental revenue stream will reduce readership to the articles requiring reader fees? Can we also admit that reduced readership equals less exposure for the journalist whose work is behind this pay wall?
Some forms of reader-paid content will work online. Subscriptions, “passes” to groups of publishers’ articles, micropayments all can work in circumstances. That all reader-paid content will negatively affect the size of that content’s potential readership is a given. That journalist’s diminished audience is something that needs to be reconciled.
This is the point I’ve worked to make here and the one I fear is being missed.
In response to another comment. See in context »I’m not sure what you would’ve liked McNally to say here, Mr. Brill. That you’re promising newspapers they can have their cake and eat it too? That your model assumes a ludicrous 90% subscription renewal rate, something I doubt even porn sites achieve? Or that your proposal featured a model newspaper with 20 million monthly uniques, a number only the New York Times has managed to flirt with? Or that you think people will pay $75.00 a year for a website login when the Times had to shut down their Select experiment at a price point of $50?
The most realistic part of your proposal is negotiating bulk licensing for the likes of HuffPo and other aggregators, but the issue there is that good aggregator websites, which I can count on one hand, aren’t usually interested in running stories from Milwaukee, and newspapers, if they wanted, could rewrite their ToS’s and try to do this tomorrow, but don’t, due to the fantastic amounts of traffic that aggregators drive to them. In fact aggregators and search are responsible for far more traffic for most news websites than the home page, as I’m sure you know. So besides cannibalizing available ad inventory with a paywall, you wanted McNally to note that you’re also going to yank the rug out from under the main suppliers of demand for that inventory? That sounds like a death spiral to me.
Anyway, you’re entitled to convince a newspaper that your numbers will work and they’re entitled to believe you and try it. But when McNally says you and others want readers “rather than advertisers” to pay, he is exactly right. You can argue, I suppose that you are just enabling publishers to choose what they want readers rather than advertisers to pay for, but surely you’re not setting up Journalism Online and your 20% commission so newspapers can charge for the crossword and funny pages. And your model would not predict both a 9% decrease in advertising revenues coupled with a robust $86 million “benefit” for this amazingly well trafficked newspaper if, indeed, readers rather than advertisers were now paying for the news.
It’s good to know you’re accessible and want bloggers to call you for comment. But your company’s numbers betray your protests here. And substituting the word “instead” in your comment, when McNally wrote “rather” is a pernicious way to distort what he said, as it changed a word indicating preference to one indicating a hard and fast choice. I suppose it could’ve been an honest mistake, a subtle difference not worth harping on. But I’ll let McNally decide whether to demand an apology from you.
In response to another comment. See in context »Hey-I am running a quick survey on Paywalls. In particular about the rapid staccato of paywall implementations that is going on.
Please do answer it
http://surveys.polldaddy.com/s/AB115B21655D2B6E/
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by smalera. smalera said: having a little comment back-n-forth w/steve brill about pay wall economics using @NiemanLab post @trueslant http://bit.ly/Anxbo [...]
I notice myself getting more and more willing to pay for content the more bored I get by free stuff that isn’t very good. Depending on the price point, I’d pay to read the Economist in place of reading the Huffington Post for free. Also, I notice I do better work for places that charge readers, because it feels less throwaway to me. That’s a personal failing, but truthfully, the symbolism of a product people put down their hard earned cash for does make an impact on how I view it’s value. I don’t know if I’m typical; a lot of people read the Huffington Post, and lots of people work hard in free content sites, including this one. Finally I wonder if this has to be a question of only two options. I notice myself going to the library more this year, for example: a place where taxes pay for the content, and then give it to me to read for free.
Thanks, Marc – I don’t disagree about paid content, the inherent value of it, and the noise it filters out by virtue of it being paid content.
I’m a subscriber to The Economist and WSJ.com, and I pay (a lot) for access to specific technical resources on the web. All of that news and info may be available elsewhere without the need to pay, but “trusted sources” and central location is worthwhile.
regarding a journalist’s work, removing access barriers to it gives that work its largest potential audience. Is that the only answer or always the right scenario? Nope. But the fact remains.
In response to another comment. See in context »its value. it’s? Jeez. First they fired the copy editors, and I said nothing…
I think we should each get a Paypal tip jar on our sites. If you really liked a post that much, show us some love!
Thanks, Caitlin –
There had been a service specifically for this. It wasn’t terribly successful and has since shut down. There may be something like “pay what you feel” that can succeed; we’ve got to work at finding it.
In response to another comment. See in context »1. There are so many articles about what people DON’T think papers should do — I’d like to see people write the more difficult article, what SHOULD they do.
2. Google finds WSJ articles just fine, and the majority are behind a pay wall.
3. I think the assumption that a larger audience is always better has some flaws — what if your audience shrinks, but it’s loyal readers who care? Or more influential readers and not someone who just happens to click on a link once?
4. Per above, “clicks” from Twitter, Facebook, etc., matter far less when you aren’t having to use those numbers to attract advertisers because your readers are now supporting your work.
Thanks, Amanda –
I appreciate where you’re coming from: all whining without positives is easy and meaningless.
Before coming to True/Slant, I spent a year and a half working on parade.com’s products and sharing that work, gratis, with the 400+ newspaper organizations with whom PARADE did business.
We had dozens of conversations with the newspaper partners about shared resources, advertising coöperatives and opportunities for mutual promotion of content. All of this expertise and work was made freely-available.
This was not purely out of our hearts’ goodness: Parade’s revenues are intimately tied with partner newspapers’ circs and reach: A Healthy Newspaper Ecosystem was good for us all on several levels.
I’ve participated in and followed-up on the “New Business Models for News” summit and the “Networked Journalism” summit before that. My work at True/Slant, too, is focused on finding ways to make the news business work and pay for journalists, publishers and advertisers.
This is not simply actionless whining from me.
And I love newspapers – I still think the good ones are the best, most convenient package of news and information in existence. I even buy them sometimes. (Individual papers, that is, not newspaper publishers …)
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To your other points, if you’re in a position not to care about the size of your audience, bravo! I would heartily agree mass does not equal quality.
But when you’re looking to expand your readership – build awareness of yourself and your work – there is definite benefit to casting a wider net and improving your discoverability.
WSJ’s for-pay articles can appear in search results, but I can’t get to the article unless I’m a paying subscriber. This is likely a worse user experience than never having seen the result.
Regarding clickthroughs from Twitter, FriendFeed and Fb, they’re growing in importance and prevalence. Even if you’re in the enviable position of being able to be “selective” about your audience, “peer filtration and curation” of news is growing in importance more rapidly than Google search did. If you’re uninterested in mass audience, aren’t you interested in sharing – and being shared by – those friends and colleagues you’ve explicitly made part of your social graph?
In response to another comment. See in context »Just wanted to point out that you actually can click through to WSJ.com stories through Google. WSJ created a special loophole through their paywall for Google results. It’s actually something of a trick to browse WSJ and then Google the headline of any locked article you want to read, thereby bypassing the paywall. WSJ can currently afford to do this and chooses to in order to not cannibalize their search and aggregator traffic. But I doubt there’s any other paper in the world that could follow suit.
In response to another comment. See in context »Thanks, Paul – I appreciate your input here.
Also, Bill Mitchell (over at Poynter) suggests the AP might erect their paywall “only” for Google OR Bing.
Done well, paywalls certainly can allow the search engines to index content, allow searchers to find that content and provide some kind of “limited sneak-peak” to readers.
This would behoove publishers, journalists and readers.
we won’t know how they’re going about it until we see it in action.
In response to another comment. See in context »I understand only about half of what you all are saying. But from what I think I do understand, I’ve become suddenly worried. If all quality news products were subscription only, what would be the equivalent of a “free” newspaper at the library? There should be that for democracy’s sake, no?
Hello, Rocky –
The library pays subscription fees for the papers it gets, so that should continue.
As to what the online equivalent would be, they’d likely have that subscription available to patrons, too.
In response to another comment. See in context »Thank you for your response. Guess I’ll just hope free public libraries survive both the financial crises (fed, sate, and local) and the onslaught of the technological age.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] are issues to be worked out still – Search Engine indexing for content placed behind paywalls chief among them. Paywalls can have the effect of “hiding” authors from their community and decimating [...]