source: https://epicpresence.com/journalism-paywalls/ Paywalls don’t work all that well. And they don’t make that much money. And they are annoying. And there are a host of other potential problems when publishers deploy them. Scottsays: January 29, 2021 at 5:10 pm Some paywalls are too strict. If I click a link that popped up on my twitter about a certain trend, and then I’m immediately stopped by a paywall, more likely than not I’m just going to close the tab and find it somewhere else. Sort of seems like going to a restaurant and being asked to pay before even handing you the menu. Still, reporters and publishers have to get paid somehow. If paywalls don’t work, what will?

The Atlantic’s Alexis C. Madrigal believes the division of content and distribution channels by big tech is one reason for the rise in paywalls. In the print and broadcast days, media companies were able to control both content and distribution. That’s not the case anymore. Now, Google and Facebook are the distribution channels, and they are taking all of the ad revenue, too. Publishers simply don’t have the advertising products to compete with the big tech firms. They don’t have many other ways of getting users to view their content without going through one of the big tech platforms, either. Madrigal reports that in 2016, internet ad revenue totaled $75 billion, split roughly in half between desktop and mobile. But desktop advertising hadn’t grown since 2013. All the growth was on mobile devices, and it’s here that Facebook and Google have claimed almost all of the ad revenue. The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle posits that publishers have raised paywalls as a way to wrestle back control of both content and distribution. For more than a century, newspapers worked in a two-sided market where they sold subscriptions to viewers and then sold those viewers to advertisers. And it was the advertisers who covered virtually all of the costs of production. “Then the Internet came along, and suddenly, we didn’t own the only pipeline anymore,” McArdle writes. “Anyone can throw up a Web page. And over the past 20 years, anyone did — far more than could support actual advertiser demand.” Unsurprisingly, no publishers won in the end, only the tech platforms that get content for free and then monetized it with ad networks. If publishers continue to give away content for free, McArdle says, they are all but signing their own death warrant. Ads Aren’t the Answer If the bulk of revenue from journalism is swept up by ad platforms, wouldn’t it make sense for publishers to build their own networks and once again own the entire pipeline? Not so, writes The Globe and Mail’s Simon Houpt. “The price of static online ads used by most news sites has been falling for years, making it difficult for them to earn enough to pay for even the creation of popular articles. And many journalists worry that popular articles that pull in traffic are not necessarily the most important ones.” Houpt’s last point is particularly important. Paywalls, to their credit, negate the need for clickbait articles to subsidize good reporting. These low-quality, attention-grabbing articles are the bane of serious journalists everywhere. In a digital publishing model built around online ads, however, those articles are often the most valuable. Perhaps what is most interesting about the rise of paywalls is the lack of uniformity in their application. A couple of years ago, the Columbia Journalism Review analyzed the country’s top 25 most-visited daily newspaper websites and found almost no cohesion in the way paywalls were used. “There was little agreement on a paywall strategy and certainly no consensus solution to the problem of the ‘ideal’ newspaper paywall,” reports CJR’s Ariel Stulberg. Out of the 25 sites, 15 had a paywall of some description. But the cost, the amount of free content and the ease with which the paywall could be subverted all varied wildly. The only similarity was outlets owned by the same organization had the same type of paywall. A lack of consistency in how paywalls are applied isn’t conducive to high levels of adoption. If consumers know easy workarounds are available, they might not be moved to pay for access. Put another way, would you still pay for Netflix if your neighbor could access it for free through a private browser? Most Paywalls Don’t Work That Well Paywalls Also Help Create Echo Chambers So, What’s the Solution?