4 ms·

Paywalls are a dying gasp being uttered by the publishing industry. Here's why they don't work: - If I respect a publication and feel that the content has val

Paywalls are a dying gasp being uttered by the publishing industry. Here's why they don't work: - If I respect a publication and feel that the content has value for me, I'll happily subscribe. - If I click on a clickbait headline only to arrive at a paywall, it's like a small and unpleasant electric shock, punishing me for clicking the link. - Paywall creators think that the combination of clickbait and paywalls is magical and gets people to subscribe, but it does not, it only creates negative emotion and irritation. - There is no such thing as a free lunch. If publishers want subscribers they need to consistently produce high quality content day after day, week after week. They also need to forego the sugar high of clickbait. - That means there can't be some sort of social virality genius telling the editor how to title articles and showing charts of all the clicks from Reddit, etc. Doing this may generate some incremental subscribers, but it does so at the cost of the publication's brand image. - The approach Salon used of showing the first third or half of the article is better than a "You obviously love great journalism" banner. Let the content stand on its own and earn the subscription. - I have not been able to bring myself to subscribe to the NYT or WaPo for one simple reason -- around half of the articles they publish are very low quality and many have clickbait headlines. The article headlines have the feel of being ads themselves that falsely represent the content of the article. In many cases the articles are pretty solid reporting, but the headlines oversell them as being the article that will bring down the Trump presidency. If I were a journalist I'd be pretty outraged if I took the time to write a thoughtful article and then some virality genius retitled it something silly and tribe-oriented to get the shallowest of readers to thoughtlessly click it.

dheera 9y ago
Agree. Also, the websites that try to get you to unblock ad blockers are equally irritating. Usually I just leave, and find another source of the same news. In many cases their ads are super annoying and CPU-intensive, which is the main reason I block them; it's not that I hate advertising itself. If they were just a simple <img> tag and a hyperlink without a huge pile of JavaScript bloat I would probably not bother blocking them.
- grandalf 9y ago
  Indeed. It's true, in a world where a major newspaper will decide to write a multi-page story about one of Trump's silly tweets and run it on the front page, it's not all that hard for a large number of news orgs to write a similarly informative story, and many make it available for free. I agree about ads, but my least favorite are the ones that begin playing video in a tiny window that devours laptop battery life... It's strange to imagine the marketers who are designing these pages. They must imagine that all of us read only when watching TV is not an option, so they try to make the website as much like TV as possible, complete with a tiny screen that you can click on to simply shift into couch potato mode.
- Karunamon 9y ago
  I find that the Anti-adblock killer list in uBlock takes care of most of these. There's an additional addon you can install that pushes it even further. The fight against browsers rendering markup in the way their users want is a losing one.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
You're correct in that reader attitudes towards paywalls are generally negative [1]. You're incorrect in that (a) advertising appears insufficient to sustain a modern press apparatus, and (b) the Wall Street Journal, at the very least, showed paywalls can be financially lucrative [2]. Roughly comparing, on one hand weak paywall deployers, the NYT and Washington Post, and on the other hand strong paywall deployers, the WSJ and Financial Times, the latter appear to benefit more from said paywalls. [1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f3f8/85f3876f9c098bac89e5a152de733bd51b1a.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f3f8/85f3876f9c098bac89e5a1... [2] https://hbr.org/product/the-new-york-times-paywall/512077-PDF-ENG https://hbr.org/product/the-new-york-times-paywall/512077-PD...
- grandalf 9y ago
  My intent was to critique the sort of viral content farm plus paywall approach that the NYT and WaPo are moving toward. That approach increases the percentage of people who clicked on a viral headline only to find a paywall. The problem is not a fee for subscription, it's shoving the wall in the face of the reader while spending money to create and market clickbait viral headlines. I realize that from the marketing perspective it's just a funnel, and the first step in the funnel is the headline copy. So none of the later steps (article engagement, etc.) matter unless the first step "succeeded" in generating a click. But this doesn't work with news, which is probably why the NYT and WaPo are moving more toward marketing to a tribe of people with specific beliefs rather than writing news and analysis that can be relied upon for its consistency and objectivity. The WSJ on the other hand has been running the same kind of news coverage and analysis for years, and has not really changed its approach to fit with a viral marketing strategy. News and analysis used to be judged by consumers/subscribers for the overall information value it provided. Now, that step is being skipped and individual headlines and stories are being judged by how effectively they rise to the top of Facebook's news feed algorithm. It's a fundamentally different game and the WaPo and NYT are able to very effectively get stories into news feeds, and my guess is that the people responsible for that are getting praise and financial rewards for making it happen, yet the consistency and reliability of the publications is suffering tremendously. News feed aggregation is biased by the people who like/click/engage with content, so content that does well might not be better quality than content that does poorly, it's just content that works better in that marketing channel. Analogously, imagine if we evaluated food quality by how well it slid through a series of pipes, rode along a belt, and was then shoved by a robotic foot onto a plate. Some foods would work very well in that machine and end up on the plate reliably. Others would not. What we're seeing is news orgs fundamentally changing how they report on events simply in response to the characteristics of news feed algos, which are simply crude machines just like the tube and belt contraption described above. It's a very hard to understand system, but more importantly there is tremendous dimensionality reduction going on in the cause/effect analysis. Dimensions like journalistic quality, consistency, and civic value are washed out by tribe affiliation value and the amount of dopamine generated when the viewer first reads the headline. From the perspective of finding entertaining content to keep people logged into Facebook it works fantastically, but something is definitely lost in the process :)
frandroid 9y ago
> - If I respect a publication and feel that the content has value for me, I'll happily subscribe. How much do you spend monthly supporting online publications?
- grandalf 9y ago
  Roughly $50
  - frandroid 9y ago
    I'd argue that's better than most... I think a paywall with a soft funnel can do wonders to bring people to pay for content that they value.
    - grandalf 9y ago
      The more I think about it, the more I realize that what I really object to is the clickbait headlines, since they cause me to use up my five free WaPo articles very quickly each month, only to be disappointed that the articles do not actually live up to the bait offered by the headline. But I agree that the concept of a paywall is not necessarily evil. FWIW the sites I do pay for all have paywalled content.
      - frandroid 9y ago
        Anyway, for the WaPo you can click on your browser's Reader Mode button and that bypasses the paywall. However I stopped to read the pop-up and they have a $20/year international subscription, so I decided to pay for that.

dheera 9y ago

Agree. Also, the websites that try to get you to unblock ad blockers are equally irritating. Usually I just leave, and find another source of the same news. In many cases their ads are super annoying and CPU-intensive, which is the main reason I block them; it's not that I hate advertising itself. If they were just a simple <img> tag and a hyperlink without a huge pile of JavaScript bloat I would probably not bother blocking them.

grandalf 9y ago
Indeed. It's true, in a world where a major newspaper will decide to write a multi-page story about one of Trump's silly tweets and run it on the front page, it's not all that hard for a large number of news orgs to write a similarly informative story, and many make it available for free. I agree about ads, but my least favorite are the ones that begin playing video in a tiny window that devours laptop battery life... It's strange to imagine the marketers who are designing these pages. They must imagine that all of us read only when watching TV is not an option, so they try to make the website as much like TV as possible, complete with a tiny screen that you can click on to simply shift into couch potato mode.
Karunamon 9y ago
I find that the Anti-adblock killer list in uBlock takes care of most of these. There's an additional addon you can install that pushes it even further. The fight against browsers rendering markup in the way their users want is a losing one.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

You're correct in that reader attitudes towards paywalls are generally negative [1]. You're incorrect in that (a) advertising appears insufficient to sustain a modern press apparatus, and (b) the Wall Street Journal, at the very least, showed paywalls can be financially lucrative [2]. Roughly comparing, on one hand weak paywall deployers, the NYT and Washington Post, and on the other hand strong paywall deployers, the WSJ and Financial Times, the latter appear to benefit more from said paywalls. [1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f3f8/85f3876f9c098bac89e5a152de733bd51b1a.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f3f8/85f3876f9c098bac89e5a1... [2] https://hbr.org/product/the-new-york-times-paywall/512077-PDF-ENG https://hbr.org/product/the-new-york-times-paywall/512077-PD...

grandalf 9y ago
My intent was to critique the sort of viral content farm plus paywall approach that the NYT and WaPo are moving toward. That approach increases the percentage of people who clicked on a viral headline only to find a paywall. The problem is not a fee for subscription, it's shoving the wall in the face of the reader while spending money to create and market clickbait viral headlines. I realize that from the marketing perspective it's just a funnel, and the first step in the funnel is the headline copy. So none of the later steps (article engagement, etc.) matter unless the first step "succeeded" in generating a click. But this doesn't work with news, which is probably why the NYT and WaPo are moving more toward marketing to a tribe of people with specific beliefs rather than writing news and analysis that can be relied upon for its consistency and objectivity. The WSJ on the other hand has been running the same kind of news coverage and analysis for years, and has not really changed its approach to fit with a viral marketing strategy. News and analysis used to be judged by consumers/subscribers for the overall information value it provided. Now, that step is being skipped and individual headlines and stories are being judged by how effectively they rise to the top of Facebook's news feed algorithm. It's a fundamentally different game and the WaPo and NYT are able to very effectively get stories into news feeds, and my guess is that the people responsible for that are getting praise and financial rewards for making it happen, yet the consistency and reliability of the publications is suffering tremendously. News feed aggregation is biased by the people who like/click/engage with content, so content that does well might not be better quality than content that does poorly, it's just content that works better in that marketing channel. Analogously, imagine if we evaluated food quality by how well it slid through a series of pipes, rode along a belt, and was then shoved by a robotic foot onto a plate. Some foods would work very well in that machine and end up on the plate reliably. Others would not. What we're seeing is news orgs fundamentally changing how they report on events simply in response to the characteristics of news feed algos, which are simply crude machines just like the tube and belt contraption described above. It's a very hard to understand system, but more importantly there is tremendous dimensionality reduction going on in the cause/effect analysis. Dimensions like journalistic quality, consistency, and civic value are washed out by tribe affiliation value and the amount of dopamine generated when the viewer first reads the headline. From the perspective of finding entertaining content to keep people logged into Facebook it works fantastically, but something is definitely lost in the process :)

frandroid 9y ago

> - If I respect a publication and feel that the content has value for me, I'll happily subscribe. How much do you spend monthly supporting online publications?

grandalf 9y ago
Roughly $50
- frandroid 9y ago
  I'd argue that's better than most... I think a paywall with a soft funnel can do wonders to bring people to pay for content that they value.
  - grandalf 9y ago
    The more I think about it, the more I realize that what I really object to is the clickbait headlines, since they cause me to use up my five free WaPo articles very quickly each month, only to be disappointed that the articles do not actually live up to the bait offered by the headline. But I agree that the concept of a paywall is not necessarily evil. FWIW the sites I do pay for all have paywalled content.
    - frandroid 9y ago
      Anyway, for the WaPo you can click on your browser's Reader Mode button and that bypasses the paywall. However I stopped to read the pop-up and they have a $20/year international subscription, so I decided to pay for that.