Honestly, they could probably make more money just slapping a patreon link at the end of every article. I’ve voluntarily paid far more creators than I have purchased subscriptions. Paywalling shit either means im forever uninterested or will go through back channels to obtain the content if I really want it.
You realize this wasn’t written by the CEO of the company right? It was written almost certainly to protest the exact thing you seem to think is a contradiction
I used to spend like $30 a month for a newspaper subscription that was hand delivered to my door. It was normal. But in that time we didn’t have many options. TV and magazines were about it.
Quality journalism just hasn’t really figured out how to thrive like they used to. It’s too easy for any random person to “become a journalist” and post about events far away.
Too easy for me to find multiple free sources online about anything I care about.
There are also way too many interesting events for one media outlet to adequately cover, so my interest level in whatever the headline is for the day at some high profile media company isn’t that high.
It’s a tricky landscape now. The journalists of old could hit hard because of their reputation, either in getting interviews or exposing crazy things. And they had a reputation that, once lost, cost them their career.
The insane thing is that they believe I’ll actually pay to read their article instead of skipping it to read other dreck (I jest) on the internet. And I do actually miss reading The Atlantic but there’s just so much more I can read for free so …
Stumbling across Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog on the Atlantic (I think the first post of his I read was about him making a character in SW:TOR, come to think of it) was my first step on the road to understanding the huge racial disparity in equity and justice in America. I even subscribed to the magazine on my Kindle for a while, but when they put up their paywall my digital subscription didn’t count, they’d shut off their comments ages ago (taking with them a lot of nasty for sure, but also squelching the communities that had sprung up around TNC and a few other writers like Alexis Madrigal), and the normal churn of writers meant that most of the folks who I like to read had moved on anyway, so I did too.
Once in a while I see an article I’d like to peruse from them, but it’s just not worth the cost of admission anymore.
He does bring up a good point that micro-transactions in news would make a lot of sense. I would pay 10 cents (if it was easy) to read a article, but you aren’t going to get me to sign up for a “less then a cup of coffee a month” subscription.
Every other “cyperbunk dystopia” out there be pretending that capitalists would make you pay for every breath you take.
That’s a hella dumb take when subscriptions exist. I wish I could actually pay-by-the-breath when the reality is the best value is 5 % off quarterly payments for a million breath bundle (unused breaths non-refundable, subscription only cancelable upon giving up your firstborn, and completely unrelaredly Breathe-Easy™ just dished out a record $10 trillion in dividends to Elon Musk).
I’ve never seen an option to pay for one specific article. I think I’d be more inclined to do that than to subscribe. The guardian offers the ability to donate but if I recall it was only in amounts that around $10 or more which feels like it would cover several articles. You could just donate that much and personally consider it a down payment on however many articles you think that buys, but psychologically a cheap price to buy the one specific thing you’re trying to read feels more reasonable when you’re making the decision to pay or not.
Another idea I’ve heard is basically getting a subscription to access a big basket of publications with each publication getting paid out of a central pot based on what someone chose to read. I think the various publishers hated this idea from what I heard so it was something of a non starter.
I would absolutely pay $5 a month to get past all the news paywalls, or 10 cents for an article. The big thing is that it would need to be easy. Like “login once and get access to all of them without additional accounts” easy. Or if it’s a pay per article, again not have to make an account and configure a credit card, just use a central service that I can get the article in under 2 clicks (buy and confirm) no matter which paywall it is.
Part of the problem is credit card fees eat up a lot when they deal with small values (less than a dollar) so they are trying to avoid that. But a “big pot” subscription that gets distributed as you use it would alleviate that.
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