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 m…
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,…
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 :)