Its difficult to visit a website today without being warned that youre on your last free article. With social media devouring traffic, ad revenue collapsing, and layoffs ripping through the industry, paywalls are helping publications survive. Some are even thriving: The New York Times added a record 587,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2020. Defector, which rose from the ashes of the horrendous private equity mismanagement of Deadspin, was dubbed the potential future of media in a New Republic article that said the new venture was on track to make at least $2 million per year in subscription fees.
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Creators deserve to be paid, and readers are saying these publications are worth the cost. The relaunch of Deadspins zombified corpse, despite being free, pulled in an embarrassing 10 percent of the traffic the site managed before the exodus of its beloved writers. But as paywalls grow more common (76 percent of American newspapers used them in 2019, up from 60 percent just two years prior) and stricter (publications are getting better at sussing out incognito mode and other tricks to dodge paywalls), most readers are still only willing to pay for one online news subscription. The media landscape, then, may come to resemble what it looked like before the internet, where it was difficult and expensive for any one consumer to traverse a wide range of viewpoints.
Just how far will this fragmentation go? Consider the case of streaming video. Subscription libraries of movies and TV shows are orders of magnitude more popular than those for the written word: The New York Times has 6.5 million subscribers, while Netflix has 183 million. But even there, as of mid-2019, the average American was spending just $29 a month, on an average of 3.4 streaming services. Even if readers turn out to be willing to spend that much for online publications, it wont get them very far. Subscribe to both The New York Times ($17 per month) and Defector ($8 per month), and youve already used up most of your budget. A Washington Post subscription ($8.33 per month), your local paper (the Denver Post is $14.99 per month), and one or two Substacks (popular ex-Buzzfeed journalist Anne Helen Petersen charges $5 per month for her newsletter) would also zero out your budget; as would a single subscription to The Boston Globe ($27.72 per month).
Unless readers are willing to spend a lot of moneyand substantially more than they spend on watching videosit simply wont be financially viable for them to consume a lot of internet content. Not coincidentally, a lot of internet content wont be financially viable, either. The New York Times 587,000 new subscriptions outnumbered the combined efforts of 261 local papers across America. In a 2017 analysis by The Outline (one of many sites to perish in recent months), only 2 percent of Patreons were earning the equivalent of $7.25 an hour from content creation, and less than half of those people hit the vaguely livable $15 an hour. Far from every Patreon is a full-time endeavor, but theres still a wide gap between the flashy success stories and everyone else.
The same problem appears to be reaching Substack. Theres long been a theory that if you can find 1,000 fans willing to pay you five dollars a month then you can make a comfortable $60,000 living online, and Substack was hyped as a simple execution of that concept. But where are those 1,000 readers going to come from when everyones pouring their money into legacy publications, and specialist sites such as Defector and The Athletic?
Continued here:
Paywalls, Newsletters, and the New Echo Chamber - WIRED
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