A few weeks ago, Business Insider published a report laying out evidence that Major League Baseball used two different baseballs during the 2021 season. In an effort to cut down on soaring home run rates, MLB announced before the season began that they would be introducing new baseballs with a lighter core, which would “deaden” the ball a bit and, in theory, cut down on the number of home runs.
In short, the whole thing seemed suspicious, especially considering some players maintain that MLB manipulates baseballs to hurt the stats of key players in the season before they enter free agency, thus lowering the value of the contract they can command as a free agent. For example, if the key free agents are pitchers, they could be given older-model balls with heavier, more home-run-friendly cores; if they’re hitters, the pitchers get the lighter-core models. This helps keep the league average salary from rising, which benefits teams and the league when it comes to salary negotiations with players. (Nobody said it was an airtight theory, but then again, I wouldn’t put it past MLB to pull something like that.)
It sounds like an excellent piece of reporting, but I’ll never know for sure because it’s behind a paywall. To read it, I would have had to pay $1 for a monthly trial. That would mean entering my credit card information, reading the article, then immediately forgetting I’d just signed up for a subscription to read one story. So after the one-month $1 introductory rate expired, Business Insider would keep charging my card $12.95 a month until I happen to review my bank statement, see the charge, spend an hour-plus freaking out that some cybercriminal stole my banking details to read finance news, accept that the charge is probably my fault, and finally navigate the labyrinthine cancellation process.
The whole process is an emotional rollercoaster that’s definitely not worth riding for an article on a sport I don’t even care about. Oh sure, I could remember to cancel the subscription immediately after, but if I’ve learned anything living inside this head for 35 years, it’s that I absolutely cannot be trusted to tie up that kind of loose end. Even if I managed to overcome my propensity for fiscal ineptitude—an “if” so big it has its own Norse folklore—and canceled every subscription the moment it’s no longer needed, this isn’t a viable long-term arrangement.
We have ourselves a bona fide paywall dilemma.
Once upon a time, people got their news from the newspaper. They’d pay a nickel or a ha’penny or whatever for that day’s edition, they’d read it, and that was that. But this model marginalizes people: journalism is the process of finding and relaying information, but the information itself costs nothing. A fact doesn’t need to be produced or manufactured; it just is. Therefore, when you pay for a newspaper, you’re not really paying for the information itself, but for the service of having that information contextualized. This distinction didn’t really matter in the early days of print journalism, because if you couldn’t afford the cost of a newspaper, the information and the context provided by newspapers were off-limits to you anyway, reserved for people who had money and could read. Poor and illiterate people—who would have benefited most from that information and context—were left on the outside looking in.
Radio leveled the playing field somewhat by ensuring that everyone had equal access to at least a baseline amount of information about major stories and events. Television further increased access to information, especially following the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine that required television stations to dedicate some of their airtime to issues and events that were in the public interest so people could stay informed for free.
Then came the internet and the concept of the online newspaper. When the idea really started gaining steam in 1995, we seemed to be on the precipice of a great leap forward. The internet promised to democratize access to information and allow everyone to be as informed as they wanted. It was a promising concept: starting in 1996, paid print newspaper subscriptions slowly declined as more and more people took advantage of the internet to access information previously unavailable to them.
But less than a decade later, it was becoming clear that this new arrangement wasn’t as lucrative for newspapers as the old model was. The number of paid print subscriptions dropped by about 20% in five years, from just over 57 million in 2004 to 46 million and change in 2009. Despite a slight uptick from 2009 to 2011, the writing was on the wall: Paid print subscriptions weren’t where the money was anymore. In order to survive, news outlets needed to make their websites more profitable. And to do that, they needed to generate more ad revenue.
Filling up their pages with ads worked for outlets back in the late nineties and early aughts, but by the early 2010s, ad-blocking software was widely available and free. Some readers understood why outlets needed ads on their sites and even turned off their ad-blockers to help out. No amount of sidebars or banner elements or autoplaying videos crammed onto each page could drum up enough money to offset the lost revenues from flagging print subscriptions, but outlets kept adding more and more ads and Outbrain links to each page. Eventually, a lot of sites became so impossibly cluttered that readers had to use an ad-blocker just to read the articles. There seemed to be no way out.
Obviously media outlets need revenue in order to keep the lights on, and the advertising honor system—a good idea in theory—just isn’t practical. There will always be sites who try to cram that extra obtrusive ad onto the page to goose their revenue a bit, and there will always be consumers who love a website but refuse to pay for it or even passively help that site generate income by turning off their ad-blockers. There’s always just a little too much greed and selfishness from each side to make the whole thing unworkable for everyone.
The people who own newspapers would argue that the paywall is an attempt to restore some semblance of balance to the equation. For years, newspapers were basically giving away their product for free and operating at a loss; thus, the thinking goes, it’s only fair that we go back to the old ways of making people pony up if they want to read something. But if anything, the financial burden is even more onerous than it used to be when printed papers ruled the land.
Back then, buying a newspaper was a one-off transaction. The quarter goes in, the information comes out, thanks for your business. But a paywall takes things a step further: now you have to enter a contract in order to read the paper. You can’t just pay for today’s news, you also have to pre-order tomorrow’s news, on spec.
To these outlets, this is perfectly reasonable: it’s a given that they’ll deliver the goods, so why wouldn’t you sign up for a subscription? But most have far too high an opinion of themselves. There are very few outlets putting out must-read journalism on a daily basis; this is not an indictment of the quality of their work, but an unfortunate byproduct of the 24-hour news cycle and Ringerization of current events. The big stories of the day will be covered by everyone, so there’s not much point in paying for something you could get for free elsewhere.
Very few people purchase a subscription because they simply cannot imagine getting their news elsewhere. In most cases, they either sign up because that particular outlet has a style or voice that no other outlet has (like Defector), or because the outlet covers so much news in general that a subscription is good value for the investment (e.g., the New York Times). For a site like Business Insider, the paywall makes less sense: the people who want to read Business Insider for what it’s known for—financial journalism—probably already have a subscription, and the people who are just interested in the MLB story are unlikely to sign up when 99% of the site is of zero interest to them.
In other words, paywalls do little to encourage readers to sign up for a subscription unless they were already interested in one. In fact, more often than not, paywalls end up disincentivizing people from wanting to read that site. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve Googled something and skipped right past a result from the Wall Street Journal—I already know it’s going to be paywalled, so why waste a click?
You may be thinking Well so what? If you don’t want to read the site anyway, then why does it matter if it’s paywalled or not? First of all, you don’t have to be nasty about it. Second, when exclusive stories are stuck behind a paywall, it means people can’t get information that would likely influence their opinion about important events or powerful people. If more people were able to read the Business Insider article about the MLB, maybe they’d feel differently about who’s to blame for the lockout. If The Athletic’s coverage of Trevor Bauer (accused of violent sexual assault) wasn’t behind a paywall, maybe he’d have fewer vocal supporters. If everyone could read Business Insider’s story on Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy (accused of being an enormous fucking creep who gets off on degrading women during sex, including spitting in their mouths), maybe he and his army of weird dorks would have a harder time trying to spin the accusations as “some dumb BROAD with an axe to grind.”
Paywalls make it harder for the stories to reach the broader public consciousness and therefore easier for the subjects of these articles to simply wait them out. Donald Trump spent four years showing everyone how to get away with that approach, and now it’s in every scumbag’s bad PR playbook. They can ignore the story or even willfully distort what the article actually says—their fans are largely unwilling to fact-check them, especially if they have to spend their own money to do it.
Leaving aside concerns for the public interest, there’s also the financial burden to consider. According to those sons of bitches at Taboola, the average cost of a subscription to a paywalled website is $15.62 per month. Millennials lead the way in paid subscriptions, with an average of 17 per person; however, it’s unclear how many of these are news or media services versus streaming or entertainment services. But even if we assume a millennial is signed up for all the most popular streaming entertainment services—Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, AppleTV, Peacock (?), HBOMax, Disney+, Paramount+, Spotify, Apple Music(??), Playstation Plus/XBox Live—that leaves us with about 7 open slots that could be used for news or media outlets; assuming the average monthly cost is $15.62, that adds up to $109.34 per month (we’ll call it $100 just to be safe).
We’re already spending as much on subscriptions as we do on our electric bills, but it’s not enough: according to Simon & Graves, the percentage of leading U.S. newspapers operating behind a paywall rose from 60% in 2017 to 76% in 2019. Even wire services like Reuters—which just spits out unvarnished information about events as they occur before journalists pick it up and add the proper context—are moving behind paywalls. This can only end one way: eventually, either you pay to get any information straight from a reputable source, or you’ll have to rely on social media or (God help us) content aggregators like Mashable and POPSUGAR to pluck out a few relevant facts and run them through an SEO machine so they can spit out headlines like “The Arctic Ocean Is Boiling Seals Alive, And We Have All The Feels.”
The average monthly take-home pay is $3,261 after taxes. A single adult has an average of $3,189 in monthly expenses. How much should it cost us to stay informed about the world we live in? Where’s the line? Today it’s $100, but what comes next? Spending the $72 left over from our take-home pay? Loan sharks for subscriptions to the New York Post?
I get that outlets have to make money, I really do, but doing it this way seems unsustainable for outlets and readers alike. In addition to their editorial side, most media outlets have a business side. The business side’s job is to maximize profits through the application of pressure.
They pressure the editorial side for more content—never “articles” or “stories” or “pieces,” just “content.” More content means more pageviews; more pageviews equals greater ad reach; greater ad reach means more revenue. They pressure editors to lay off writers and “pivot to video.” Or, alternately, they pressure the reader for more money: increased subscription costs; tighter paywalls with fewer free articles; and so on. The way the business side sees it, they’re the reason the site can keep the lights on. They are the engine driving the outlet, not the editorial staff. They don’t care what editorial does as long as it doesn’t affect profits, and they don’t care if you’re happy with the site’s content as long as you don’t cancel your subscription. The business side is there to make money, plain and simple, and they’re not satisfied with having enough money—they want all of it. They hold strategy meetings on how to extract as much of that leftover $72 from you as they can. If that means keeping an important story behind a paywall, then that’s what they’ll do. They don’t even particularly care if this approach will eventually cause the whole enterprise to fall apart, just as long as they’re not there when it happens. They’ll happily light the fuse and move onto the next outlet.
As a reader, it’s unpleasant enough being on the receiving end of this pressure, but what makes it especially frustrating is the pointlessness of it all. How does a surge of new subscribers actually benefit paywalled outlets if all those subscribers immediately cancel once they’ve gotten what they came for? Why do outlets get to force readers to subscribe based on nothing more than assurances that they’ll eventually get their money’s worth, rather than demonstrating that they are worth the cost of a subscription first? Would you take out a mortgage on a house because the architect showed you a picture of the downstairs bathroom and promised you that the rest of the house will be equally lovely (and to prove it, here are pictures of houses he’s built before)?
Paywalls are bad for journalism and bad for access to information in general, but I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge my own personal stake in the outcome of this whole thing as well. Opportunities for full-time journalism jobs are few and far between as it is, even more so when it comes to journalism jobs I’d actually like to do for a living. I could write about finance because I’m good at it, but I have no interest in a staff writing position for The Motley Fool or wherever.
That means that for now, at least, the only place I can reliably write about the things that interest me is right here, in this newsletter. Right now, my freelance work is my only source of income, which means I’m often forced to choose between writing for myself (for free) here, or writing bullshit for someone else but getting paid for it. Most of the time, I opt for the latter because it feels irresponsible to turn down paying work, and as a result, the things I want to write about get put on the back burner until I can find some time to work on them.
I already spent years of my adult life making that choice, and I resented myself for it. That’s why I went back to school for journalism. Yet I’m still stuck making that choice, still sacrificing what I want to do for what I should do. Ironically, that sacrifice feels even worse now: before, a career change was unrealistic because I didn’t have the requisite training or experience, so I didn’t have to feel quite so badly about toiling away at some boring project management gig. Now I have that training and experience, but it doesn’t seem like I’m much further along today than when I first started.
Point is, I’d like to introduce a paid subscription option for this newsletter, at least for some of the stuff I write. But I’m also a reader—I know how many outlets I pay for and how much money I spend to read them, and it’s a lot, so I feel uncomfortable about, or unworthy of, adding to that financial burden for someone else. Not to mention, part of me wants my writing to be accessible to everyone. I know how shitty it feels to be excited to read something, only to click the link and get hit with a paywall. It’s probably not good business sense, but after having wasted so many years working bullshit jobs before I figured out what I wanted to do for a living, I’m still just grateful that anyone wants to read my work. It’s probably not smart from a financial standpoint, but that could be said for pretty much every decision I make involving money.
Luckily, I think I have a solution that could work for everyone. It would alleviate your financial burden, soothe my angst and still let Business Insider make money:
Bring back the old way of buying a newspaper. A pay-per-article model for large outlets.
See something in the Washington Post you want to read? No problem: pay $1 for 24 hours of access, no strings attached, no subscription required. If you find yourself reading 16 articles per month, then it’s probably worth the cost of a subscription; if not (or if you just don’t want to bother maintaining another subscription), you keep paying as you go.
With a pay-per-article model, readers could access information that they’re genuinely interested in reading without having to sign up for a subscription. And from a business standpoint, outlets could see which stories generate the most 24-hour-access payments, which would give them a better sense of the kinds of stories they might want to focus on to convert some non-subscribers to permanent subscribers. Outlets still make money, but more importantly, readers like you have enough left over to throw me a few bucks a month and help put an end to my ongoing existential crisis.
Everybody wins. (Except Dave Portnoy, but fuck that guy.)