The subscription model will prove to be fatally flawed because it overlooks a glaring reality about consumer behavior: on the internet, people don’t care as much about who is telling the story as they do whether the story interests them.
Particularly, in the current era of echo-chamber mainstream “journalism”, where events are quickly shaped into stories that sustain the narrative upholding the corporate oligopoly, most readers couldn’t care less if they get the story from CNN or MSNBC or ABC or CBS or FOX or WaPo or NYT — it’s all the same lies wrapped with different ribbons. For all but the few who have been brainwashed into believing in a particular media-god, stories about current events won’t drive subscriptions; it will have to be something else. But what?
New York Times has some advantage here because they do have a proliferation of high quality content about a landscape far broader than the current Trumpian circus. Fashion, technology, the arts, and so on, are covered in beautiful, well-turned prose. WaPo, same deal, at least to some extent.
Ah, but if you are interested in a topic, what do you do? In days of yore, you would open your newspaper to the relevant section and scan for an article, feeling grateful that you had subscribed to such an important source of useful information delivered daily to your doorstep. But today you simply type the topic in the address bar of your browser and check out what Google (or Duckduckgo, my personal preference) delivers.
Maybe the first few items will be links to NYT or some such (your click will be paid for by the media outlet), but since you’re aware of their paywalls you ignore them and go down the list. There will be at least 20 or 30 other places you can go to explore the topic, and anytime you hit another paywall you’ll just back out and try the next one until you hit one that’s free.
Maybe the prose won’t be as well-turned, maybe there will be typos and grammar errors (god know there are plenty of those, even in the respected journals these days!), but did you get the information you were looking for? Maybe, but if not, you’ll just try the next one and keep going till you’re satisfied.
For people with highly-focused interests, a subscription to a particular outlet will make sense. For example, if you’re into finance, a subscription to FT or Barrons or WSJ would be a good investment. But for the vast majority whose interests are spread much further, it would be silly to plunk down money for a subscription just to read a single article of interest.
But writers and editors need to get paid, so what’s the answer?
The answer is for all the media to join together and support a unified micropayment system. If I go a paragraph or two into a story and find it interesting, will I stop and fill out a form with my credit card to commit to a monthly or annual subscription so I can read the rest ? Don’t think so! But how about if a bar appears across the bottom inviting me to pay, let’s say, 5¢ out of my prepaid account? Just click the bar, the nickel (or dime, or whatever) gets deducted from my universal payment account, and I keep reading.
Every month or two, depending on how much I use it, the universal payment account sends me an email advising that my prepaid balance is low, so I click its link and dump in another $20 or $30.
This seems so obvious, why haven’t they done it already?
