The Paywall Comeback: Why We’re Finally Ready To Pay For News
For years, forecasts for news’ commerciality were bleak. A generation of people growing up with free news from alternative sites meant the concept of traditional media titles charging for their output was a busted flush. Who’d now pay for news online if there were a thousand other places offering it up for free?
But now more and more are asking their customers to pay. And the resistance is weakening. On our doorstep here in the North East, ChronicleLive has announced a new premium service. For under £4 a month, or £40 a year, you can gain access to exclusive content, long-form journalism and, crucially, bypass much of the Reach title’s infuriatingly invasive ads that make usability of the site, especially on smartphones, close to impossible. If you know, you know. The price of a coffee a month seems reasonable.
They’re not the first Reach title to do this. Major titles covering Scotland and Wales, and in big city areas, such as Manchester, Liverpool and Lecister, are already operating in this manner. Are the days of ‘paywall’ being a dirty word over? Niche titles, especially in specific trade and industry sectors have long had success of keeping all their content under financial lock and key, and now more populous titles are seeing a way of graduating paid news into their financial models.
So is paid news as a concept actually working? Well, yes. It is. It’s been nearly six years since the Press Gazette, the industry trade bible, launched its 100k Club, an elite list of media titles that enjoy more than 100,000 paid subscribers. It kicked off that list with just 24 titles. Now the list boasts more than double that. Slow progress, and American titles dominate, but progress all the same. At the top of that list is the New York Times, with more than 12m digital subscribers. That’s up 13% from last year. Big numbers.
So why is it working now? I have one theory. More openly than ever, traditional media houses have taken sides and aren’t afraid to show it. The divides are stark. As a trainee journalist entering the industry in the 90s, I remember impartiality being king. Present the facts. While there were clear traditions and political foundations to certain media titles, you could have put a cigarette paper between left and right.
So is it chicken or egg? Are media titles, in the quest for online eyeballs, feeding known political biases to its audiences, or are the audiences going to find the titles that appeal to their own ethical or political beliefs? Build it, and they will come.
As an individual of a certain vintage, my career in communications has crossed the divide of print and digital media. Many, probably rightly, predict the end of newspapers as a concept (they also predicted the same when radio and TV was invented). However there still remains a place for those operating in immediate and always-on media cycles to put the proverbial front page on a pedestal and assess what impact that will have on the news cycle for the coming hours, days and weeks. The BBC, Sky News and countless others still give space and time to analyse what the papers say.
ChronicleLive’s launch of their premium service (you can still read the God-awful, user unfriendly main site for free) comes off the back of Reach, earlier in the month, outlining how they’ve lost 50% of Google’s referral traffic. We’ll leave the expensive arguments and on-going lawsuits about how justified it is for Google to share no-click search results, while marginalising its sources, for another day.
Let’s say it’s working. Media titles start to claw back their status again, and we all get used to paying proportionately again for our news and insight. What happened in that period in between was a scything of talented journalists, editors and sub-editors. The product has suffered in the clickbait era as they’ve competed with the wave of competitors competing for their eyeballs. Their product quality has suffered as a result and it needs to improve. I’ll be pretty annoyed if my ‘£4 coffee’ tastes like piss.
