The Future Will Be Paywalled

As I’m sure anyone who is on social media regularly has noticed, it seems like every news story is behind a paywall now. From the Rolling Stone article claiming to have exclusive information that members of Congress were involved in the 1 / 6 riot, to a Wall Street Journal piece detailing the influence social media has on teens and gender identity, to the Daily Wire expose of the Loudoun County sexual assault scandal that I wrote about, it’s getting difficult to find news that doesn’t require a subscription to read. And that’s just the mainstream publications -- the amount of paywalled content being created by independent content creators for platforms such as Substack and Patreon has exploded over the past few years. 

It’s becoming clear, the question is no longer “free content versus paid content” it’s “who do you want to pay for content.”

I’m of two minds on this -- I’m of the generation where everyone believes information, like, just wants to be free but I also understand that media organizations are businesses that need to make money. That applies to independent content creators as well, myself included, who struggle to find the right balance of free versus subscriber-only content. As important as good journalism and opinion writing is, nobody can afford to do it while generating zero revenue. 

The move by mainstream outlets and independent creators away from an ad-based model to a subscription-based model can be both a blessing and a curse. The ad-based model, while allowing for a blend of ideas and opinions, led to the emergence of clickbait journalism meant to attract eyeballs by any means necessary. The content that came out of the clickbait model was...less than optimal as anyone who can remember that period will attest (looking at you, Gawker and Buzzfeed). The same dynamic can be seen on the independent creator level -- how much an advertiser is willing to pay a podcaster or how much revenue a YouTube creator makes is wholly dependent on the amount of traffic that creator generates. The move to a subscription-based model allows media outlets and creators to spend more time focusing on quality pieces and less time generating hate clicks for advertising dollars.

The subscription-based model comes with its own set of perverse incentives, however. Instead of chasing ad dollars, outlets and creators now have to chase after individual subscribers, which gives the readers / listeners / viewers an immense amount of leverage over which topics are covered and in what fashion. Remember the freakout over the New York Times Tom Cotton op-ed in which he made the case for the federal government sending in the US military to quash the riots that took place in the wake of George Floyd’s death? The backlash from their subscriber base was so severe that the Times added a lengthy apology for ever publishing it. While I agree Cotton’s idea was dumb on every level it could have possibly been, it was also the idea of a prominent US Senator and, as such, was newsworthy. The subscriber base of the Times wasn’t trying to hear that, or likely much of anything else Cotton has to say, so the op-ed had to be amended.

The pressure to attract and maintain subscribers is even more intense for independent creators. When one works for a media organization, the amount of traffic and subscribers one brings is tangentially related to one’s paycheck but for independent creators that is their paycheck. And just as a subscriber base has immense power over a media outlet, so does it over independent creators. In our current hyper-politicized environment, creating the content that your subscriber base wants to consume is paramount to maintaining your career as a creator, and yes I absolutely think audience capture is real and is an issue worth discussing further. 

The subscription-based model will also accelerate the silo effect currently present in media consumption. It’s already hard enough to get consumers to maintain a balanced media diet, it will be almost impossible once they’re expected to pay money to do so. Let’s face it -- nobody is going to pay a monthly subscription fee to an outlet or creator with whom they don’t already agree. The more content that goes behind a paywall, the less content there will be available to spread freely and make it in front of someone who might be persuadable on a certain issue, and that will become a major problem in the future. If most content is paywalled, and one is only willing to pay for certain kinds of content, then one will be in their bespoke echo chamber that nothing can penetrate. 

Despite all of my concerns over how the subscription-based model can lead to some bad outcomes, I still believe it is the best way going forward. Media outlets can’t compete with Google and Facebook in the advertising market, continuing to try is a fool’s errand that will either lead to increasing levels of desperate clickbait journalism or bankruptcy. For independent creators, it’s a chance to make the content that is best for you and your audience while (hopefully) making enough money to call it your day job. 

Very interesting times we live in, I’m curious to see how this all shakes out.