If we take the view, backed by a segment of the newspaper industry, that the world wide web really was a worldwide Wild West at its initial stage, then we are now, allegedly, entering the era of barbed wire in the form of the paywall, designed to tame its free-for-all lawlessness. Just as the latter saw the extinction of cattle herders and cowboys; the former is threatening both livelihoods and professions in the real world of journalism.
The arguments which rage in news organisation boardrooms right now say content is proprietary and expensive, because there is a cost and expertise which go into its gathering or creation and its free use erodes both its uniqueness and its value. My first inclination is to say that we have heard sentiments like these before and they were first aired by the Luddites in 1811. Every time the stage changes those who are working in it are always faced with the same choice: adapt and find a new way to operate; or fight and hope you can stop change.
It is significant to note that just as in the days of farmers versus cattle barons in the Wild West, the lines here are drawn by those who understand the issue and those who don't. Those who understand the web realise that the real change is the web itself which has transformed the way we do everything. Those who don't, see the web only as an extension of their paper or transmission-based channels and want to use it in the exact same way. In the balance hangs not just journalism as a profession, but also the ability of the journalist to make a living in the new era.
As you are reading this the Times and Sunday Times are well on their way to putting their content behind a paywall, as have industry leaders, Rolling Stone magazine, Bloomberg and Ad Age. The Times was bought in 1981 by Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation and he has become, depending on who you are willing to listen to, the poster child for the paid content brigade, or the newspaper industry's Don Quixote, bent on a quest he is bound to lose, for reasons he cannot understand.
There are serious issues here which need to be examined in some depth. Newspapers' revenues have declined over the past 10 years and this decline has coincided with the explosion of online free content. The online ad revenue which is directly linked to page views has failed to bridge the revenue gap. Print had a single, traditional pricing model that worked. Logic dictates that, in order to survive, newspapers and magazines, need to do something.
This need for action however, seems to have translated into a 'circle the bandwagons' mentality, where every action taken seems designed to, mostly, curtail freedom of information and potential readership numbers. The problem is that what makes sense on paper does not necessarily make sense on the web, particularly if you fail to take into account the other factors which have changed and which have affected newspaper revenues: easy access to information, real-time web reporting, news consumers unwilling to accept 'filtered' news and a general sense of empowerment when it comes to how information is gathered and consumed.
News consumers have also changed
The knee-jerk reaction is to assume that everything is the same and therefore all that needs to be done is to round-up the information that's freely roaming out there behind and put it behind the barbed wire of a paywall and online news consumers will flock with their credit cards in order to access it again.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The news browsing hunters roaming out there are very different from the ones who existed before the web came along. We have now had 15 years' worth of people learning to search, look for content, create websites and use chat, messaging and email. Each of these has opened up new ways of finding and sending information to a degree that, in places, has supplanted those traditional news organisations that still rely on the old-fashioned, time-delay model for getting news, deciding what to show and tell and then serving it to the public.
A perfect example of this is Kampala, in Uganda, where there were a series of deadly riots that occurred under the radar of international mainstream news media for days last year. It was a situation that affected millions of lives. Information coming out of there reached millions through real-time services such as Twitter and SMS. Later, when the mainstream news picked up on what was going on, they were often wrong or misleading in what they reported and it took them weeks to get up to speed. The point is that news consumers did not rely on traditional news outlets. They understand the shortcomings of large organisations and feel confident in their own ability to supplant them when necessary. To those who 'get it', this is the death knell for traditional news organisations unless they succeed in re-purposing themselves to provide quality analysis and research where their tradition gives them a depth that can be of real value and which can therefore be offered in exchange for payment.
The pay-for-content models and what they reveal
The pay-for-content models that have emerged tell their own story about who gets it and who doesn't on the web:
Ad Age, has decided to make its content available for free and start the meter running after a user has accessed three stories in a day; previously, its content had a free shelf life of a week before going behind the paywall. It's interesting that the 'refinement' it has produced seems to penalise the very readers whose loyalty it has managed to gain with its content.
Bloomberg, which launched a new site that is also meant to be more advertiser-friendly, has placed a paywall in operation in "specific cases where it makes sense to provide a data-intensive premium offering to a group of subscribers", with most of the site making money from an ad-only revenue stream which relies upon high-quality, free content.
Rolling Stone unveiled a model that is a hybrid of what Ad Age and Bloomberg are doing. It has created a subscriber-access paywall, which gives access to its archive. It has maintained free day-to-day content and created a three-tiered model for subscribers with the top tier also getting the digital version of the magazine for free.
The Times and Sunday Times will take their content behind a paywall, saying it is too high-quality to be free and the time has come to charge for it. They will also make the sites largely invisible to search engines, which means that those looking for stories which the Times and Sunday Times have covered beyond their free-to-view homepages will not find them unless they go directly to the websites and through a subscription package. In my opinion Murdoch's touch was to take the Times from the high-brow, high-quality content spot it occupied in 1981 to the level of a middle-of-the-road, generic paper. As such the assertion that its content is worth paying for becomes questionable at best and ludicrously misguided at worst.
On the web, traffic is what leads to money and quality information is what leads to successful pay models. The Financial Times, for instance, totally gets it and has, over the last year, seen a massive increase in revenue. The Bloomberg model follows this lead as does Rolling Stone magazine, which charges for access to information which is unique and has very specific value.
Ad Age and the Times papers, on the other hand, are responding in a blinkered way, closer to wishful thinking than a coherent web monetisation strategy. To prove the point a study, published by Wiggin, a media law firm, suggested that more than 90 per cent of users would be unwilling to pay £1 a day or £2 a week, the pricing planned by the Times and Sunday Times, to access a range of news websites.
Paywalls, unlike barbed wire, are not a means to tame the web, but to stop access to news services in the mistaken belief that those who now read them will miss them enough to decide to pay for them. As such they try to protect news organisations' bottom line rather than journalistic integrity or quality. The approach threatens journalists, whose jobs will be the next to go as online news readers dwindle and revenue drops even further. This threatens journalism because it encourages the emergence of less professional services that directly, and more successfully, compete with it.
The old pricing structure for news content is now outmoded, but the new way to make money from news is neither crystallised nor clearly understood. Until that happens journalism and journalists will be in for a rough ride, which may curtail the extent of their profession forever.
Related reading on Journalism.co.uk - 'The role of SEO and performance-related pay in the future of online journalism and paywalls'
David Amerland is a journalist with 15 years' experience in SEO. He is active in helping companies and individuals develop winning online strategies. His book 'SEO Help: 20 steps to take your site to Google's #1 page' is available to buy from Amazon and any quality offline or online bookshop for $29.99. It is also available as an eBook from most reputable online eBook stores for $19.99 and can be purchased directly from David Amerland's website: www.helpmyseo.com.
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