If Musk were to promise to tighten the censorship regime on Twitter, the bluecheck set would be falling all over themselves to praise his enlightened rule.
Hard disagree. It's who he is, not what he's done, that raises the animus. If he bent the knee to one demand it would be taken as a sign of weakness, or as a move of calculated pandering.
Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, the suggestion that Musk would relax censorship on Twitter is what first caused the commentariat to lose their minds.
“If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” - Louis Brandeis
I think the implication is a sincere promise that accorded with the twitterati's personal beliefs. Which is to say you're probably right in the real world, because he wouldn't make that promise sincerely enough.
What is this new bluecheck meme shit? Verification was created by Twitter because it was in Twitter's interest to make sure that notable people weren't being impersonated on Twitter without a way to tell.
My point wasn't to disparage identity verification itself but the class of people whose identity as Public Intellectuals And Serious Thinkers demands the blue checkmark.
I just started paying attention to Twitter because of the Musk thing, but isn't the problem that a blue check can still have the blue check on their account even if they change the name of that account, to "Elon Musk" for example?
I honestly don't know, I don't pay much attention to Twitter. But I do think (absent any context) that it seems reasonable to forbid name changes if Twitter has verified you.
Although as I understand it now Twitter is letting anyone get the blue check if they pay for it (without the actual verification) which seems like a tremendously bad idea.
Musk said in a tweet on Sunday, however, that there would be consequences for inauthentic accounts. "Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying 'parody' will be permanently suspended," he wrote.
Yes. There are a lot of cryptocurrency scams where someone hacks a bluecheck account and uses it to shill their coin; some of these also involve changing the account's name and picture to pretend to be someone much more famous.
You will probably get caught pretty soon, but by then the damage is usually done.
Similarly, remember the “why do I have to pay for all these channels I don’t watch? Why can’t I just pick the ones I want and pay for those?” Vs. “now I have to have like 7 different subscriptions just to see the things I want to watch.”
I remember when I called to cancel our cable subscription the man was aghast that I didn't want ESPN or other sports channels and I had to tell him about 4 times I didn't watch sports or the news so it was of no use to have cable. I've never regretted cutting the cable cord in 2005. We had our Netflix DVD subscription, and mostly listened to music anyway, and reading news online was quite normal for me back then. Really the only people I know who still have cable/sat tv are my inlaws who live in the country and my bro-in-law who has all the sports packages.
The big difference between paying $100/month for cable vs. $80+ for my streaming subscriptions is that I'm not beholden to the broadcast schedule, advertisements and movies "edited for broadcast".
As my username suggests, I am on team pay wall. However, that comes with its own risks. The NYT, or at least most desks within the NYT, is terrified of offending its own readers. The threat of an audience revolt is real, and this prevents real reporting from taking place, because it's natural for people - all of us, not just NYT readers - to prefer lies that confirm our biases to truths that are uncomfortable. Advertisers care about 'brand safety', of course, but they don't really care about reader comfort, as long as people keep reading.
One of the reasons I like this blog is that Freddie clearly doesn't pander to his readers and makes it clear that if people are so offended or in disagreement that they want to unsubscirbe, they are more than welcome to do so. There are other publications that don't do this, and that bend in the wind, just as they would if an advertiser told them to spoke a story. Ultimately, then, the danger of both approaches can only be resolved at the level of management and ethos.
I suspect you're right, but this is more than just a function of loudness, but rather a function of the loud ones being representative of the activist class, the NGO class, and thus more able to coordinate things like boycotts and advertiser pressure campaigns etc. That is, the volume isn't just sound and fury signifying nothing, but the rumble of boots in the near distance. Your average sweater-vest wearing earnest type who still subscribes to the NYT while being a moderate centrist is, in those terms, irrelevant.
Hasn’t that always been true of any publication that relies on a subscriber base? It’s not like the NYT just started selling subscriptions. Although I guess the argument is subscription fees then did not make up the majority of the company’s revenue.
You've answered your own question with regards to the NYT.
Maybe for other publications that relied on subs but carried little to no advertising things haven't changed. But that the NYT is now beholden to the tastes of its readers in a way that it wasn't before seems to me undeniable.
It's a vicious cycle and a bit of a chicken-egg dilemma, but that's true of most "journalism" these days. Even when it comes to Fox, MSNBC, and CNN, are they really propaganda arms of the parties or do their viewers' affiliation with a particular party dictate their content?
And yet the WSJ and FT flourish with the only genuinely politically diverse audience in the U.S. mainstream media landscape. Perhaps the NY Times peddles narrative-confirming, biased journalism, not because it must necessarily do so to avoid offending an audience, but because years ago it drove away the audience for non-sensational, neutral-ish news and attracted the audience it has now.
I wouldn't actually call the WSJ politically diverse. Its readership is unified by a particular financial outlook, even if that makes them occasionally cross political lines. That's not to down the WSJ. Just pointing out true diversity is not the best business model in publishing. You find a niche.
If all I knew about a person was that they were a subscriber and regular reader of the WSJ, I would not feel confident in predicting their party affiliation, their views on, say, hot button culture issues like, say, guns, BLM or the trans movement. I'm not even sure fringe groups like Marxists would be under-represented (I could imagine the opposite is the case). If I know you're a NY Times subscriber, I will get all of those things right way more often than not.
That seems to me (as a WSJ subscriber, for what it's worth) a distinction without a difference. That is to say, if there's an audience for what we'll call neutral-ish news, and the NYT doesn't care to attract it, and it's doing very well attracting a different (and much more demanding) audience, then... so what?
They could supplement revenue by running paid "Lordy Lordy Someone's 40" and "Denise announces her best-decision-she's-ever-made divorce" classified ads like local papers do.
Similar to my comment but much more concisely stated. Paywalls create bubbles. That doesn't mean you have any better option, just that you need to recognize that danger as well.
I agree--I do really appreciate that about this blog. I have written an article or two that I thought was going to be at least partially offensive (they were) and I wasn’t so much frightened of losing paying subscribers (I am still all free) but more of just alienating people who are working towards a similar vision of society as I am. It’s a little tangential to the point of this article, but falls into the same category of “reader retention, either for financial or community-building (or other) reasons often has built-in obstacles.” Writers do have to be willing to just accept those obstacles and speak their minds, which formats like Substack make possible. Freddie is a good model for speaking one’s mind and trusting that those who are interested and willing to engage will come/stay.
This might turn out to be paid-for Twitter's killer feature: you get x free articles a month from paywalled sites by accessing them as a blue check from a blue check's tweet
The entire tech company strategy of selling a product at loss in order to gain market share was already running into major headwinds before interest rates started skyrocketing. The era of (nearly) free money and cheap products and freebies is over (for now).
If God is just, it will see the implosion of algorithmically sorted social media platforms. (And the end of "gig economy" delivery and ride share services too, if I really dare hope.)
As a person who thinks advertisements are one of the banes of modern civilization, I'm definitely in the pro-paywall camp. The sheer volume and precious time that is wasted on people forced to trudge through millions of pointless ads in their lifetimes is a sad reminder of just how inexorably linked we all are to the inescapable condition of money generation. Advertisements are becoming the gateway to anything good and normal in life.
I would add that I also believe in a strong free public framework that would need to exist in tandem to paywalls. For instance, I think access to wireless internet should not be a private affair, but rather a basic part of our public infrastructure like roads and sewers. The bar for public goods needs to be raised in order for paywalls and no-ads to work.
Ah, but Musk has the temerity to have no filter between his brain and his mouth, and so he says the kind of shit that I suspect many millionaires and billionaires are secretly thinking. That's his real crime: not being circumspect enough about all of this.
He's personally annoying and his fans are obnoxious goofuses officially sanctioned by the Twitterati. His companies build sci-fi rockets and made electric cars cool, but somehow we've all agreed that he's worse than Warren Buffett or Michael Bloomberg.
There is always the ideal and the reality, which is what I enjoy about you. You actually recognize that and try to deal with both, the world as you wish it and the world as it is.
I subscribe to a ton of Substacks because I feel guilty reading too much without buying a subscription, even the ones that aren't behind a paywall. But I have the means to do so, for the most part. Most people don't. Which leads us back to the ideal and the reality.
"We can have a broad variety of perspectives and a tremendous amount of information that’s expressed in written form, or we can not have it; we can drown it in advertising, or we can at least limit the advertising that hangs around the stuff we’re interested in." The problem is the first part isn't true in the world as it is, the paywalled world. Honestly, it wouldn't be in the advertising world either, given the control just a few companies have. But the more you throw up behind paywalls, the more people are only going to subscribe to people who reinforce their worldview, so, yes, there will be a tremendous amount of information out there *in general* but in specific for each individual, especially those on strict budgets, which would be most people, they will be able to subscribe to only a few here and there and will make their choices in a way that leaves them in a bubble.
I make this comment not as a criticism of you, just to reinforce that the "world as it is" always trumps the "world as we wish it."
And I didn't read the Compact magazine article (I'm already killing my budget with Substack subscriptions), but I know how even handed you are here. People are too reactionary and too tribal. In other words, the billionaires who give lip service to what *we* believe are safe and those who don't are out to destroy democracy, so saith the talking heads. In reality, all these people have the same worldview, and to have any chance at maintaining our autonomy and voice, we have to recognize that and work them as they work us. No one's going to save us. We have to save ourselves.
Great piece, and one I agree with. Though I'm broke, you were my first paid subscription on Substack; even though you gave out so much for free, at some point I just thought: "If I can't spare one latte per month for this kind of writing, I'm the asshole" (Note: LESS than a latte, as I live in Democrat paradise Los Angeles, and a decent latte from a privately-owned coffee shop can run in the neighborhood of $8). The Substack model works well for us working poor (Middle-aged and rapidly approaching old Uber driver trying desperately to finish school) because, although it's usually more expensive to pay monthly, I'm doing well enough that I can take the the $6 hit while barely noticing.
But I have a question: Do you think we're going to see more of the Bari Weiss "Common Sense" model where we see more writers under one banner? The Dispatch comes to mind as as well, as well as a couple other sites I'm planning to sign up for. I think, that for me, I'm going to commit to signing up to one paid form of media monthly; it's something I've been thinking about and this is the second article I've seen in two days about paying your share (The other was a pitch that if we want free speech on twitter, we need to pay monthly, becoming the customer rather than the product.)
Finally, as far as something like Compact, you know what would be nice? Let people read the article, and perhaps one more, for a dollar or two. It would be a great way to let people see what the site is about while still contributing. This would, of course, benefit writers like you who have an online army of followers who could easily bring in whatever they paid you for one article, or at least subsidize it. If it wasn't for you, Jeff Mauer wouldn't be getting my other $6/month, so thanks for that as well.
Okay, going to "Check my privilege" while heading off to grind in L.A. traffic for the next 8-10 hours. Viva patriarchy.
Riffing on that: maybe the biggest collateral damage done by the wonders of modern technology, particularly as repped by The Web Blob we’ve all fallen so hard for in the last couple decades, is that a free lunch is our birthright. And that it will save us all. And that we’re going to suffer grievously if we can’t have it.
I sometimes think that the music industry shot itself in the foot twice by sinking its energy into trying to fight Napster instead of focusing on a similarly convenient offering that they could at least make SOME money from. Half a generation grew up accustomed to getting their music for free and may have never warmed to the idea of paying for it as a result. It’s much harder to take away something people already have than to deny them it in the first place.
How DARE you make a structural critique of Musk and others just like him? The problem is that he is a Bad Person™ and as a result he is empowering LITERAL Nazis to destroy our* democracy!
Not knowing enough about the economics of journalism, I'm curious if small, regional newspapers can be successful with a paywall, or will they always need to rely on advertising. Obviously, newspapers like the New York Times, LA Times, and Washington Post have enough name recognition and had enough resources to be able to make it through the 'everything is free' phase of the Internet and also be able to attract enough customers to overcome the resistance to a paywall.
I'm not sure that will work for smaller newspapers.
One thing I'd like to see is some kind of way to buy a single subscription to many news sites. As mentioned in the post, many people don't want to pay just to read one article; maybe a model that gives someone access to a number of sites for a single subscription is viable.
One thing I don't want to see is some kind of government subsidy for these news organizations. I think that is a disaster waiting to happen, especially given the environment we are in now. The left wants social media to become the arbiters of truth, and the right wants to force social media to allow any crackpot with a phone and two thumbs to be able to post anything they want, even if the social media company doesn't like it.
I think Substack is a great thing for a reader. I hope it stays a good thing for the writers.
Minor point from a rightwinger regarding social media allowing crackpots. I just want them to clearly be publishers or platforms as defined by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
If you accept the government protection from most lawsuits that comes from being a platform then you must act like a platform and what you want or do not want posted on your platform is irrelevant, if it's not explicitly illegal then it stays.
If you want to act like a publisher and curate your site to only allow what you want on it then that's fine. You're a publisher and are now responsible for the content posted on there. All of it.
Do as your morals and business plans allow that's fine but you don't get the protections of a platform while acting as a publisher.
The fact that we've lost some many local newspapers doesn't surprise me. Their business model, even before the Internet, was pretty flawed.
Most of the local local newspapers (the weekly papers that covered one town, or a few towns in the area) were free, and relied solely on advertising.
The regional papers (the daily papers that covered a mid-sized metropolitan area) were sold at the news stand or via home delivery (subscription), but still couldn't survive without advertising.
Even in the 70s and 80s the newspapers were having trouble surviving. Most newspapers relied on child labor to fulfill their subscription deliveries (most paper boys/girls I knew growing up started delivering papers when they were 11 and quit when they got their license at 16 and could go get a real job), and consignment arrangements with the news stands.
The content was produced by mostly underpaid local writers.
As an advertising vehicle, it was pretty blunt, especially compared to Internet advertising. As an advertiser, your ability to target your customer base was pretty limited - you could ask for your ad to be in the garden section if you were selling gardening tools, and the sports section if you were selling cars. If you were a local business, you could choose for your ad to show up in a specific 'town' edition. That was it.
And, for the newspaper, there was a marginal cost for each addition page of ads published.
I'm assuming the price of the newspaper covered printing and distribution costs, but the money to pay for content and profit came from advertising.
The newspapers probably thought dropping the subscription/pay model and relying strictly on advertising for on-line editions made sense, since the 'printing and distribution' costs were much closer to zero than with a physical newspaper.
In the early days, I imagine most people had no idea what kind of ad revenues they could expect, but were assuming that because there were potentially many more readers, that they should do at least as well as they were doing with their print editions. I guess it didn't quite pan out that way.
In a typical, small regional newspaper, there's like 5 stories a day that couldn't be sourced to AP. One of them will involve a high school football team, one of them the local hospital, one of them a local zoning argument occasioned by a strip club, bar, section 8 housing development or methadone clinic, one of them will involve a church fair and one of them will involve a county-level or lower politician being arrested on child pornography charges. I'm not saying there won't be any losses, but I am saying small, regional newspapers were never awesome.
I was actually thinking of larger papers in mid sized metropolitan areas, like the Hartford Courant in Connecticut. They used to do quite a bit of local reporting throughout the state. But, your point is well taken.
Yeah, the regional paper of record, like the Hartford Courants, the Pittsburgh Post Gazettes, the Indianapolis Star, the Plain Dealer-type newspapers are all going to survive this, in my opinion. In part because while the national newspapers cut into their high-end audience, they are simultaneously the beneficiaries of the closing of even smaller, sub-50,000 subscriber papers surrounding their geographical area.
I don’t know about never. I do historical research sometimes and small regional newspapers from 150 years ago were often incredibly entertaining. They were run by people who liked to write but often didn’t have much to write about, so you’d get a blow-by-blow description of a stray cat fighting a stray dog in the street outside Gomer’s Pub, written with so much gusto that you feel like you’re watching Jurassic Park when you read it. But maybe that’s just my personal definition of awesome.
I remember the local newspaper around here used to reprint local news articles in an 'on this day in history' segment. One of the articles was from around 1915 and it described a runaway horse, and it's travels from one town to the next. It was only about four paragraphs long, but it seemed like they were describing O.J. Simpson's slow speed chase. It ended when a kid managed to get the horse to stop. The kid that stopped the horse was my grandfather.
My grandparents lived in a very small town that was just barely big enough to have its own newspaper. When we visited, it was often a line item in the paper--"Mr. and Mrs. X of Aspen St. received a visit from their daughter and her family, of Littleton." Every day was a slow news day, apparently.
We have a great local newspaper. Its one of the few family owned, independents left. I haven't gotten around to re-subscribing. I need to see if I can get the print version part of the time. It makes great kindling for the woodstove and the good old fuel reduction burn piles.
I agree completely with the basic point: services for money. I do want to add that it would be great to have a third alternative to advertising and subscription models. It would be great if there was an option for buying individual articles. Occasionally a random internet deep dive will take me to something like a 1985 interview in the Bloomington Gazette. Obviously, I do not want a subscription to the Bloomington Gazette. But I would be happy to pay 10 or 25 cents to read the article. If it is feasible to implement such an option, it would be quite profitable. You would be able to sell to occasional readers, but regular readers would still prefer the price of a subscription.
Subscriptions are undesirable once you have more than a few. The cumulative costs add up, and the more things you’re subscribed to the less time you have available to enjoy the content provided by each. The more subscriptions you have, the less value you derive from them.
Nobody seems to be interested in running a per-use model alongside a subscription model. It’s a shame.
Along with a per-use model, I would love to see an affiliate model. I would pay $20/month for a group deal here at Substack, something along the lines of 2-3 full subscriptions + 10 articles from various, something like that.
Consumers want micropayments for obvious reasons, but it's a terrible idea from the publication's perspective. They need subscribers who pay a high price every month, whether they read the content or not.
If the publication offers an alternative, many of their existing subscribers will convert from paying $100+ per year, with automatic renewal, to 25 cents here and there with no ongoing commitment. It would be a disaster for the publication.
It's much better to force people to subscribe to get past the paywall. You'll get fewer readers but a lot more revenue.
I agree this is the relevant consideration, but the publications are allowed to set the price. So they just set the price high enough so that regular readers will not want to switch (or will pay more if they unadvisedly do switch). It will take a bit of data to decide what that price is, but that should be an easy problem, as newspapers will have lots of data on exactly that.
My guess was that ~10 cts. would be fine for a newspaper, but that was a bit of a guess. A couple of articles a day would be ~1000-1500 articles or $100-$150 per year, which is about the price of a subscription, I would guess. If they want to make sure regular readers don't switch, they could charge a bit more. I expect they'd charge less for really old articles. Obviously someone like Mr.DeBoer should charge a higher price, if he goes in this direction.
By the way, this is a standard problem in theoretical economics (mechanism design), called, a.o. names, menu pricing. You offer different bundles of goods at different prices, targeted at different kinds of consumers. The details depend, but there is no way the optimal system is one take it or leave it price for the whole shebang.
I think they could go much higher. I'd easily pay $1 for something I wanted to read, with one large caveat: if it requires me to provide my email address, forget it. I get enough marketing spam from companies I actually do repeat business with. I don't need to manage dozens more, unsubscribing and hoping they bother to actually listen.
Newspapers used to give you the option of both buying a single issue and an ongoing subscription, and people still subscribed.
A per-day price that's comparable to a single print issue (say, $2-3) would dissuade regular readers who pay $15/month from switching as if you're reading for more than 5-7 days a month it's not worth it. If they made payments frictionless (i.e. I pay through Google/Apple Pay, instead of having to sign up for a new account at every outlet and unsubscribe separately from their spammy email lists), it would also make things a lot more tempting than finagling with the various ways to get around paywalls.
Thanks! Interesting article. I have to say that most arguments it puts forth strike me as unconvincing. Only the technological constraint seems like it might have real bite (maybe enough to kill the idea altogether).
But the other argument, that it would lead to subscriber losses, is just wrong. You can tailor the price in such a way that you do not lose subscribers. One way, likely not optimal, is to make the per article price high enough that any subscriber who reads more than 1 article per year will not switch. You will not make a loss doing that, you might make a profit (if you can get someone to buy at that price). The optimal pricing will not look like that, and will likely lose a few subscribers, but it will give even higher profits.
This is a hypothetical (that it can be tailored to not lose subscribers).
A lot of this subscriber discussion involves people (and I'm not saying you personally, but in general) saying "Oh, I WOULD pay $X if it got me articles from WaPo, WSJ, NYT, etc" but who currently pay $0 because they don't subscribe at all. Which does make me skeptical, just because if your mental anchor is paying nothing, you're more likely to stick to that than anything you say you "might" spend if it were offered.
A big problem is that if you do choose to pay for something, you’ve just revealed yourself to be a much, much higher-value advertising target.
Paying for ad-free is essentially buying out ad slots and you’ve just revealed those ad slots are especially valuable, so you better pay even more, or else accept paywall+still annoying ads.
Can someone who understands journalism better than me explain how internet paywalled news is different than just subscribing to the local newspaper, other than the delivery medium?
I mean, I get there are arguments about access and biassing writing towards the customer that are against paywalls and would favor ads. I’m just curious about arguments that say somehow the NYT, for example, is fundamentally different as an internet paywall than a print subscription paper.
I'm not really a student of Marx, but isn't the difference between you and Musk one of degree and not of kind? One could argue that he's simply been more effective than anyone else at monetizing the content he produces. You can argue that creators must get paid to produce content, but isn't that really just a yuppie Nuremberg defense?
Social media platforms are absolutely nothing without their user content - literally nothing. This blog, while augmented by a comment section, would be (in my opinion, at least) worth it even if 100% of the content was produced by Freddie and 0% by commenters.
Social media would also be worthless without the network effect of delivering an audience to consume that user content. It's not like we didn't all have opinions before facebook. Few of us had an audience who would listen to them.
I’m not a Marxist either, but I’ve studied it enough to get the basics. What most people miss is his labor theory of value that is fundamental to all other analysis. Basically, it’s the labor expended in producing a product that gives it the value. Each of us is owed the product of our labor. If you are forced to sell your labor to someone else, they are capable of exploiting you by not paying you the full value for your labor. Those in a position to extract this surplus value are the capitalists.
As an example, let’s say substack has a cost of $.50 per user per month to run a newsletter. If the pay Freddie only $2 per month per subscriber, they are exploiting him for $2.50 per subscriber. In this scenario they could pay him $4.50 and be fair, but they would still be capitalists because they would still have the ability to extract this surplus value.
People get caught up a lot in the whole means of production talk, but that is very confusing in a modern sense. It’s much easier to just ask “who is positioned to extract surplus value from others labor?”
If Musk were to promise to tighten the censorship regime on Twitter, the bluecheck set would be falling all over themselves to praise his enlightened rule.
Hard disagree. It's who he is, not what he's done, that raises the animus. If he bent the knee to one demand it would be taken as a sign of weakness, or as a move of calculated pandering.
Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, the suggestion that Musk would relax censorship on Twitter is what first caused the commentariat to lose their minds.
Oh, I don't hold out much hope for The New Boss.
“If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” - Louis Brandeis
That's communism! /sarc
I think the implication is a sincere promise that accorded with the twitterati's personal beliefs. Which is to say you're probably right in the real world, because he wouldn't make that promise sincerely enough.
What is this new bluecheck meme shit? Verification was created by Twitter because it was in Twitter's interest to make sure that notable people weren't being impersonated on Twitter without a way to tell.
My point wasn't to disparage identity verification itself but the class of people whose identity as Public Intellectuals And Serious Thinkers demands the blue checkmark.
Do those people exist? I try to spend as little time as possible on Twitter.
Clever human. Yes, they exist.
Yikes.
I just started paying attention to Twitter because of the Musk thing, but isn't the problem that a blue check can still have the blue check on their account even if they change the name of that account, to "Elon Musk" for example?
I honestly don't know, I don't pay much attention to Twitter. But I do think (absent any context) that it seems reasonable to forbid name changes if Twitter has verified you.
Although as I understand it now Twitter is letting anyone get the blue check if they pay for it (without the actual verification) which seems like a tremendously bad idea.
From what I understand it's just charging $8 for the blue check as a means of generating income. The validation is still there.
No, as I understand you’re gonna get the blue check with no verification.
Musk said in a tweet on Sunday, however, that there would be consequences for inauthentic accounts. "Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying 'parody' will be permanently suspended," he wrote.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/05/1134561542/twitter-blue-check-paid-verification-elon-musk
Yes. There are a lot of cryptocurrency scams where someone hacks a bluecheck account and uses it to shill their coin; some of these also involve changing the account's name and picture to pretend to be someone much more famous.
You will probably get caught pretty soon, but by then the damage is usually done.
Similarly, remember the “why do I have to pay for all these channels I don’t watch? Why can’t I just pick the ones I want and pay for those?” Vs. “now I have to have like 7 different subscriptions just to see the things I want to watch.”
What if we could “bundle” them together like……cable
Bundle and...save?
Excuse me, I need to go take a long, hard look in the mirror...
I remember when I called to cancel our cable subscription the man was aghast that I didn't want ESPN or other sports channels and I had to tell him about 4 times I didn't watch sports or the news so it was of no use to have cable. I've never regretted cutting the cable cord in 2005. We had our Netflix DVD subscription, and mostly listened to music anyway, and reading news online was quite normal for me back then. Really the only people I know who still have cable/sat tv are my inlaws who live in the country and my bro-in-law who has all the sports packages.
The big difference between paying $100/month for cable vs. $80+ for my streaming subscriptions is that I'm not beholden to the broadcast schedule, advertisements and movies "edited for broadcast".
That is so, so true. Wow.
As my username suggests, I am on team pay wall. However, that comes with its own risks. The NYT, or at least most desks within the NYT, is terrified of offending its own readers. The threat of an audience revolt is real, and this prevents real reporting from taking place, because it's natural for people - all of us, not just NYT readers - to prefer lies that confirm our biases to truths that are uncomfortable. Advertisers care about 'brand safety', of course, but they don't really care about reader comfort, as long as people keep reading.
One of the reasons I like this blog is that Freddie clearly doesn't pander to his readers and makes it clear that if people are so offended or in disagreement that they want to unsubscirbe, they are more than welcome to do so. There are other publications that don't do this, and that bend in the wind, just as they would if an advertiser told them to spoke a story. Ultimately, then, the danger of both approaches can only be resolved at the level of management and ethos.
I suspect you're right, but this is more than just a function of loudness, but rather a function of the loud ones being representative of the activist class, the NGO class, and thus more able to coordinate things like boycotts and advertiser pressure campaigns etc. That is, the volume isn't just sound and fury signifying nothing, but the rumble of boots in the near distance. Your average sweater-vest wearing earnest type who still subscribes to the NYT while being a moderate centrist is, in those terms, irrelevant.
I'll say this for them: they show up and they mean business.
Hasn’t that always been true of any publication that relies on a subscriber base? It’s not like the NYT just started selling subscriptions. Although I guess the argument is subscription fees then did not make up the majority of the company’s revenue.
I think it's exacerbated the situation, but your point is valid.
You've answered your own question with regards to the NYT.
Maybe for other publications that relied on subs but carried little to no advertising things haven't changed. But that the NYT is now beholden to the tastes of its readers in a way that it wasn't before seems to me undeniable.
It's a vicious cycle and a bit of a chicken-egg dilemma, but that's true of most "journalism" these days. Even when it comes to Fox, MSNBC, and CNN, are they really propaganda arms of the parties or do their viewers' affiliation with a particular party dictate their content?
And yet the WSJ and FT flourish with the only genuinely politically diverse audience in the U.S. mainstream media landscape. Perhaps the NY Times peddles narrative-confirming, biased journalism, not because it must necessarily do so to avoid offending an audience, but because years ago it drove away the audience for non-sensational, neutral-ish news and attracted the audience it has now.
I wouldn't actually call the WSJ politically diverse. Its readership is unified by a particular financial outlook, even if that makes them occasionally cross political lines. That's not to down the WSJ. Just pointing out true diversity is not the best business model in publishing. You find a niche.
If all I knew about a person was that they were a subscriber and regular reader of the WSJ, I would not feel confident in predicting their party affiliation, their views on, say, hot button culture issues like, say, guns, BLM or the trans movement. I'm not even sure fringe groups like Marxists would be under-represented (I could imagine the opposite is the case). If I know you're a NY Times subscriber, I will get all of those things right way more often than not.
That seems to me (as a WSJ subscriber, for what it's worth) a distinction without a difference. That is to say, if there's an audience for what we'll call neutral-ish news, and the NYT doesn't care to attract it, and it's doing very well attracting a different (and much more demanding) audience, then... so what?
Just stressing that it was a choice.
They could supplement revenue by running paid "Lordy Lordy Someone's 40" and "Denise announces her best-decision-she's-ever-made divorce" classified ads like local papers do.
Similar to my comment but much more concisely stated. Paywalls create bubbles. That doesn't mean you have any better option, just that you need to recognize that danger as well.
I agree--I do really appreciate that about this blog. I have written an article or two that I thought was going to be at least partially offensive (they were) and I wasn’t so much frightened of losing paying subscribers (I am still all free) but more of just alienating people who are working towards a similar vision of society as I am. It’s a little tangential to the point of this article, but falls into the same category of “reader retention, either for financial or community-building (or other) reasons often has built-in obstacles.” Writers do have to be willing to just accept those obstacles and speak their minds, which formats like Substack make possible. Freddie is a good model for speaking one’s mind and trusting that those who are interested and willing to engage will come/stay.
This might turn out to be paid-for Twitter's killer feature: you get x free articles a month from paywalled sites by accessing them as a blue check from a blue check's tweet
I would get a twitter account for that! (and also for rules clarifications in Dungeons & Dragons)
The entire tech company strategy of selling a product at loss in order to gain market share was already running into major headwinds before interest rates started skyrocketing. The era of (nearly) free money and cheap products and freebies is over (for now).
If God is just, it will see the implosion of algorithmically sorted social media platforms. (And the end of "gig economy" delivery and ride share services too, if I really dare hope.)
Clearly you’ve never read the Old Testament
https://www.wsj.com/articles/meta-is-preparing-to-notify-employees-of-large-scale-layoffs-this-week-11667767794
As a person who thinks advertisements are one of the banes of modern civilization, I'm definitely in the pro-paywall camp. The sheer volume and precious time that is wasted on people forced to trudge through millions of pointless ads in their lifetimes is a sad reminder of just how inexorably linked we all are to the inescapable condition of money generation. Advertisements are becoming the gateway to anything good and normal in life.
I would add that I also believe in a strong free public framework that would need to exist in tandem to paywalls. For instance, I think access to wireless internet should not be a private affair, but rather a basic part of our public infrastructure like roads and sewers. The bar for public goods needs to be raised in order for paywalls and no-ads to work.
Ah, but Musk has the temerity to have no filter between his brain and his mouth, and so he says the kind of shit that I suspect many millionaires and billionaires are secretly thinking. That's his real crime: not being circumspect enough about all of this.
He's personally annoying and his fans are obnoxious goofuses officially sanctioned by the Twitterati. His companies build sci-fi rockets and made electric cars cool, but somehow we've all agreed that he's worse than Warren Buffett or Michael Bloomberg.
I think his real crimes are the labor violations.
And that he's desperate for people to think he's cool.
Fair point. His labor policies are ghastly.
There is always the ideal and the reality, which is what I enjoy about you. You actually recognize that and try to deal with both, the world as you wish it and the world as it is.
I subscribe to a ton of Substacks because I feel guilty reading too much without buying a subscription, even the ones that aren't behind a paywall. But I have the means to do so, for the most part. Most people don't. Which leads us back to the ideal and the reality.
"We can have a broad variety of perspectives and a tremendous amount of information that’s expressed in written form, or we can not have it; we can drown it in advertising, or we can at least limit the advertising that hangs around the stuff we’re interested in." The problem is the first part isn't true in the world as it is, the paywalled world. Honestly, it wouldn't be in the advertising world either, given the control just a few companies have. But the more you throw up behind paywalls, the more people are only going to subscribe to people who reinforce their worldview, so, yes, there will be a tremendous amount of information out there *in general* but in specific for each individual, especially those on strict budgets, which would be most people, they will be able to subscribe to only a few here and there and will make their choices in a way that leaves them in a bubble.
I make this comment not as a criticism of you, just to reinforce that the "world as it is" always trumps the "world as we wish it."
And I didn't read the Compact magazine article (I'm already killing my budget with Substack subscriptions), but I know how even handed you are here. People are too reactionary and too tribal. In other words, the billionaires who give lip service to what *we* believe are safe and those who don't are out to destroy democracy, so saith the talking heads. In reality, all these people have the same worldview, and to have any chance at maintaining our autonomy and voice, we have to recognize that and work them as they work us. No one's going to save us. We have to save ourselves.
Great piece, and one I agree with. Though I'm broke, you were my first paid subscription on Substack; even though you gave out so much for free, at some point I just thought: "If I can't spare one latte per month for this kind of writing, I'm the asshole" (Note: LESS than a latte, as I live in Democrat paradise Los Angeles, and a decent latte from a privately-owned coffee shop can run in the neighborhood of $8). The Substack model works well for us working poor (Middle-aged and rapidly approaching old Uber driver trying desperately to finish school) because, although it's usually more expensive to pay monthly, I'm doing well enough that I can take the the $6 hit while barely noticing.
But I have a question: Do you think we're going to see more of the Bari Weiss "Common Sense" model where we see more writers under one banner? The Dispatch comes to mind as as well, as well as a couple other sites I'm planning to sign up for. I think, that for me, I'm going to commit to signing up to one paid form of media monthly; it's something I've been thinking about and this is the second article I've seen in two days about paying your share (The other was a pitch that if we want free speech on twitter, we need to pay monthly, becoming the customer rather than the product.)
Finally, as far as something like Compact, you know what would be nice? Let people read the article, and perhaps one more, for a dollar or two. It would be a great way to let people see what the site is about while still contributing. This would, of course, benefit writers like you who have an online army of followers who could easily bring in whatever they paid you for one article, or at least subsidize it. If it wasn't for you, Jeff Mauer wouldn't be getting my other $6/month, so thanks for that as well.
Okay, going to "Check my privilege" while heading off to grind in L.A. traffic for the next 8-10 hours. Viva patriarchy.
Riffing on that: maybe the biggest collateral damage done by the wonders of modern technology, particularly as repped by The Web Blob we’ve all fallen so hard for in the last couple decades, is that a free lunch is our birthright. And that it will save us all. And that we’re going to suffer grievously if we can’t have it.
I sometimes think that the music industry shot itself in the foot twice by sinking its energy into trying to fight Napster instead of focusing on a similarly convenient offering that they could at least make SOME money from. Half a generation grew up accustomed to getting their music for free and may have never warmed to the idea of paying for it as a result. It’s much harder to take away something people already have than to deny them it in the first place.
Spotify killed pirating not laws. They did figure it out.
How DARE you make a structural critique of Musk and others just like him? The problem is that he is a Bad Person™ and as a result he is empowering LITERAL Nazis to destroy our* democracy!
*Or it would if I lived in the US.
Not knowing enough about the economics of journalism, I'm curious if small, regional newspapers can be successful with a paywall, or will they always need to rely on advertising. Obviously, newspapers like the New York Times, LA Times, and Washington Post have enough name recognition and had enough resources to be able to make it through the 'everything is free' phase of the Internet and also be able to attract enough customers to overcome the resistance to a paywall.
I'm not sure that will work for smaller newspapers.
One thing I'd like to see is some kind of way to buy a single subscription to many news sites. As mentioned in the post, many people don't want to pay just to read one article; maybe a model that gives someone access to a number of sites for a single subscription is viable.
One thing I don't want to see is some kind of government subsidy for these news organizations. I think that is a disaster waiting to happen, especially given the environment we are in now. The left wants social media to become the arbiters of truth, and the right wants to force social media to allow any crackpot with a phone and two thumbs to be able to post anything they want, even if the social media company doesn't like it.
I think Substack is a great thing for a reader. I hope it stays a good thing for the writers.
Minor point from a rightwinger regarding social media allowing crackpots. I just want them to clearly be publishers or platforms as defined by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
If you accept the government protection from most lawsuits that comes from being a platform then you must act like a platform and what you want or do not want posted on your platform is irrelevant, if it's not explicitly illegal then it stays.
If you want to act like a publisher and curate your site to only allow what you want on it then that's fine. You're a publisher and are now responsible for the content posted on there. All of it.
Do as your morals and business plans allow that's fine but you don't get the protections of a platform while acting as a publisher.
We've lost something like 2000 local newspapers in the United States in the past 20 or so years, so there's your answer.
The fact that we've lost some many local newspapers doesn't surprise me. Their business model, even before the Internet, was pretty flawed.
Most of the local local newspapers (the weekly papers that covered one town, or a few towns in the area) were free, and relied solely on advertising.
The regional papers (the daily papers that covered a mid-sized metropolitan area) were sold at the news stand or via home delivery (subscription), but still couldn't survive without advertising.
Even in the 70s and 80s the newspapers were having trouble surviving. Most newspapers relied on child labor to fulfill their subscription deliveries (most paper boys/girls I knew growing up started delivering papers when they were 11 and quit when they got their license at 16 and could go get a real job), and consignment arrangements with the news stands.
The content was produced by mostly underpaid local writers.
As an advertising vehicle, it was pretty blunt, especially compared to Internet advertising. As an advertiser, your ability to target your customer base was pretty limited - you could ask for your ad to be in the garden section if you were selling gardening tools, and the sports section if you were selling cars. If you were a local business, you could choose for your ad to show up in a specific 'town' edition. That was it.
And, for the newspaper, there was a marginal cost for each addition page of ads published.
I'm assuming the price of the newspaper covered printing and distribution costs, but the money to pay for content and profit came from advertising.
The newspapers probably thought dropping the subscription/pay model and relying strictly on advertising for on-line editions made sense, since the 'printing and distribution' costs were much closer to zero than with a physical newspaper.
In the early days, I imagine most people had no idea what kind of ad revenues they could expect, but were assuming that because there were potentially many more readers, that they should do at least as well as they were doing with their print editions. I guess it didn't quite pan out that way.
In a typical, small regional newspaper, there's like 5 stories a day that couldn't be sourced to AP. One of them will involve a high school football team, one of them the local hospital, one of them a local zoning argument occasioned by a strip club, bar, section 8 housing development or methadone clinic, one of them will involve a church fair and one of them will involve a county-level or lower politician being arrested on child pornography charges. I'm not saying there won't be any losses, but I am saying small, regional newspapers were never awesome.
I was actually thinking of larger papers in mid sized metropolitan areas, like the Hartford Courant in Connecticut. They used to do quite a bit of local reporting throughout the state. But, your point is well taken.
Yeah, the regional paper of record, like the Hartford Courants, the Pittsburgh Post Gazettes, the Indianapolis Star, the Plain Dealer-type newspapers are all going to survive this, in my opinion. In part because while the national newspapers cut into their high-end audience, they are simultaneously the beneficiaries of the closing of even smaller, sub-50,000 subscriber papers surrounding their geographical area.
I don’t know about never. I do historical research sometimes and small regional newspapers from 150 years ago were often incredibly entertaining. They were run by people who liked to write but often didn’t have much to write about, so you’d get a blow-by-blow description of a stray cat fighting a stray dog in the street outside Gomer’s Pub, written with so much gusto that you feel like you’re watching Jurassic Park when you read it. But maybe that’s just my personal definition of awesome.
Sounds kind of awesome to me.
I remember the local newspaper around here used to reprint local news articles in an 'on this day in history' segment. One of the articles was from around 1915 and it described a runaway horse, and it's travels from one town to the next. It was only about four paragraphs long, but it seemed like they were describing O.J. Simpson's slow speed chase. It ended when a kid managed to get the horse to stop. The kid that stopped the horse was my grandfather.
Nice! Great family story.
My grandparents lived in a very small town that was just barely big enough to have its own newspaper. When we visited, it was often a line item in the paper--"Mr. and Mrs. X of Aspen St. received a visit from their daughter and her family, of Littleton." Every day was a slow news day, apparently.
We have a great local newspaper. Its one of the few family owned, independents left. I haven't gotten around to re-subscribing. I need to see if I can get the print version part of the time. It makes great kindling for the woodstove and the good old fuel reduction burn piles.
I agree completely with the basic point: services for money. I do want to add that it would be great to have a third alternative to advertising and subscription models. It would be great if there was an option for buying individual articles. Occasionally a random internet deep dive will take me to something like a 1985 interview in the Bloomington Gazette. Obviously, I do not want a subscription to the Bloomington Gazette. But I would be happy to pay 10 or 25 cents to read the article. If it is feasible to implement such an option, it would be quite profitable. You would be able to sell to occasional readers, but regular readers would still prefer the price of a subscription.
Completely agree with this.
Subscriptions are undesirable once you have more than a few. The cumulative costs add up, and the more things you’re subscribed to the less time you have available to enjoy the content provided by each. The more subscriptions you have, the less value you derive from them.
Nobody seems to be interested in running a per-use model alongside a subscription model. It’s a shame.
Along with a per-use model, I would love to see an affiliate model. I would pay $20/month for a group deal here at Substack, something along the lines of 2-3 full subscriptions + 10 articles from various, something like that.
Consumers want micropayments for obvious reasons, but it's a terrible idea from the publication's perspective. They need subscribers who pay a high price every month, whether they read the content or not.
If the publication offers an alternative, many of their existing subscribers will convert from paying $100+ per year, with automatic renewal, to 25 cents here and there with no ongoing commitment. It would be a disaster for the publication.
It's much better to force people to subscribe to get past the paywall. You'll get fewer readers but a lot more revenue.
I agree this is the relevant consideration, but the publications are allowed to set the price. So they just set the price high enough so that regular readers will not want to switch (or will pay more if they unadvisedly do switch). It will take a bit of data to decide what that price is, but that should be an easy problem, as newspapers will have lots of data on exactly that.
My guess was that ~10 cts. would be fine for a newspaper, but that was a bit of a guess. A couple of articles a day would be ~1000-1500 articles or $100-$150 per year, which is about the price of a subscription, I would guess. If they want to make sure regular readers don't switch, they could charge a bit more. I expect they'd charge less for really old articles. Obviously someone like Mr.DeBoer should charge a higher price, if he goes in this direction.
By the way, this is a standard problem in theoretical economics (mechanism design), called, a.o. names, menu pricing. You offer different bundles of goods at different prices, targeted at different kinds of consumers. The details depend, but there is no way the optimal system is one take it or leave it price for the whole shebang.
I think they could go much higher. I'd easily pay $1 for something I wanted to read, with one large caveat: if it requires me to provide my email address, forget it. I get enough marketing spam from companies I actually do repeat business with. I don't need to manage dozens more, unsubscribing and hoping they bother to actually listen.
The gym membership model of revenue generation.
Newspapers used to give you the option of both buying a single issue and an ongoing subscription, and people still subscribed.
A per-day price that's comparable to a single print issue (say, $2-3) would dissuade regular readers who pay $15/month from switching as if you're reading for more than 5-7 days a month it's not worth it. If they made payments frictionless (i.e. I pay through Google/Apple Pay, instead of having to sign up for a new account at every outlet and unsubscribe separately from their spammy email lists), it would also make things a lot more tempting than finagling with the various ways to get around paywalls.
It would also be damn near impossible to implement.
https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-by-article.php
Thanks! Interesting article. I have to say that most arguments it puts forth strike me as unconvincing. Only the technological constraint seems like it might have real bite (maybe enough to kill the idea altogether).
But the other argument, that it would lead to subscriber losses, is just wrong. You can tailor the price in such a way that you do not lose subscribers. One way, likely not optimal, is to make the per article price high enough that any subscriber who reads more than 1 article per year will not switch. You will not make a loss doing that, you might make a profit (if you can get someone to buy at that price). The optimal pricing will not look like that, and will likely lose a few subscribers, but it will give even higher profits.
This is a hypothetical (that it can be tailored to not lose subscribers).
A lot of this subscriber discussion involves people (and I'm not saying you personally, but in general) saying "Oh, I WOULD pay $X if it got me articles from WaPo, WSJ, NYT, etc" but who currently pay $0 because they don't subscribe at all. Which does make me skeptical, just because if your mental anchor is paying nothing, you're more likely to stick to that than anything you say you "might" spend if it were offered.
A big problem is that if you do choose to pay for something, you’ve just revealed yourself to be a much, much higher-value advertising target.
Paying for ad-free is essentially buying out ad slots and you’ve just revealed those ad slots are especially valuable, so you better pay even more, or else accept paywall+still annoying ads.
Can someone who understands journalism better than me explain how internet paywalled news is different than just subscribing to the local newspaper, other than the delivery medium?
I mean, I get there are arguments about access and biassing writing towards the customer that are against paywalls and would favor ads. I’m just curious about arguments that say somehow the NYT, for example, is fundamentally different as an internet paywall than a print subscription paper.
I'm not really a student of Marx, but isn't the difference between you and Musk one of degree and not of kind? One could argue that he's simply been more effective than anyone else at monetizing the content he produces. You can argue that creators must get paid to produce content, but isn't that really just a yuppie Nuremberg defense?
Social media platforms are absolutely nothing without their user content - literally nothing. This blog, while augmented by a comment section, would be (in my opinion, at least) worth it even if 100% of the content was produced by Freddie and 0% by commenters.
Social media would also be worthless without the network effect of delivering an audience to consume that user content. It's not like we didn't all have opinions before facebook. Few of us had an audience who would listen to them.
Agreed. I'm also glad Freddie demands civility and good behavior in the comment section.
I’m not a Marxist either, but I’ve studied it enough to get the basics. What most people miss is his labor theory of value that is fundamental to all other analysis. Basically, it’s the labor expended in producing a product that gives it the value. Each of us is owed the product of our labor. If you are forced to sell your labor to someone else, they are capable of exploiting you by not paying you the full value for your labor. Those in a position to extract this surplus value are the capitalists.
As an example, let’s say substack has a cost of $.50 per user per month to run a newsletter. If the pay Freddie only $2 per month per subscriber, they are exploiting him for $2.50 per subscriber. In this scenario they could pay him $4.50 and be fair, but they would still be capitalists because they would still have the ability to extract this surplus value.
People get caught up a lot in the whole means of production talk, but that is very confusing in a modern sense. It’s much easier to just ask “who is positioned to extract surplus value from others labor?”