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.
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.”
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.”
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?