Paywalls might be bad for democracy, but there are other ways to pay for journalism
As Buzzfeed’s redundancies continue to shake the digital publishing industry, Christopher Kerrisk lays out some potential steps toward a sustainable business model.
As soon as Buzzfeed announced a 15% reduction in overall staff headcount, reports quickly emerged sinking the boot into a company on a mission to make digital journalism profitable, or sounding the doomsday bell that this shining light was fading.
But there is one key statement in Jonah Peretti’s email that was glossed over: “The restructuring we are undertaking will reduce our costs and improve our operating model so we can thrive and control our own destiny, without ever needing to raise funding again.”
In case you missed it “without ever needing to raise funding again”.
What??? Paywalls are bad for democracy? Tell that to the millions of readers of the FT, the NYT and the WSJ, around the world.
Saying a paywall is bad for democracy makes as much sense as saying a newsstand cover price is bad for democracy.
There is not a publisher on the planet, big or small that could compete with the data aggregation of Facebook or Google. There is also the bit where it takes a massive investment in engineers to *extract* that value, lots and lots of engineers.
Notions of anything other than a fiat payment model delivering sustainable return for publishers fail to understand how freaking big the gap is between collecting a bit of voluntarily submitted demographic data by users – and the ginormous volume of automated behavioral data tracking and analysis at the scale of Google and Facebook.
Solution put forward is a flight of fantasy.
Publishers just need to realise they are no longer meaningful gatekeepers to audience for advertisers – and instead concentrate on creating a content product people are willing to pay for direct – with real fiat money.