Why I love paywalls 🔒
News does not want to be free.
It’s 2025! Should I give this newsletter a real name now, or what?
1. Content lockdown
It’s getting hard to read articles on the internet.
Legacy news outlets keep tightening paywalls and writers you love keep establishing new independent subscription newsletters on Substack and similar platforms. Ben Lindbergh describes the landscape in the (paywall-free) Ringer:
Reading the internet now calls for careful budgeting. Shell out for every well-regarded online newspaper, newsletter, and magazine, and your monthly bill for subscription-based news, analysis, and text entertainment would rival what Dril drops on candles. Even the special deals designed to entice nonsubscribers—“$1 for 1 year,” the Union-Tribune offers, dangling Odor for a dollar in a pop-up “flash sale”—spur difficult questions. Will I use this enough to justify sharing my payment information? (I’m nowhere near San Diego.) Will I remember to cancel before the subscription auto-renews at a far higher rate? (That’s $3.50 per week, in the U-T’s case.) How big of a hassle will canceling be? (All evidence suggests: huge hassle.) How many marketing emails will I get? (I can’t put a price on Inbox Zero.)
To Lindbergh’s point, my January budget includes about $80 for news content after I just went on one of my periodic subscription sprees. Big legacy outlets represent a minority of that budget line (I spend $4 per month for The New York Times and $4.17 for The Washington Post, for instance), because of my inherent price sensitivity and stamina for renegotiating subs.
I’m increasingly turning over subscription money to individual authors with newsletters. I choose some because they’re essential to my work and others because I find personal value in them (or, in some cases, both). I also having a growing number of friends launching subscription newsletters. I stopped in the middle of this paragraph to throw down for Sam Robinson’s Detroit one million, which I’ve been meaning to do.
This is certainly a more annoying way to consume news than the old days when you’d just subscribe to one, or a few, big publications. But also, I love it.
For one thing, I’m not sure I’m spending more money now than I would be under an older news distribution model. The New York Times charges about $80 per month for a seven-day print subscription, or about the same amount I’m paying for all my digital news subscriptions combined, including NYT.
Also, while it was great when large publications bundled a bunch of great writers together1, subscribing to newsletters a la carte gives me more value on net. I enjoy most editions of the newsletters I pay for. Meanwhile, I’ve likely never read an entire Sunday New York Times print issue, because they include a lot of articles I don’t care about.
I’d argue paywalls are good for consumers because they create more options for high-quality journalism and analysis. They’re even better for the writers who provide that work.
While many people clamor for newspaper-like bundling of newsletters, Josh Barro explains why that probably won’t happen:
The theory of the bundle is that there are a lot of readers who aren’t willing to pay $6 per month to read me, but who would be willing to pay for a larger subscription bundle of whose price I would get, say, $0.75. And at least in my case, I don’t think that math pencils.
I don’t know exactly who would be enticed into a bundle because of my presence in it, but Sara and I do have one bit of clear market research: We know that 24% of the people who receive this newsletter at all are currently paying $6 per month or $60 per year to get past the paywall. That suggests the market of people who are interested in receiving a subset of my newsletters at a price of $0 per month is only about four times larger than the subset who have shown the willingness to pay $6 (or $60 per year). Some of them won’t be willing to go up to $0.75. And if I joined a bundle, we wouldn’t be getting $6 from the existing readers anymore — we’d be getting $0.75. All of which is to say, if you throw this newsletter into a bundle, I’m pretty confident it will generate less revenue than it does as a standalone product.
And this is the rub for readers: Like in many industries, heavy newsletter users are a small fraction of the customer base but a large fraction of the revenue generation. Most people who go to Las Vegas aren’t willing to lose $5,000 at blackjack, but some people are, and they’re essential to the business model. Similarly, most people won’t pay for 12 different Substack newsletters — but some of you will, and we writers appreciate you in the way a casino appreciates a gambling addict. These heavy users are of course the readers who are most interested in bundling, because it would save them personally a lot of money. But — you see where this is going, right? That a bundle would save you money and cost us money are just two sides of the same coin.
My experience with paywalls has been on the legacy media side — and that’s where I’ve come to appreciate them.
It’s clear now that the likes of Jeff Jarvis were disastrously wrong in the aughts when they encouraged news executives to publish their products for free.2
Here’s an example of Jarvis finger-wagging at NYT’s porous metered paywall in 2011:
Value should be encouraged, not taxed. Readers bring value to sites if the sites are smart enough to have the mechanisms to recognize, exploit, and reward that value, which comes in many forms: responding to (highly targeted and relevant) ads; buying merchandise; contributing information, content, and ideas; promoting the site…..
The key strategic opportunity for news sites is relationships — deeper, more valuable relationships with more (but not too many) people. Engagement.
Fortunately for NYT, it ignored Jarvis’ insane view of subscriptions as taxes. Now, NYT is an unparalleled juggernaut fueled by paying subscribers.
No other news site has been nearly as successful as NYT. But Jarvis’ last word there — engagement — is why I love paywalls as a writer for IndyStar.
Consider the incentive structure for publishing free news in a for-profit business model. The whole ballgame is to mine pennies from digital ads by piling up clicks. That necessarily steers executives, editors and, thus, writers toward producing low-hanging internet fruit that may or may not provide value to people doing the clicking.
When thought leaders like Jarvis assured us that news wanted to be free, they seemed to assume news companies would crank out high-quality journalism and give it away while magically sustaining themselves by selling merch or whatever. Instead, the free-news era ushered in a golden age for hot takes and clickbait headlines. That set the table for a doomed generation of boom-and-bust news sites.3
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this period of widely accessible free news coincided with the public’s erosion of trust for outlets. News consumers got what they paid for: free, shitty products. They weren’t satisfied.
When you put up a paywall, though, value is no longer optional. A paid subscription model incentivizes articles that build trust with loyal readers who know they can expect some combination of useful information, thought-provoking ideas and entertainment in exchange for money.
Most columns I’ve written for IndyStar have been behind the paywall. That constrains my potential audience, of course, but it also gives me space to prioritize a subset of paying readers and their preferences over algorithms that drive clicks via Google, Facebook and other platforms I can’t control.
The paywall gives me freedom from base instincts, it gives readers well considered columns targeted to their interests and it gives my employer money. That’s a good deal for everyone.
I think many journalists bought into the news-wants-to-be free philosophy, in part, because the news business operates with a public service ethos. Journalists want to make the world a little better, even for people who can’t afford to subscribe to a half-dozen publications.
The Bulwark, for example, has a paywall yet keeps its content accessible. Jonathan V. Last explains why:
I’ve heard people say, “Oh, the Democrats need their own Joe Rogan.” No. Democracy needs its own Joe Rogan. And that’s what we’re doing. Instead of criticizing the media, we’re building the media platform this country needs.
That’s why we’ve pushed so hard into YouTube. YouTube is television now. If you want to reach new people, you have to be there. So we are.
It’s why more than 90 percent of everything we publish is free, without any ads, even. Because you can’t reach people if you’re sequestered behind a paywall.
If you can give away your content and turn a profit by selling subscriptions, more power to you. I applaud the Bulwark’s clarity of mission.4
I’m skeptical, though, that you can apply their outlook more broadly. Reality-based media outlets don’t have much juice left to move needles beyond their relatively small audiences.
I spent substantial time in 2022 writing columns about why Republican Diego Morales was one of the worst statewide candidates in Indiana history. Morales easily won his secretary of state contest that year anyway.
My columns were behind the paywall. But I’m confident that I could have written a free column about Morales’ awfulness every day during that cycle and let every Indiana outlet publish it, too, without making any difference in the outcome.
Audiences are fragmenting. Media literacy is in decline. Those of us working to increase the supply of illuminating news and analysis must grapple with our diminishing roles. But any conversation about how “the media” can collectively improve civic engagement won’t matter if we can’t hang around.
Paywalls are bolstering legacy media while also expanding opportunities for high-quality independent journalism and analysis. That trade-off is worth annoying consumers as both sides figure out some semblance of a sustainable news ecosystem.
2. Journalists can’t ignore the business side
One more point on paywalls.5
When I moved from IndyStar to Axios, it was disconcerting to realize I didn’t understand the connection between my day-to-day work and revenue. I once asked a company executive about that. He basically said, don’t worry about that, it was my job to write good stuff and let the company figure out how to make money.
I appreciated the well-intentioned guidance to detach myself from business concerns. But I disagreed with it (which I said at the time). In my view, ignoring the relationship between your work product and money is a recipe for personal obsolescence. Even if you work for a nonprofit, you need some theory of the case for how you’re helping to keep the lights on.
I know journalists are wary of metrics. But, to state the obvious, journalists who are experiencing success with independent projects are the ones who have a clear vision for how to create a salable product. You might as well start figuring that out now, even if you work for an institutional employer.
Online metrics can warp our instincts, as I noted above. They also can help us tailor even the most service-minded work to an audience — and guide it toward monetization.
You don’t have to obsess over money. But anyone who writes for public consumption should consider: Who might want to read this, and why? If no one would want to read it, how can I alter my idea to make it more appealing?
If you work in media, or hope to, you probably should be thinking about how to find an intersection between your passions and audience demand.
3. What I wrote
I published one (paywalled!) column this week for IndyStar:
4. What I read
So far so good in following up last week’s post on reading more. I finished two books this week (fwiw, I give four stars to both):
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach
Yellowface by R. F Kuang (via recommendation from Ryan Martin)
Also worth your time:
Sam Ro on how the stock market usually goes up (no paywall!).
5. Rolling into 2025 like …
I’ve been mostly off work the past two weeks. Now, back to real life!
Thanks for reading and subscribing to this totally free, no-paywall newsletter. If you know someone else who might like it, please pass it on. Happy new year!
NYT still does this better than any other U.S. publication.
This period is well documented in the Ben Smith book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.
To be clear, I’m talking about for-profit outlets here. Nonprofit newsrooms warrant a separate discussion.
Yes, I know the above photo is idiotic.
Preach.
One concept that simply hasn’t caught on - but I wish would - is the idea of being able to pay per article rather than having an entire subscription. WSJ is an example of a newspaper I’ve subscribed to - but seldom read front to back. I also subscribe to both NYT and Washington Post. i never read any of these three newspapers cover to cover. I would love to be able to buy access to a single article or, perhaps, get a bundle that includes 10 articles/month (or whatever). Back in my Twitter days, I would often encounter a link to an article that was buried behind a paywall. (The Economist had tons of articles like this). I wanted the article - but not a subscription to another publication. I’d forego the article. If there were a mechanism to pay, say $1 for access to the article, I would have easily done it. There honestly is not a single writer whose work I read that I feel like I want an annual paid subscription to - I’d much prefer per-article access to most. Finally - I really fear most for local news outlets, such as the Indy Star. There is no way they will stay viable long-term in the current environment. And when local news coverage is gone, so is accountability on the part of government officials and any good way to get information on prospective legislation and politician behavior.