Why Paywalls Won’t Save the News Industry

So advertising revenue has hit the floor and skewed the news, but are paywalls the answer?

Imogen Champagne
Aug 28, 2017 · 5 min read

The obvious answer to the upheaval in the news industry seems to be, for most publications, a paywall. But even when paywalls do work for the publisher (a rare occurrence) they sure don’t work for the reader.

The primary idea of a paywall from the perspective of a news outlet is threefold: to make up for the loss of revenue in print sales; to compete with the abundance of digital news available; and to attract more advertisers with a guarantee of eyeballs on products.

Paywalls Lack Innovation

More than that, they stifle opportunity

While paywalls, when they work, may effectively meet the aforementioned criteria, the irony of trying to fix the ‘problems’ caused by digital advancement by clinging to past methods seems to be lost on most publishers. Paywalls are simply the digitalisation of buying a whole newspaper from your local news agency — you don’t get any of it without paying, and when you do pay, you get all that extra stuff you never asked for.

The digitalisation of news has brought on a lot of change, much of it regarded as negative, but one great thing it has brought about is a diversity of voices and the ability of anyone, from anywhere, to access any kind of news. Paywalls actively work against that positive by locking the reader back into a long-term commitment with the same angles, the same voices and same vested interests that the internet tried to free them from.

Instead of diversifying and working with the change in innovative ways to stay afloat, large media companies are just using restrictive methods to convince their readers to subscribe to their news. What they don’t take into account is the public’s desire to read a variety of reports, news, and opinion from across the political and social spectrum — and their ability to do that through the plethora of free news available online, albeit by sacrificing more than a bit of quality and journalistic integrity.

We’d like to address the lack of innovation and the continuation of ‘same old’ publishing at InPress. For us, it makes sense to change the status quo; both in how the news is accessed and the quality, independence and diversity of the content that is available.

Every article on InPress costs a small amount (between 10c and 35c AUD) that is displayed on each article. So you pay for what you read, but you don’t pay for what you don’t read. This means you don’t feel obligated to read from only one source because of hip-pocket demand. You’ll never feel like you don’t get value for money but not reading everything, or by looking for an alternative — and sometimes better! — sources of information.

Because the InPress platform is ad-free, every article is actually there to inform you, not just to steer your eyes to pop-up ads or native advertising. And finally, our mandate for diversity and lack of directional editing (changing the angle or course of the story) means that if readers want to stay on just the one platform, they won’t be limited by a larger publisher’s strict editorial angles and lack of diverse hiring.

The Paywall Profit (Lie?)

While paywalls were seen as the early saviour of digital news (the New York Time’s ‘leaky paywall’ was launched in 2011 and deemed a success by many, despite it being unclear whether an uptake in funds was from revenue or cut-backs), it’s been reported that paywalls aren’t actually capable of regaining lost profit from non-subscription advertising, and instead, according to this report from the Guardian “some 90% of growth lands straight in the pockets of Facebook and Google”.

This loss of ad revenue to other platforms is in addition to the remaining difference in profit between digital and print, as illustrated by The Sydney Morning Herald, which according to research by Tom Felle, a senior lecturer in news and digital journalism from the University of London, had digital revenues of $15m in 2014, compared with $242m from print circulation and print advertising.

Beyond the drop in value of advertising when it goes digital, paywalls aren’t making money for a very simple reason — they’re offering the same thing everyone got for free a few years ago, but now at a cost. There is no new value, such as higher quality or strong innovation being offered for this new price — something that is key to generating sustainable revenue for digital news according to Poynter media expert Bill Mitchell. Sure, 10 years ago we all paid more per week for our news than your average monthly subscription in 2017, but there has been several solid years of publishers aggressively clamouring for the reader to read their free content in the meantime. Why would readers now start paying news publishers when the publishers have made no effort to deliver something worth paying for?

At InPress, we’re adding that value. We’re publishing news worth paying for. Our journalists are gathering news from across the country, on the land they know, instead of recycling a wire sent in to an inner-Sydney office. They’re not forced to stick to basic formulas that make news dry, give news false balance and cover up a story with dogged objectivity instead of crystallising it by weighing the facts. And you’re reading it in a new, innovative way — a way that is easy for you, but still funds the independent journalists writing it, instead of the businesses skewing it.

We’re creating a sustainable news environment where our audience are willing to pay for the best news because it’s the best, not because it’s what they’ve been reading for the last 20 years.

News needs to be independently financed by the end reader. Paywalls may be beneficial for the news outlet in terms of advertising dollars, but they are detrimental to the consumers’ ability to access objective news.

Independent news outlets, where the reader is paying the journalist, not the advertisers are always the best way to guarantee a consumer is accessing the most trustworthy content, at an appropriate cost. We’re hoping you agree.

Interested in learning more about InPress? Jump over to www.inpress.media for all the info you’ll need, plus a free $1 reading material for giving us a chance!

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Imogen Champagne

Written by

Co-founder and publisher at InPress Media.

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