Facebook’s paywall play

Facebook’s exploring options for paywalls in Instant Articles, a move designed to appease publishers who have bailed from the platform. Exactly how this will work hasn’t yet been revealed, but Mike Isaac and Sydney Ember report in the New York Times that Facebook will pilot the program in October.
What does Facebook get out of this deal? They’re not taking a cut of subscriptions, and they’re potentially driving people away from the platform by cutting them off from free content. But Facebook’s model always comes back to advertising, a strategy that depends on control over users’ time and attention.
More subscriptions mean more revenue for publishers. At face value, that’s a good thing, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the power dynamic between Facebook and its content providers. Facebook rolled this feature out on its own time, letting publishers give away their content for free for months. Subscriptions are a minor appeasement to the companies that keep your news feed interesting, while Facebook bets that users won’t bail at the first sight of a paywall. At the end of the day, Facebook makes publishers even more dependent on it by attaching direct revenue to its platform, eroding any bargaining position media outlets now have. In the process, it keeps users on its platform longer.
But that’s not a new dynamic; Facebook’s been in a dominant position for years and will continue to be, with or without subscriptions. It will be interesting to see what new ideas crop up to take advantage of these changes. More platform dependence may weaken traditional digital publishers, but it presents some interesting opportunities for new outfits. The combination of publisher-sold advertising and metered subscriptions might finally be enough to sustain a (non-clickbait) media outlet solely on Facebook, creating a new kind of publishing in the process. A totally distributed journalism enterprise, one that lives on platforms like Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles without a website to link back to, would remove the overhead of building and maintaining the proprietary tech stack that so many digital media giants rely on, opening up viable publishing to new players. As the pivot to video continues to slash journalism jobs, digital media could benefit from some experiments in profitably running a text-based outlet. It’s not exactly the heyday of independent blogging, but it could give small creators a much-needed boost.
