Walled Gardens: The Past, Present & Future of How We Use the Internet

You’ve got access to information online that not everyone has.

You’re privileged. So am I. When you’re online, we all get the chance to be privileged. It’s all because of walled gardens.

Also known as Closed Platforms, the walled garden provides access to content unavailable elsewhere. Whether it’s as huge as Facebook, or a small niche forum, walled gardens are all over the place.

On Facebook, your privilege usually comes about through friendship or a personal invitation. For clubs and forums, the privilege is often money. Think paywalls.

From great escape to intentional lock-in

We once escaped the walled garden. If you remember AOL and Compuserve, you’ll remember the online services provided access to the Internet, but weren’t so pushy about getting you on the Web. They had their own content and services so you didn’t need to brave the big bad world of…well…the big bad world online. You could get caught up in the Web. Scary stuff.

But over time, people got increasingly used to the Web, and the walled gardens of AOL and Compuserve were less appreciated. “Access for all! Let’s conquer the Web!” said…no one in particular. But it’s kind of happened.

And now it’s full circle to an extent. Fast forward to today and you face plenty of paywalls and private groups and access denied. Lots of AOLs and Compuserves of varying shapes and sizes. The walled garden has risen, fallen, and risen again.

Wikipedia describes the walled garden as:

“…a system where the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applications or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, where consumers have unrestricted access.”

So walled gardens are very much back. And it’s got me thinking about the things we can access…and the things that we can’t.

It’s also got me thinking about the walled gardens we’re happy to pay for access to opposed to the ones that might be useful, but we just won’t pay for (even if we have the money).

What if your favourite online info-source went behind a paywall? Would you pay? Could you pay?

And what’s the alternative for those who put up paywalls to make money so they can keep their service running?

Got money? Welcome to the knowledge bank

John Heltman is a reporter for the American Banker. I don’t expect many of you have read his output, because the American Banker is a subscription site.

But I can point you toward his article for the Washington Monthly, “Confessions of a Paywall Journalist”.

Heltman talks about the boom in niche journalism and policy analysis. It’s out there. But at a cost.

Heltman says:

“The rise of the paywall press and the decline of mainstream media coverage of government aren’t causally connected. But the two trends coincide with a palpable populist outrage, in which average Americans are suspicious of how their tax dollars are being spent and observe Washington insiders operate at ever-greater levels of power and secrecy. The irony is that policy journalism in Washington is thriving. It’s just not being written for you, and you’re probably never going to read it.”

Heltman’s publication, the American Banker, is accessed through a subscription. Each year you get access to reports, 249 daily issues of the digital edition, newsletters, archives, breaking news…all sorts. To get this, you pay $1,875 a year. If that sounds steep for you, a new subscriber can get access for a discounted rate of $1,475 a year.

Still too much? Well, it’s not too much for everyone. Many of these publications get the subscriptions they need. And the market is growing.

Heltman contrasts the rise in policy journalism with the fall in household names. He talks of McGraw Hill buying a business intelligence outlet called SNL Financial, for $2.23billion in cash. Yet The Economist was valued at $1.4billion after Pearson sold its 50% stake for just over $700million. The New York Times is currently valued at around $2billion.

Heltman goes on to speak about the problems with information overload causing a drop in longform pieces in these niche publications. It’s well worth a read. After all, it’s free. Hurrah!

But aren’t these walled gardens depriving us of information? If so, how much would you be willing to pay for it? If you could afford to pay, what would be reasonable?

Paying for entertainment is easier and more rewarding than paying for information.

Let’s take TV and music for a moment. They provide an entertaining type of information. Other than documentaries, we’re not so much looking for truth, we’re looking for fun.

Binge watching, music streaming, sport-supporting FUN.

When you add up the cost of your cable, satellite and streaming subscriptions, you may be paying a small fortune.

The thing is, many people are happy to pay. Not in a “Hooray! I love giving the companies my money” way, but more “I’d rather have access to this, so I guess I’d better pay the price” way.

There are well over 17 million pay TV subscribers in the UK. Millions also stream exclusive content. I don’t know how much crossover there is, but a sizeable proportion of people in the UK are paying to be entertained.

This isn’t a surprising global anomaly either. For all the things Brits may be considered weird about, watching TV doesn’t make the list.

Yes, people like to consume entertaining content and will pay for it.

So how much would you pay to stay informed? More than you’d pay to be entertained, right?

Right?

Possibly not. For a start, we’re all looking for different information. And we usually want a reason to be engaging with the information. There needs to be a reason, even if that reason is simply to be entertained. Information gathering as an alternative to House of Cards perhaps?

Is it enough to buy a newspaper? Are you satisfied with browsing a few daily newsletters for your global updates?

And what about specialist information? Even if you want it, we’ve seen that many trade publications are simply out of reach for members of the public.

Pay TV and streaming services boast a wide selection for subscribers. You ignore a huge proportion of their offerings in favour of the small number of shows that actually interest you.

Your job is to select from the wealth of choice on offer. But when it comes to specialist information, there aren’t consumer sources to hand that bring a wealth of different data into one centralised place.

Where are the aggregators?

The closest I’ve seen to lots of newspaper and magazine content in one place is through PressReader, which charges £19.45 a month (around 25 Euros or $30 in the US) to access all titles. And if you’re lucky, your local library may let you read a selection of trade publications and newspapers online as part of your membership.

A wide range of newspapers and magazines from all over the world is a start. Still not trade publications and niche data, but a start. Would you be tempted to pay the monthly fee for this?

If you’re in the UK and your library service doesn’t provide online access to lots of newspapers and magazines, there’s a possible solution. Oxfordshire Libraries currently have access to Press Display for members. The good news is that anyone in the UK can join Oxfordshire Libraries and take advantage of access to Press Display and a whole host of other online services.

Seriously, check your own local library online to see what they let you access. Plenty of walled gardens open to you with a library card.

If you’re a student, academic libraries also subscribe to various services. And they pay ever-increasing amounts of money to access academic journals. Cutting edge studies and experiments that, again, members of the public won’t have affordable access to.

[As an aside, many public libraries in the UK are participating in a project that allows access to academic journals. More winning for public libraries.]

Even university libraries will find it nigh on impossible to subscribe to huge numbers of online walled gardens with exclusive information. With a booming industry in trade publications, how can universities keep up and afford so many subscriptions? And which should they choose to pay for anyway?

When the situation is difficult enough for institutions with big budgets, there’s hardly any hope for individuals.

When you’re forced to decide

You may not think all this matters. Maybe you don’t see the point in accessing all that information, let alone paying for it.

But imagine that you’re happily reading the latest updates on your favourite website. It’s pretty niche in nature, so you can’t exactly go elsewhere for this type of information.

The site is one of your regular go-to spots to stay up to date. You’ve been using it for years.

And then…One day…You check out your favourite site…And it’s paywalled. You now have to pay every month for access to what you were enjoying for free.

What do you do? If you’ve got the money to spare, is the price worth the sub? If you don’t have the money, how do you cope with a sudden drought of information?

What happens next can be a tough decision to make. You may decide that you can afford it, but won’t pay on principle.

At the same time, times are good and the general mood for investing in forums, courses and niche content is positive. Subscriptions aimed at individuals can be found all over the net. If it’s not for the information itself, it’s about communicating with like-minded people through private communities and tribes.

Similar to policy journalism, there seem to be enough people willing to pay money for access to all sorts of walled gardens with specialist information and advice at the moment. The paywall gives people accountability to themselves. By paying for the service, there’s more incentive to do the work so they’re not just wasting their money.

And some people want to pay because the information and contacts are packaged for them right there. No need to spend hours searching the Internet for the same, freely available advice. Just cough up the cash and you’ve had the searching done for you.

You still have to do the work, mind.

Fundraising as alternative or direct competitor

Now, all of this depends upon you having the cash resources available to access these walled gardens.

So what alternatives can publishers use in order to keep their content available to all?

Fundraising is one way to go. You could get a small group of investors who want to play a supportive role in making the information free to everyone. It may be as simple as providing resources or money in exchange for recognition that these investors are helping to build (and perhaps shape) the conversation.

You could also rely on random donations from happy readers if you can brave the randomness and have a large enough and appreciative readership already. Some people are happy to support what they currently enjoy for free, even if they get nothing more in return.

Then there’s Patreon. Their goal is to “help every creator in the world achieve sustainable income”. In effect, you could put together exclusive information that enough people are willing to pay for so you can keep putting that exclusive information together. Everyone wins.

Either enough people pay and everyone benefits, or there’s not enough paid interest and you have to move on.

I’m not saying that trade publications will suddenly change their business model to one of fundraising to keep open access, but there are potential ways forward.

This is just one way. Some people with enough interest seek support from like-minded others in order to create an information service for all people in that field to freely access. Think of it as a public version of services that are otherwise behind walled gardens.

Walled gardens that consumers don’t notice, but publishers do.

There is another type of walled garden that the public don’t necessarily notice or feel restricted by. Social networks are looking for ways to keep users active, as opposed to navigating away to consume content elsewhere.

Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter are all developing services that allow publishers to provide content from within. A lock-in that stops users moving away from the main social network. The content is all in one place.

Get comfy, because you don’t need to go anywhere else...

This makes sense for the social networks. Mobile phone users tend to concentrate half their time on a single app and a fifth of their time on a second app. After that, apps are only used in small doses. If a particular service can be a one-stop shop for users, what’s the point in people going anywhere else?

What we once knew as a place to communicate and share with others may slowly be turning into this generation’s AOL and Compuserve. Publishers are working with social networks on these developments, but they’re also finding issues with such moves.

Sachin Kamdar, CEO of Parsely, says that while walled gardens tend to bring greater reach and engagement, there are also reasons for digital publishers to be concerned. Kamdar states three big concerns for publishers:

1. Competing for traffic with your own content.
2. Ignoring data streams and platforms outside a particular walled garden.
3. Being dependent on the platform to provide insight and analytics.

In other words, what’s going on within the social networks…stays within the social networks.

Kamdar doesn’t have a solution to the uneasy situation. He says that “finding a balance between encouraging visitors to stay and allowing them to leave will take effort and compromise, but for now, the best course of action may be to wait and see what happens”.

So while the state of information changes, you get to experience the pros and cons of closed networks. It’s easy to carry on paying for access to entertainment walled gardens and shrugging at the loss of access to information and data-portals. After all, it doesn’t appear to matter all that much on the face of it.

Moving forward, however, the more we have walls built up around us, the more they could start to resemble a prison.

Perhaps there was a bigger reason why the World Wide Web became the victor over AOL and Compuserve’s content. Greater freedom looked so good back then.

Now the World Wide Web has walls too. But it still feels free. For now.

Huge growth in mobile and app usage could be part of the stealth changes. Online doesn’t feel like the Web any more. Instead, we’re able to make up our own mind over which apps to use and what content to consume. There’s so much content that it’s hard to imagine that even more information exists behind paywalls and private groups.

Yet we have subscriptions and we access these groups, even if it’s in a limited capacity.

The eyes have walls. Pretty, pretty walls. And, oh, the gardens!

Just remember: While the roses are beautiful, you must still beware the thorns.