“Who does get to report news first? How do “updates” grow and travel across web publishers?”, so goes my quest.

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Content publishers can get pretty competitive.

Majority of the clients I worked with were content publishers, and they were all after being “first to break”.

From time to time, I start trying to hunt for who the fastest news uploader is, on the interwebs.

My vested interest in that is, of course, I’d want to follow those entities that break news first, rather than wait for the sites who just report off of other sites.

Note: This is specifically regarding tech news, because (1) I work at a web design and digital advertising agency.

And (2), because, to be honest, it seems like majority of the digital marketing industry is trying to out-update each other about latest Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Instagram, Google developments — from Mashable, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, The Verge, Fast Company.

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Last week, I was looking for various Internet business models.

I came across this article from The Information about Vevo potentially being sold, posted on June 4, 2014.

It was pretty interesting news. Vevo, similar to Apple, changed the music monetization game. And now, collaborative ownership was finally rearing its ugly head.

What interested me more were the two giant buttons at the bottom of the article:

The article had a paywall.

A really. Expensive. Paywall.

It cost more than a dollar a day ($399/year) to subscribe to the site.

I just thought — who does that?! Who puts that high a paywall on news that you could probably Google?

So, I Googled.

Lo and behold, all articles and excerpts I saw linked to The Information as their source.

Even publishers like Business Insider and Quartz .

I tried to look for the earliest mentions of various keyword combinations vevo+sale, vevo+business+news, vevo+2014+business.

All recent articles linked to The Information, or some other article citing it.

Save for one.

The earliest mention of the news without linking to any other source was Bloomberg’s “Vevo Owners Close to Hiring Goldman to Explore Sale”.

It was published April 29, 2014 — five weeks before the The Information article.

The Quartz article mentions both The Information and Bloomberg as sources.

And Business Insider cites both Quartz and The Information.

So only two publishers “broke” the news, and everyone else got their scoop from them. One was free, and the other, expensive.

Why is this news for me?

Because I didn’t think an online content publisher (especially one about tech news) could survive with a paywall.

I figured, in this day and age, all information (hah) gets out in the open for free eventually anyway (I’ve seen subscribers-only content copied and pasted onto Tumblr*).

The fact that The Information (an expensive digital publisher) can “own” (retain attribution) a piece of breaking news amidst so much online competition amazes me.

That must be some level of “exclusive”.

So, apparently, paywalls can survive in Tech news.

They aren’t just for Jamie Oliver or The New York Times.

News publishers aren’t restricted to just using freemium and advertising models all the time.

That’s a surprise for me. That, you do just need to be “worth the money”, and give your buyers something they want that they absolutely cannot get anywhere else.

It’s just really, really competitive, that’s all.

Footnote

Meanwhile, on the other side of the business model hemisphere, CNN attempts to increase its pageview performance.

Hey, if you can’t beat Buzzfeed, join ‘em.

Today’s CNN homepage shows their “Which ‘60s personality are you?’ quiz**, and Shia LaBeouf’s breaking news update.

**To be fair to CNN, the quiz appears to be an engagement strategy promoting its The Sixties special.

Just saying, it’s a tough world out there. Upworthy is optimizing its headline-writing. Buzzfeed keeps iterating their quiz platform. There’ll eventually be even more clickbait strategies to deal with the tyranny of the Facebook algorithm.

Surprised to see that you can still charge for news.

Hats-off, The Information. For being that beacon of hope for media conglomerates everywhere, who are still looking for ways to milk money out of reportage.