Newspapers and paywalls: not so easy

These are difficult times for the newspaper industry. Advertising is still suffering an identity crisis caused by wrongheaded approaches dating back to the earliest days of the internet and when some bright spark came up with the first banner, and as a result is locked in a spiral of diminishing returns, while Google or Facebook take the lion’s share. It seems for most advertisers that if an advertisement isn’t in your face, it’s not working.

In response to this dysfunctional situation some are trying to “fix” advertising, so far unsuccessfully; meanwhile, around a third of all internet users are using ad blockers and taking part in what is probably the biggest boycott in history. And in the meantime, a growing number of publications seem to be taking the paywall route.

Paywalls are a very unimaginative solution: if your business model is based on preventing access to your content, you need to think about changing it, and what’s more, they don’t work. On the internet, bits are free, and if you are still unaware of that and you don’t believe it, it is just a matter of time and experience. That said, it’s possible to create a paywall to encourage readers to take out a subscription because they value the reporting, independence, editorial line, style, etc., of a publication.

Paywalls are already common: The New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Times, Wall Street Journal, Wired and Financial Times, among many others, have opted for various versions and combinations of the paywall, from the hard paywall, that simply prevents access to all content and no alternative to a subscription, taking in the soft paywall or metered paywall, which allows access to a certain number of stories each month. In Spain, it seems things are to change in the coming months: after La Vanguardia said it will introduce a paywall soon, El País and El Mundo will likely follow suit in a bid to attract as many subscribers as possible to make up for the decline in relevance that this step usually implies.

Obviously, putting up a paywall is a problem: if you don’t allow the likes of Google to index your news, and not simply a snippet or fragment, your relevance on the web drops immediately. In addition, a very high percentage of your readers, faced with the obstacle, will simply find what they’re looking for somewhere else, leaving you with readers who consider that your publication provides a very important differential value. At the same time, most paywalls have holes in them that readers can exploit, although they’re not practical for regular use. Here’s a guide to accessing paywall publications:

• The New York Times, The Washington Post or Bloomberg: just get rid of the cookies these media put on your computer to keep track of the number of articles you have read. When you reach the limit, go to your browser and delete the relevant cookies which will contain part of the publication’s name. Once the cookies are eliminated, the counter returns to zero. As easy as that.
• The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal: the paywall of the former prevents access to articles and only shows headlines, the latter allows you to see the headline and a few lines of the story. Just copy the headline, look it up in Google, and click on the first result, the same one you came from: when you enter through the search engine, you will be able to access the full story.
• Wired: deleting cookies or entering through Google doesn’t work: you will have to copy the URL of the story, open an incognito window and paste it there, which isn’t too much of a hassle.

Here are a few other tips:

• Outline.com: insert “outline.com/” immediately after the “https://” fragment of the original URL of the article (no spaces and no quotation marks, needless to say) protected by the payment wall, and wait for the service to generate the corresponding page, or copy the whole URL and paste it in the box that appears on the page of Outline.com
• Browser add-ons: install plugins or add-ons for the browser you use, such as Bypass Paywalls (for Firefox), Browse Unlimited (for Chrome) or any that come up when you look for paywall in the add-ons store, taking the usual precautions.
• Browser add-ons: install plugins or add-ons for the browser you use, such as Bypass Paywalls (for Firefox), Browse Unlimited (for Chrome) or any that come up when you look for paywall in the add-ons store, taking the usual precautions.

Is it ethical to avoid a payment wall? It’s a similar dilemma to installing an adblocker: you’re impacting the viability of the publication, but on the other hand, you’re telling it that it’s going nowhere with a paywall, at least not with you. Should everything be free on the internet? Of course not, but for payment models to work, they need to be properly thought through and offer an unequivocal value proposal. For the moment, the logical thing to do is to offer readers something they’re not going to find anywhere else, so that they either subscribe or accept advertising.

If your publication is little more than a cut and paste of agency stories people can find easily elsewhere site, you’re going to have problems getting them to pay for your information. If, on the contrary, you providing a unique added value in terms of the quality of your journalism or you break stories and set trends, or if instead of readers you have followers you have a reasonable chance. It also depends, obviously, on your size: if you have an international audience, are respected, seen as a benchmark, then the drop in advertising and readers should be compensated by subscription payments… but smaller publications will find it hard. So remember: most paywalls can be breached anyway, and you’re still going to lose relevance and traffic. Instead of trying to keep people out, try something different. And above all, be polite and have the patience to wait for your users to understand.

(En español, aquí)