‘I get a paywall — you get a paywall — everyone gets a paywall!’

Some notes on the Medium Partner Program

Photo by Roberto Júnior on Unsplash

In August, I noticed that some users were able to “lock” their posts make them available exclusively for Medium members, and that after reading a number of members-only posts, I am invited to become a Medium member for $5 a month, to become part of a site-wide effort to support the writers on this platform.

As a writer myself, I wholeheartedly support paying writers for their output. I once heard a colleague say, If you’re good at something, don’t do it for free. This is true. Anybody who brings value to the world deserves their own compensation, and sometimes, that compensation is money.

Expanding the Medium Partner Program

I say sometimes because for some, the metric is not monetary. For some, the most important thing is reach/eyeballs/reads; for others, it’s feedback. Still, when you ask others what makes them feel rewarded for sharing their writing, they say as long as someone finds it useful or informative, that’s a reward in itself.

And then, there’s money.

Whenever I hear the word paywall, I automatically think about newspaper websites like the New York Times, whose articles are behind a metered paywall — which means that after a specified number of articles per month, a reader must pay a subscription fee to be able to read past the limit.

I can think of a few reasons why anyone would subscribe to read an unlimited number of New York Times articles:

1. Quality journalism that is well-written and insightful.
2. Credibility of NYT as a reputable source of information.
3. Exclusive content that can be found only behind the NYT paywall
4. Ease of subscription process.
5. Affordability.

I suppose there are more, but I’ll stop at five. For me, these are the core qualities I look for in a news website before gladly paying for the paywall fees: Quality, credibility, exclusivity, ease of process, affordability.

I also think NYT’s paywall is doing quite well, too.

Infographic: The New York Times Passes 2 Million Digital Subscriptions

I mention the New York Times paywall as I build toward my next question. Blogging platforms democratized publishing and disrupted newspapers and other traditional publications and their online ventures. How will democratizing paywalls affect these traditional publishers’ paywall structures as well?

In other words: Now that anyone & everyone can be a publisher who can seek monetary compensation for their articles using a very accessible platform — what now?

I don’t think we have a Philippine online publication that has successfully implemented a paywall. (Do we? Is there?) I can’t even think about which mainstream online publication can execute a paywall?

Some important questions:

1. Are Filipinos willing to pay for content?
2. Are there mechanisms in place to make it easy for Filipinos to pay for content?
3. How will implementing paywalls alter the current Philippine online landscape?

Some more questions:

1. Will making people pay for words make information more inaccessible or more precious?
2. Will making people pay for words make people more discerning and circumspect about the information they consume, since they are paying for it?
3. Will making people pay for words push online publishers to be more attuned to audience tastes?
4. And most importantly: Will paywalls be a deterrent to bots? Will paywalls ensure actual human interaction and actual human insight that cannot be faked for the sake of artificially boosting metrics?

All that said, I can’t wait to see how the rest of Medium’s partner program experiment goes. I sincerely hope it goes well. If anything, I hope we’re about to enter an age where more premium is put over what is well-made than what is (or has the potential to be, artificially) viral.