Revisiting A La Carte Payment in Journalism
Is it really possible to monetise attention?
A story that Medium founder and CEO Ev Williams posted on his own Medium blog exploded this week. The story titled ‘Renewing Medium’s Focus’ is a manifesto that addresses the issues and questions that have plagued the publishing industry since it went online: how do we fund good journalism, and how do we encourage good journalism. It is a timely strategy shift. Of late, I have noticed that the quality of my Medium feed has regressed into an ostentatious but shallow hub for listicles and click-bait. Although this doesn’t reflect all of the writing on Medium (much of which is still extremely good), it’s a worrying trend that goes against the grain of Medium’s foundational purpose. As Ev writes:
“We believe people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on their ability to enlighten and inform, not simply their ability to attract a few seconds of attention.”
In Ev’s story comes the news that Medium will lay off 30% of its staff and close offices in New York City and Washington DC, most of which were dedicated to its nascent ad business which has now presumably been nipped or drastically scaled back. Seemingly, the only thing not addressed by Ev is an actual solution. I say that not with derision but with empathy; Ev and Medium are as confounded as we all are. How does the online publishing industry reward good work?
It’s a difficult question to answer, and recently it has become increasingly clear that not only does the current advertising business model not reward good work, but it actively incentivises bad work with clickbait and linkbait that we’ve all become familiar with, but also fake news which rocked the US Presidential election. Fake news, a product of Facebook’s news feed algorithms and its resultant ‘echo chamber’, is another poor reflection of the ad model predicated on attention. The ad model is damaged when applied by individual publishers, but is clearly also deeply flawed when applied on aggregator platforms such as Facebook. Obviously this is worrying for platforms like Medium which acts as an aggregator for independent bloggers.
A little over a year ago I wrote this story, supporting a micro-payments model in journalism. At the time, this a la carte payment model had been spearheaded by a Dutch start-up called Blendle which had received the backing of publishing behemoths Axel Springer and the New York Times. On Blendle, users pay small amounts for every article they read, and can request refunds on stories they deem not worthy. I supported Blendle because a return to direct payment although far-fetched, is the best solution. The advertising model, is just enough (but hardly sustainable) to prop up established publishers with the scale to make it work, but it immediately shuts out smaller players and independent bloggers.
Despite this, the fundamental premise of Blendle’s model is undeniably shakey: people should pay for journalism because, well…it deserves to paid for. This is not untrue, but building businesses predicated on the goodness of people is usually a poor way to do business, and a dangerous assumption to make. History has shown that people don’t pay for things they can get for free, until paying for it becomes considerably easier — like in music and movies. Unfortunately, browsing the web for news content has become so user friendly that getting published content for free is actually easier than paying for it.
As such, I’m less bullish on the prospects of Blendle today than I was a year ago; although I really want them to succeed. But wanting Blendle to succeed is like saying I want people to buy music from record stores. It’s a nice thought but not very constructive. Nonetheless, the core of my story remains valid: the kind of journalism that should be paid for is unique, often long-form, and deeply insightful. When I say paid for, I mean that unique and heavily researched stories are the things that should be driving value, not commoditised news stories or clickbait stories that are great at drawing clicks and attention, but as per the economic model of scarcity, actually dont have any value.
So how is it that we actually measure the value of this so-called good content? Many people, including John Gruber have come out recently saying that we should be measuring attention over clicks and page views. Although I agree with this to some degree, I still don’t think attention is necessarily directly correlated with good content. When I read a bad story, or visit a clickbait article, I’m still paying attention to it, it’s just that I don’t come away from it satisfied or particularly enlightened. More crucially though, I don’t think attention is a metric that can be reliably monetised, at least in the ad-based business model. There is nothing intrinsic about attention that makes it more appealing to an advertiser. For an advertiser, scale and contextual relevance are the only important factors, and none of that has anything to do with how good a published story is. In fact you might even say that a reader who is engrossed by a story is less likely to look at ads.
This is a problem that is much more pronounced for written content. The advertising model tends to work much more comfortably in the video medium. Video ads embedded in the video medium operate in the same runtime so to speak, and so have a much higher likelihood of catching users. Ads in written content usually take the form of a visual banner which is easily ignored. There’s friction to viewing ads in written stories, whereas this friction doesn’t exist in video form.
I’m not here to write about a solution, because I like most others don’t have one. Micro-payments is the best we’ve got, but publishers have made it so easy to get their stuff for free. For the most part, publishers are their own worst enemy; but a collusive agreement to put all content behind a paywall would certainly raise eyebrows, legally speaking. Collusive agreements are also inherently unstable as publishers will always be incentivised to break collusive agreements. I also think an aggregator subscriber model is valid (like a Spotify for publishers), but if users don’t pay per unit of content — by delineating payment and consumption — then we’re still not actually encouraging good work. This is true of Spotify, does Spotify actually encourage the creation of good music? I don’t think so, but then again the definition of good music is a lot more subjective than what good writing is. Hopefully we’ll be back in time with some better ideas.
