If there was a simple "pay 10c to read" button, I'd click that.
If there was a subscription that I could have that would give me ad-free access to all the random news articles that get shared with me, I'd buy that (at a reasonable price, that is).
But there isn't.
Subscribing to 283894 newspapers isn't an option.
Dear Newspapers, please accept the new reality. The days of people subscribing to exactly one newspaper died with the paper editions.
Stop blaming your failure to offer a reasonable product on "Internet freeloaders".
Exactly my thoughts, going back to the paper-age pattern of reading only that one publication or two that you subscribe to isn't a customer experience that feels like money well spent now that we have been spoilt by two decades of everything available via ads.
We absolutely should find a way of returning to paying about as much of our income for news as we did before (and not indirectly via ads), but those big fat one-publication subscriptions aren't the way. Even less when they get peddled with that "first 3 months only x" lure that's essentially a promise that they'll make unsubscribe harder than a fitness studio.
What I'd love to see instead isn't a "Spotify for news" (with all the power imbalance that would come with that) but a "federated subscription" where being a subscriber at your "home publication" would give you some form of guest access at "cooperating competitors", with a fixed part of the fee passed on based on tracked cross-publication usage. The organization running the thing would ideally be a non-profit cooperative, enforcing uniform rules about what exactly would be included in "guest access" (perhaps 24h latency + ads?). The biggest issue I see with this would be that it would kind of rule out pricing competition, but we already see a very limited amount of price variation amongst consumer online subscriptions anyways. (for some reason they are almost universally just marginally lower or higher than "one Netflix", no matter what's offered).
The thing is that so little of what you read in various online news sources was actually "written" by reporters in the classical sense of the man in the beige raincoat with a "Press" ticket in his hat-band, frntically scribbling shorthand in a notebook, before phoning in his story.
The vast, vast majority of news articles concerning national and international news are pretty much copy/pasted from news agencies like Reuters [0] or AP [1]
So, yes, writers deserve to get paid. And, through news agency licensing fees, the original writers of such articles are. But how much does the person who bascially copy/pastes that into another site deserve to get paid?
Ironically, where the stereotype reporter, actually writing original content [that I portrayed above] does still exist, it tends to be in very local news gathering where the likes of a news agency has no interest. For example; your local village flower show, or the traffic congestion on the high street. And yet those very local news outlets are almost exclusively non-paywalled.
And those seem to be the ones struggling the hardest with ad-funding, at least that's what my sample suggests: full of bottom-level outbrain-level shit because their "natural" ad market (local stuff) is all gobbled up by map platforms (well, usually exactly one map platform) and the occasional "still advertises on Facebook". If being a subscriber to the local publication would take care of transparent microtransaction guest access to most of the stuff you find linked I the wide web it would be a no-brainer to subscribe.
