Paywalls Will Soon Be Arriving in Unexpected Places

By Dustin Rowles | TV | October 1, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | October 1, 2024 |

The paywalls are coming. There was a time when digital media could sustain itself on advertising alone, thanks to the referral traffic from Google, Facebook, and, to a much lesser extent, Twitter. Those days are gone. There’s less Google traffic—partly due to AI search results pulling from other websites—but social media traffic is practically nonexistent. This is true across digital media, even for a site like ours, where Facebook referrals once accounted for around 35 percent of our traffic. Now it’s about 1 percent.

No one has figured out how to replace that lost traffic, although I hear some sites are trying to cultivate audiences on WhatsApp. And if you can’t generate new traffic, the alternative is to generate more revenue from existing traffic through paywalls. That requires either content that feels indispensable or a brand strong enough to command loyalty.

We’ll soon find out how many sites are important enough in people’s lives to justify paid subscriptions. The Verge, Vox Media’s popular technology site, is set to introduce a paywall. I’m a regular reader of The Verge, but not that regular (and I already pay for subscriptions to other Vox Media sites like Vulture). Will the average person pay a few dollars a month for tech news?

Maybe. However, even with a relatively small $3.99 subscription fee, I doubt CNN will attract many subscribers, at least for now. CNN’s website is a disaster—it looks like Matt Drudge threw up on it. The design is terrible, the videos load too slowly, and it uses so many CPU resources that it crashes browsers. Yet, starting today, they want some visitors to pay $4 a month. Until they make considerable improvements, that’s not happening.

Meanwhile, the NYTimes, which runs the nation’s best paywalled site, is expanding its paywall to its podcasts. From now on, only the two most recent episodes (or three, in the case of The Daily) will be available without a subscription, which can be purchased through the Apple or Spotify apps. Regular NYTimes subscribers will still have access to their archives.

That’s the current setup, though the Times suggests it may extend the paywall to future episodes of podcasts like Serial (in other words, the first few would be free, but you’d have to pay to listen to an entire season).

It’s frustrating, and all these subscriptions add up. But it’s the future, and unless Facebook decides to start pushing news again, paywalls aren’t going away.