5:03 am

Is the future of the Web really one where so much of the content is behind a paywall or a registration screen? (some call it a “regwall”) Are we returning to the pre-Internet days where so much information was locked away in gated “walled gardens” of online activity such as CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, Delphi, etc.?

Each morning after our dog wakes me up sometime between 4:30 and 5:00am, I let her out in the backyard to do her thing… and then I start my morning scan of news. Over the last 15 years or so I’ve found that I’ve come to value the curation of Gabe Rivera’s teams and so I start out with Memeorandum for general news and politics, and then Techmeme for tech news and sometimes go to MediaGazer for media news.

My frustration that has been growing over the past five years or so is that so many mainstream news sites are locking their content behind paywalls or regwalls.

When I go to Memeorandum I’ve come to know that I just should not bother clicking the link if it is from the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Bloomberg, Wired… and even sometimes Reuters.

And it’s not just news sites… I’ve pretty much given up reading Cory Doctorow’s latest articles when he initially posts them because he goes to Medium first, which won’t let me read his articles without a subscription. (In his particular case, I can wait a few days and get it on his blog.) I’ve come to just ignore the email messages Medium sends me because pretty much all the articles now either require login or payment.

And this is why I moved this newsletter from Substack over to WordPress. Increasingly so many Substack newsletters I was reading would let you read a page or so… and then you have to pay.

Even here on WordPress.com, they actively promote that you should use them for a newsletter because you can charge for content:

Earn with your work
With gated content and paid subscriptions.

I could add in some blocks and set it all up so that you all had to pay to read this morning missives.

Good journalism is expensive

Look… I get it!

It’s incredibly expensive to do good journalism correctly.

And the advertising model that initially propped up so many media sites completely evaporated in the wake of Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace for classifieds, and the move of so many people to social media to discover news (read about the latest stats out this week).

I’ve read so many of the reports and articles about what’s happening in the media industry. I get it.

It’s an incredibly hard problem to solve.

And so I don’t begrudge news sites in putting up paywalls to try to pay their reporters. For them it’s a return to the pre-Internet model where you had to pay for a subscription or buy a copy at a newsstand.

And with all the zillions of layoffs in the media industry, I don’t begrudge all the many individual reporters who have set up their own Substack or other newsletter so that they can attempt to continue their reporting and independently make a living.

I get it. I understand.

But … what is the end game?

But how does this all end? I don’t know about you all, but I simply can’t subscribe separately to EVERY media site and newsletter that I want to read. (Nor do I want to register on every single site so they can track me.) $20 here, $20 there… and sooner or later you’re spending hundreds of dollars. It’s just like all the zillion video streaming services asking for us to subscribe to each of them.

It just doesn’t work for most people.

Will we see more “bundling”? Which is basically what Medium is doing with their “Members-only” – pay a fee and get access to all the writers who contribute members-only articles.

Will we see more of a return to the “information services” of old where only those who could afford to pay would be able to see the good articles? (And those who could not afford to do so would not.)

Or what?

The crazies don’t put up paywalls

My additional concern is that the folks who don’t care about “good journalism” don’t put up paywalls. The conspiracy theorists, the fringe groups, the extremists of all political views, the anti-vaxxers, the climate change-deniers, the anti-science people.

Disinformation and misinformation is freely available for everyone. No paywalls. No regwalls.

THAT content is what can get found in search engines. THAT content is what will get indexed by generative AI systems… and then regurgitated as “fact” by the very plausible and authoritative large language models.

Good content behind paywalls… misinformation without.

Over time I see this further eroding the trustworthiness of the Web. (That is admittedly already eroded.)

The answer is… ?

I don’t know. I know it’s NOT the utter stupidity of the Canadian government’s failing attempt at a “link tax”. (And that’s a topic for another day…)

But I’m not sure that the realistic answer is paywalls (“subscriptions”). How many can the average user afford?

What do you think?

All I know is that with every paywall or regwall … the Web, and the broader Internet… seem… a… little… less… open… 😢

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Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

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Until the next time,
Dan

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Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007 or 2008, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.