The [Wall Street] Journal has found that these non-subscribed visitors fall into groups that can be roughly defined as hot, warm, or cold, according to Wells. Those with high scores above a certain threshold — indicating a high likelihood of subscribing — will hit a hard paywall. Those who score lower might get to browse stories for free in one session — and then hit the paywall. Or they may be offered guest passes to the site, in various time increments, in exchange for providing an email address (thus giving the Journal more signals to analyze). The passes are also offered based on a visitor’s score, aimed at people whose scores indicate they could be nudged into subscribing if tantalized with just a little bit more Journal content.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I think that the future of paywalls is aggregation, not artificial intelligence. Spotify is an aggregator. It works better than having individual recording companies set up and manage their own paywalls. Maybe Amazon Prime will become a news aggregator. It already has access to the WaPo (gee, I wonder how it got that?). Facebook is a news aggregator.
The WSJ should get together with the NYT and other major publications to create a news aggregator. I have been saying that for twenty years, but the legacy media won’t do it. Pretty soon they won’t have much choice. Aggregate or be aggregated.
As a matter of fact, there is already something like that. At least here in Holland we can browse through a number of newspapers and other periodicals, including WaPo, NYT and WSJ, and pay only for the articles you want to read. This is Blendle.com. I do not know whether it is available in the US.
Works fine.
The New York Times invested in Blendle 3.5 years ago, and Frederic Filloux responded to that news by casting some doubt on the business model. NYT covered the company in a brief article.
I sometimes use Blendle and it works OK, however I wish the news sites themselves would link back to Blendle. My common workflow:
1. Click on a link that seems interesting
2. Hit a paywall.
3. (usually) leave and do something else, but sometimes I’ll want to read it badly enough that I’ll log into Blendle and use their poorly working search to try to find the article in question. I wish a “pay 10 cents and read with Blendle option” was available on the paywall site itself.
Yes, that would be nice. Blendle works, but a little awkward, at least for users who come from a web post somewhere.
I’ve been saying the same thing, but it’s always been kind of illegal. Form a cartel and set prices for the industry wouldn’t have flown before the industry was in free fall. My wife is a reporter, and I’ve been watching this industry for decades. There will either be an aggregator who can charge 1 price or do mirco-payments, or every newspaper will become a non-profit with endowed chairs of education reporting, etc…
There are other alternatives but they won’t be good for the republic.
Aggregators? We don’t need no stinking aggregators. There are plenty of quality, ungated, foreign news outlets available with iPhone apps. I use the Channel NewsAsia, DW, El Pais in English, France 24, SCMP, Straits Times, The Hindu, and BBC News apps on my iPhone daily and feel relatively well-informed without feeding the highly partisan US outlets.
An obvious answer to a growing problem that you made clear with the Spotify analogy. With Spotify, consumers still retain the right to purchase an LP, CD, or digital download of the music directly. Or they can “lease” the music through an aggregator … or more specifically, multiple aggregators … Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Google Music, etc.
This is especially true of medium-sized papers. I hold a subscription to the WSJ and was looking to add one to the Omaha World-Herald (as a native Nebraskan, to keep up on issues at home). But the OWH wants to charge as much as the Washington Post or New York Times! With all due respect, its journalistic quality or breadth of resources doesn’t remotely approach those broader “national” newspapers.
Nonetheless, local reporting is important, and it would be a shame for these papers to simply cease being relevant due to stubborn insistence that their content is worth X. Not only is it “aggregate or be aggregated,” it’s “aggregate or be ignored.”
I’d expect AI based personalized aggregation to be the increasing answer – as well as the echo chamber multiplier. Isn’t FB doing this, sort of?
Content will be paid for by adds and/or subscriptions (most news junkies will go for adds or just one subscription).
I would call it decentralized vs centralized.
On that axis I am uncertain, and think both survive. The one says we send out search bots that have our private profile and the other, is like a batch processor. They each have utility.
I think the ultimate solution is micro-payments that go directly to authors … no intermediates … no “newspapers” … no aggregators. Just 1/10 th of a cent per view with subscriptions at a discount.
Regards,
Bill Drissel
Frisco, TX, USA