There is an unmistakably growing trend in journalism from legacy media to blogging. That is subscription based content. Major outlets like the New York Times often allow you to view a number of articles a month before requiring a subscription to view more. Reading posts on blogs has mostly been free at platforms like Blogger and WordPress with options for making donations. The site, Patreon, offers a way for bloggers to accept subscription donations and offer exclusive content. Lately, a new site, Substack, has gained popularity allowing bloggers to charge subscriptions. Typically, a post will have a few summarizing or teaser paragraphs with the rest being available to paying subscribers.
One of the big complaints about modern media is that there is such a cornucopia of choices that readers get caught up in their own bubble. It is hard to see a subscription model being of any help. One of points of journalism and blogging is to get your ideas and work out to more people. This is bound to get harder with a growing number of writers competing for subscription dollars. I would like to offer a possible solution from the worlds of music and book publishing.
For a long time the music business sold songs on vinyl records with 45 rpm singles and collections on 33 rpm albums. They then moved on to CDs (compact disks) which were a good fit for albums, but not singles. Then a compressed digital format called MP3 came out and a company called Napster allowed people to share songs in a quasi legal fashion. It's detailed in the forgotten book, All the Rave: The Sudden Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster, by Joseph Menn. Music is now mostly sold as MP3s (or similar format) at iTunes or Amazon. Songs typically sell for about a dollar with albums going for around ten to twenty dollars. Books now also usually include digital versions, most notably on Amazon's Kindle. They usually sell for between ten and twenty dollars, sometimes being discounted for limited time prices of a few dollars.
How should digital articles or blog posts be priced? I would recommend nickels, dimes and quarters. Someone could literally charge for their two cents worth. An article or post should clearly not cost as much as a song, which can be put on a phone or ipod and played repeatedly forever. Articles have currency or timeliness. They do not have the shelf life of a song. Perhaps a time value could be applied. After some freshness period they could become free for people doing research, although with a low enough price (two cents worth?) this might not matter and offer small residuals for writers. The price could also include comment privileges or more precisely comment submission privileges. Of course, parts of an article can remain free such as teasers, summaries or even the whole article with the fee being for notes or links. This could also be applied to artwork or photography by offering higher resolution for a fee. Also, as someone who writes podcast reports for the blog Climate Scepticism, I would be remiss not to mention audio. The fee could include the right to download an MP3 of the article.
This does not mean there can't also be subscriptions. They could still give a volume discount or offer a way for readers to support their favorite writers. Right now I think digital subscriptions, which typically run in excess of $100 a year, are way too high. I don't think $10 to $20 for a book is too high and I sometimes pay that much for fare from writers I detest so that I can slam them in a review. But subscribing to a lot of writers can get pricey and, frankly, I feel that I'm grossly underpaying for a lot of the stuff that I get for free. There's lot's of paywalled articles I'd probably pay five, ten, maybe even fifty cents for. Right now, I only have one digital content subscription, John Ziegler's The Death of Journalism podcast (please check it out).
How would the logistics of this work? In this age of digital baloney slicing, I can't imagine this would require AI or bitcoin mining levels of computing power. This could be done with special accounts or even existing accounts. I usually buy music and Kindle books with Amazon gift cards. I always have what I suppose could be called an Amazon gift card debit balance at the ready and a tiny iTunes balance. Media companies could offer specialized accounts and charge for features such as privacy levels. I don't think the digital overhead for micro pricing would be that high and it could be charged for.
The main benefit to this model is that readers would likely get access to more writers with writers getting access to more readers. Writers would have another metric to evaluate their effort. New writers could take revenue from entrenched writers which may or may not be a bad thing. Quality and popularity would be given a premium. It would be harder for established writers to rest on their laurels. It should definitely benefit newer writers. I think it would have the potential to shake up the stale field with its dreary echo chambers. It might also wrestle some control away from the legacy media and big tech oligarchs. Perhaps a billionaire platform owner who's dissatisfied with the status quo, has ambitious plans for a new landscape and maybe even some experience in online payments might want to take a look. .. Elon, are you listening?
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