Key Takeaways
- Paywalls are now common due to the need to fund quality content creation.
- Developing and maintaining websites, creating quality content, and relying on ads isn’t always enough.
- Subscribing to certain content like news sites is worth it, but flexibility in payment methods is desirable.
Everywhere I go these days, it seems that web and app content is locked behind a paywall. Whether it’s the latest news or older articles that now need a fee to access. It’s annoying, and, of course, I can’t afford to subscribe to every single website out there. However, are paywalls really a bad thing or is it better to have quality over quantity?
The Old Web Is Dead
In the heyday of the web, from the mid-90s to the advent of social media by my reckoning, the internet was a very different place.
Websites were rudimentary, and much more scrappy. Perhaps most importantly, the web hadn’t been commercialized to the same extent as today. While there was plenty of advertising to give site owners income to keep their servers running, it was rare to virtually non-existent for anyone to ask for actual money.
Good Content Is Expensive
Things can’t be any different now. The cost of setting up and maintaining a website that can handle thousands or even millions of visitors a month isn’t cheap. Website development and administration is complicated. Quality content costs money to produce on top of all the infrastructure costs. There are people behind the website, just like me, and just like this one, who work to make useful stuff for everyone else. Whether it’s for utility or entertainment, it takes time, skill, and effort to create.
It doesn’t help that websites that try to stay afloat on ad revenue alone are at the complete mercy of whether search engines will show their site in search results. So affiliate revenue or sponsored content has to help. Even that only goes so far, and eventually we all have to face up to the check being written somehow. WIth social media sites where things seem free, it’s your data that’s valuable and keeps the lights on. Thankfully, most content providers on the web are not in the business of reselling your information, but that leaves the paywall method. It’s an honest and straightforward approach to funding a site, but it’s also something that rubs most people the wrong way. Myself included.
Selectively Paying for Sites Works Great for Me
I’ll make a quick U-turn when I click on a link and hit a paywall, but the truth is that when it comes to certain types of content I find myself willing to subscribe. News is probably the key one. I subscribe to at least one local news site in my country to make sure that I get access to real journalism. Anyone can open a “news” website these days, and paying for access to a traditional newspaper still makes a lot of sense. No anonymous writers, and they’re subject to the press regulator and several other legal checks and balances.
To me, personally, this is becoming more relevant now that generative AI technology makes it easy to create mountains of plausible-sounding nonsense with no way to reliably detect it. That makes a paper trail more important to me than ever, and paper money is a good way to secure that.
I Wish I Could Always Pay Per Article Instead
While I can afford one or two subscriptions to sites that cater to general audiences, it’s those specialized sites where I just need to read one article where I can’t commit to another subscription. Some sites let you pay for single articles, or purchase credits for a fixed number of articles that you can use on an ad hoc basis, but in my experience, most of the time a paywall is subscription-based.
While I’ve accepted that paywalls are a necessary evil at times, it would be nice if we could get more flexibility. While I’m usually the last person to wish for even more intermediaries, it might even be nice if publications let us share article credits using a central service of some kind, though that’s probably asking for more trouble than it’s worth.
As it stands, while I don’t want to pay for casual browsing, and I’ll put up with plenty of ads on free sites, my attitude towards paying has changed. If I want a good web experience, I have to put my money where my mouth is.
