IMHO our democracy depends upon economic realities that depend upon technology, and that scares me. It is a noble and important thing to support MoJo by subscribing, however the reality of the situation is that it is not easy for them to be paid for their work. The current state of technology does not intrinsically support their business because some important barriers to entry have been flattened. I hope that we can get from 'here' to 'there' on a bridge of people doing the right thing and preserving what is good against the economic grade. Maybe micropayments enabled by value transfer protocols like blockchains will help us get there. I'm not sure. But if something doesn't, hello feudalism.
Ryan Holiday made the point that Gawker and its ilk are basically the historical parallel of the original yellow journalism broadsheets, wherein news was paid for issue-by-issue through the most lurid headlines and stories. It was from the ashes of that dumpster fire that the New York Times first launched a subscription model wherein the well-to-do were willing to fund their broadsheet ahead of time in order to increase its accuracy and insight. NYT has been paywall-enabled for a few years now - how's that working out for them? I saw that the WSJ is basically going with the Pando/NSFWCorp unlock model. I have the whole goddamn internet available to me, but I pay The Week something like $60 a year to be my in-print aggregator. And I've noticed something from my roommates, who are die-hard advocates of these bullshit little nothing Youtube channels with eighty gajillion views each - they love these talking-head reading-wikipedia bullshit-graphic meaningless-doublespeak videos that tell you nothing you didn't know in a format that reminds you nothing quite so much as a teenaged media intern reading you an eHow page. But they make money. And they make money because Youtube is willing to pay them to suck down your eyeballs, but only because Google has an endless pile of money. It's a distortion of the market, an attempt by Google to buy marketshare. Meanwhile CBS.com, deciding that Hulu was a bad deal, is putting new content online only - they're doing a Good Wife spinoff, the new Star Trek is premiering online only and they're doing a whole season of Big Brother (and probably The Amazing Race) online only. This is a broadcast network that dominates the ratings, has contracts with the NFL and NBA, and they're getting people to pay to watch broadcast television. I think we're just a few years from the middle class and upper middle class willingly paying a couple different sites for content that isn't bullshit. The externalities driving clickbait journalism are starting to wear out.
I earnestly hope that you are right. I would love to see what the age demographics are for those that do subscribe. Personally speaking, if I could have an account that I could dump $ into, and then I could permission certain sites to draw from it, and have a history of my activity and spending, I would be a much better internet denizen.
it actually looks kind of okay. In those pre-digital days, the Times’ daily circulation stood at 1.5 million. Today, it counts 625,000 daily print payers (home delivery and single copy) and those 1 million digital payers. That’s a little over 1.6 million. That’s another mind-boggling equivalency. With all that has changed, in the news business particularly, roughly the same number of people pay for The New York Times. One takeaway: Even at the peak of financial success — and the ’90s were good for the industry — the Times still relied on only a tiny percentage of Americans. At one point, a million and a half paying readers meant sustaining prosperity. Now, it seems like a shaky lifeline. There’s truth and there’s perception, and a lot to think about.The Times can count about the same number of paying daily readers today as it could in 1995.