While I was on holiday last week (house renovations rather than exotic holidays, I’m afraid) I found myself musing about monetization models in the wake of Time’s decision to remove its paywall.
The decision was a surprise, given that Time was one of less than 30 publishers to have successfully cracked the 200,000 subscriber mark. Time CEO Jessica Sibley boiled the decision down to a desire to reach a younger and more diverse global audience.
Time still needs to keep the lights on, however, and aims to produce ad-supported digital content that complements revenue from its print and digital magazine editions as well as Time Studios.
The magazine’s decision mirrors a similar move from Quartz last year, which had a great deal less success in converting visitors with just 25,000 subscribers. Time will hope that its decision yields a significantly better result than Quartz, whose multi-year decline in traffic continued even after its paywall came down.
The deputy editor-in-chief of Swedish daily Aftonbladet, Martin Schori, agrees that the subscription model locks out younger audiences, but argues that an ongoing subscription slowdown needs to be addressed through content innovation. Claiming that many publishers simply make online newspapers, Schori argues that reaching new audiences and convincing them to subscribe requires new formats and approaches.
He makes a compelling case.
After all, it’s hard to miss the growing dominance of short-form video in general and TikTok in particular. Rekindling audience interest requires more than simply ditching a paywall, as Quartz’s apparent struggle to drive traffic to its site proves.
A common refrain within the entrepreneurial community is to focus on “adding value” to drive growth. This is something publishers need to focus on when trying to both drive traffic to their site in pursuit of either new subscribers, higher ad revenue or both. Do more of what people like and then figure out what they’re willing to pay for. Sounds simple, but that’s rarely the case.
Subscriptions won’t be the right path for every publisher, with their potential audiences happily looking elsewhere for free content. So, that means advertising and perhaps even affiliate marketing. However, there might be another option tied to the subscription model — micropayments.
The idea of charging users to access a single piece of content has been around for years and yet hasn’t gained much traction. Still, that hasn’t prevented the idea from attracting new believers.
Micropayments platform Axate founder Dominic Young, who is a former News UK executive, has argued that ad-supported and subscription models fail to serve the “middle market”. This is the part of the market that, according to him, “used to pay for news but no longer do because they don’t want to subscribe.”
Elon Musk agrees, proudly declaring that Twitter will now allow media publishers to charge users for access to a single article.
Rolling out next month, this platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per article basis with one click.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2023
This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article.…
While I agree that hard paywalls lock out a large chunk of prospective readers, I’m not sure how much I buy into the idea that lost subscription revenue can be recovered through selling bitesize chunks of content.
Micropayments might encourage a visitor to buy a single piece of content, but if that person refused to subscribe before then I’m struggling to see how per article transactions will suddenly pry open their purse strings.
The answer probably lies, as always, somewhere in the middle. Publishers need to both diversify how they create content as well as how they monetize it. With more and more publishers experimenting with short-form video in the hopes of reaching new audiences, perhaps mixing metered paywalls with micropayments, ads, sponsorships and affiliate marketing holds the key to their monetization challenges.
