Online Paywalls and the Future of Media

The most realistic outcome—and one that has already been happening in many legacy newsrooms—is that online paywalls will make up some, but not all, of the revenue that's been lost on the print side. Therefore these huge media outlets will shrink somewhat, and probably demand more from each employee, but they will not disappear. In the long run, the overall number of professional journalists will probably shrink, at least until online media figures out how to monetize itself as well as print did. (Since print newspapers were for many decades small monopolies virtually capable of printing money, this is unlikely.)

This does not mean that paywalls will work for everyone. Paywalls will work for content that is worth paying for. An easy way to determine whether content is worth paying for is to ask: is content that is more or less the same freely available at a million other places online? If so, you should not put your content behind a paywall, because people will just click somewhere else for it.

Examples of media outlets that can support paywalls: high quality national newspapers (NYT, WSJ, probably the WaPo, and... ?), sites that offer quality financial news to an audience for whom a paywall's cost is negligible (WSJ, FT, Bloomberg), sites that cater to very specific niche audiences with highly specific news that can't be easily found elsewhere (Politico, trade publications of all types, small local newspapers), sites offering very high quality proprietary longform journalism published on a frequent basis. Additionally, magazines that maintain their quality should be able to offer online subscriptions to their loyal subscriber base.

Examples of media outlets than cannot support paywalls: mediocre or shitty newspapers that have decimated their newsrooms, shitty magazines with little quality content, sites full of mostly opinions and listicles and other entertaining but easily reproduced things of that nature, most blogs.

This will all work itself out in the space of a generation. Which is no comfort to all the journalists who found themselves laid off before it got worked out.

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Google+ Is Growing at Facebook Speed

Google today announced that it has 135 million active users checking their Google+ streams each month, up from 100 million in mid-September. If you run the math, that means Google+ is now growing at the same pace as Facebook when it was similarly sized.

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