Could website content gated behind a subscription work or will the practice ensure the death of a site? Aaron Birch reports
The internet is seen by most as a free source of information. Whatever you want to know, you can find a site online, somewhere, that has what you need. Whether it’s news, the latest movie reviews, reference material for an exam or simply the latest juicy gossip, it’s all there. Sites are available for you to visit and soak up all that they contain.
This resource of information has steadily grown ever since the internet first launched itself on an unsuspecting world, and it shows no signs of stopping its meteoric rise any time soon. Success, however, doesn’t come without baggage, and wherever there’s success and a lot of public attention, advertisers and the desire for money soon follow.
With the need to pay the bills, site owners have to make money somehow, and as is the case with most forms of media, advertising is one of the easiest ways to do this. Offer a company the chance to advertise their product on your site for a fee, a site that receives plenty of traffic, and you’ll quickly start to earn some cold, hard cash. Bigger sties have bigger advertising deals, and the money that comes in from this agreement to plug products on such a site can make a very respectable living. It’s nothing new, and the internet certainly didn’t start this trend. Magazines, radio and TV all ply their audience with advertisements, and this is where a good deal of revenue comes from. Newspapers, for example, make the majority of their money from advertisements, which is why the cover cost of the paper can be so low. The more people who buy it, the more eyes there are on advertising, and the more money advertisers will pay. It’s a simple formula, but a formula that the general public isn’t exactly fond of.
We’ve all been there. You’re watching the Saturday night movie, getting into the atmosphere and losing yourself in the narrative when, bam! The adverts come along and pull you kicking and screaming out of your escapist bubble. It’s a pain, and it often ruins programming for the viewer, but as much as we hate it, if advertisements weren’t present, the cost of programming would fall to the viewer, as it always has done with ad-free channels like the BBC.
Digital Peddling
The internet quickly grew to embrace this advertising model, and not long after the first sites appeared, adverts followed. Things started off fairly benign, with simple banner ads and the odd pop-up, but today advertising on the internet is rampant. Practically no site or form of online media is safe from it. There’s a whole mess of pervasive and often invasive advertisement techniques being used, such as fullscreen pop-ups, pre-page load ads, ads in YouTube videos, ads in music streaming services, even ads in your installed programs. They’re everywhere, and knowing how successful advertising has been in other media over the years, we can only expect it to get worse. That’s the cold, hard truth.
One of the most recent forms of online advertisement exploitation is the idea of the website paywall. This is an idea that, while not solely based on advertising, plays on the general public’s hatred of advertisements and is a method to do away with such content, making money at the same time. It’s not limited to this model, and some sites use paywalls regardless of advertisements.
Simply put, a website paywall is a subscription service that locks content behind a paid model. By subscribing to the site, you’re allowed access to the content behind it, and this can often include the benefit of no adverts. Once you’re subscribed, you’ll have full access to the whole site, and if you don’t pay, you’ll be barred from this content or, at the very least, have to view such content with plentiful ads.
A good example of this kind of thing would be the system used by popular music streaming service Spotify, which has a free and a paid version. The free version is totally free to use, but songs are punctuated by radio-style, unskippable ads. The paid version has no ads and no interruptions to listeners’ enjoyment. It’s a simple idea and the chance of no ads is enough for many people to pay the small subscription fee.
This is all well and good for this kind of content, but when it’s used to gate off normal, text-based content on a website, ads or not, it’s something that quickly earns the ire of the web-using community.
Pay To Read
You may or may not agree with the removal of ads for a fee, but however you look at it, it’s something that does actively improve your time on a site. Not having to see ads and only getting the content you want to look at is a bonus. However, the paywall that gates off content entirely unless you pay a fee is a little more troublesome.
There are plenty of sites that lack adverts but lock their actual content behind a subscription, and if you want to read it, you have to pay first. Sites like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal do this, with the latter actively hiding the majority of a news story behind a subscription. It gives you a couple of paragraphs, but to read more, you need to pay. Likewise, some community sites do this. A popular site is www.experts-exchange.com (now with added hyphenation to prevent embarrassing confusion). This technical help forum hides answers to questions, which you often stumble on following a Google search, and to view them, you need to subscribe. Don’t pay, and all you see is the question and a prompt asking you to sign up for a trial.
It’s an odd way to promote such content but one that’s understandable given the need for site owners to generate revenue. Few people do things in this world for free, and business is business, so from that standpoint, you can’t really argue. That said, does this kind of system work?
High Price
It’s difficult to say whether such paywalls on websites actually work without financial figures and viewing numbers, but given the prevalence of such sites, there’s clearly money to be had. Taken from a user point of view, though, this is a practice that really isn’t good, and it’s not too great for the sites either.
You see, the internet is huge. It’s a massive repository of constantly evolving information, and competition is rife. There’s no monopoly on anything, and for every subject you search for, there are countless results most of the time. Because of this, it’s hard to justify the cost of paywalled sites, as you can get the same or similar information anywhere else.
Take Experts Exchange, for example. It’s a forum dedicated to technical help for computers, and it offers all sorts of detailed help to people who need it. That’s great, but you can get the same type of help from a huge number of other sites – for free. Why pay a subscription on one site, when there are endless alternatives willing to give you help for nothing? Likewise, news sites that gate off content are unlikely to persuade the frugal user to part with cash when a simple Google search will reveal pages and pages of results for the very same information. We’re sure this is an opinion shared by a great deal of people, so you have to wonder why some sites consider this approach and how it actually works, even to a small degree.
The answer is quality of content and unique features. At least, that’s what paywalled sites will tell you. Sites that gate off content often justify this by claiming that it’s of a better quality than other, free sources. Experts Exchange, for example, advertises the ability to speak to and get help from actual industry professionals. This plays on the belief that most forums are just normal people giving advice, not qualified professionals. In many cases, this may be true, but how much difference does it make? Many community forums have members that are every bit as knowledgeable as so-called professionals, and there are even professional sites, such as Microsoft’s own forums, that offer content for free. What makes Experts Exchange and others of its ilk different? Well, other features on offer include video tutorials, mobile access, specialised articles and the chance to write your own and more. There’s a whole set of features on top of the simple technical help, and some of these may well be worth it, but not necessarily for users who simply want an answer to a simple question.
Paywalls can work, but even when they do, how successful are they compared to free alternatives? Let’s look at some figures from July 2015, taken from various Australian news sites (via the Australian Business Review – www.theaustralian.com.au).
Here, figures showed that the most popular paywalled site, the Australian itself, managed 1.1 million unique visits in the month of June 2015. That’s a lot of visits and clearly a lot of money. However, the most popular free news site, www.news.com.au, managed 3.7 millions unique visits – over three times the amount.
It’s telling, and it clearly shows the majority of users want free content and aren’t willing to pay. It also shows that while those who are willing to pay are a minority, there’s more than enough interest to generate plenty of revenue.
Even so, it’s clear the user looking for free content is the type of user that’s the most common, and most will simply turn away and look elsewhere, even if they have to put up with ads. There’s enough of a disliking for this kind of paywall to create a bigger concern for site owners, however. That includes browser plug-ins.
Paywall Demolition
It didn’t take long for programs and plug-ins to be released that allowed users to block adverts. The hugely popular AdBlock is one example and is used by many to block site advertisements, and paywalls are no different.
A lot of paywall systems work in the same way, and monitor your usage of a site using cookies. After you access so many pages, you’ll be prompted to subscribe to see more. This is called a ‘soft paywall.’ Knowing this, programmers have come up with ways around it, including tools like the Firefox plug-in Paywall Pass (mzl.la/1Mym3HZ). This tool manipulates values in the referral header to trick the destination site into thinking it’s your first visit, thus bypassing the paywall. It’s a simple system and is probably easily blocked, but it’s a clear sign that the paywall isn’t as sturdy as people may like it to be. It’s also a clear sign that people don’t like them, and having them on your site is not only going to lose you visits but also maybe income, because tools are used to bypass them.
Sometimes, no software is needed, and companies see that paywalls just don’t work. Although covered in a layer of spin, the Sun’s website recently scaled back its paywall, which previously locked most content behind a subscription. Now the site’s content is mostly free, although there are some stories and features you need to pay for. It’s clear that the tabloid’s higher-ups at News UK saw a decline in online readers and deduced that the paywall voracity was a little too strong. This was made all the more clear when viewing figures were released for the site by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), showing that the paper had only 792,994 unique visits on an average day in June 2015. This was compared to the the Mail Online, which had 14 million unique views per day in the same month.
After scaling back the paywall, the Sun’s traffic increased two-fold to around 1.3 million unique visits per day, showing just how much of a negative effect a paywall can have, especially in an area with so much competition freely available.
Perhaps the ultimate fly in the ointment of paywall culture was The Daily Paywall. Created by Paolo Cirio, this was an online and print repository that smashed down the paywalls of a number of sites, including The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and The Economist. The content was distributed for free, with only a humble request that people donate to the crowdfunding of the project.
Of course, this was all highly illegal and boiled down to basically stealing and plagiarising copyrighted work from writers and publications. The project was quickly shut down, and Cirio revealed that the whole thing was an experimental idea, partly exploring a crowdfunded alternative that would not only lead to writers being paid when articles were read.
Regardless of the real agenda of the project, the Daily Paywall caused quite a stir and polarised people’s views. It sparked a debate about paywalls, with people talking about the rights and wrongs of the practice.
Are Paywalls Acceptable?
It goes without saying that only the people running paywalls like them. Those who have to pay to get past the cash barrier never will. Are paywalls acceptable, though? Regardless of any personal opinion and dislike of the added cost, yes, paywalls are, at the core if it, perfectly acceptable, at least in terms of the idea.
Sites that put paywalls into place are merely exercising their right to charge for their hard work, often forgoing the extra income from adverts. It may only be text on a website, but often a lot of work goes into writing and researching this, so you can’t really hold it against anyone wanting to earn money for that. After all, we all work so we can get paid, and those who run these websites are no different. Okay, so there may be multi-million pound businesses behind the scenes, but it’s still business.
The problem with paywalls really comes down to our basic point from earlier, and that’s user choice. As long as there are free alternatives and no single company has a monopoly on content, paywalls will never be totally successful. Everyone likes to get something for free, so paywalled sites will always lose traffic to those without. At the end of the day, it’s the internet user sitting at home who can determine the success or failure of a site using a paywall. If you don’t like it, don’t visit: simple. The Sun learned that and was forced to change, and no doubt more sites will follow suit as long as the public reaction is similar. Just be prepared for a lot more advertising.