You’ll get what you pay for

For years, Vox prided itself on being free, saying that this universal, ad-supported access was a key part of its mission. Then the pandemic came and ad sales slumped, and Vox started asking readers for contributions “to help keep our work paywall-free.” Multiple rounds of layoffs later (one of which, full disclosure, got me), this year Vox finally put up a partial paywall “to help us weather the notoriously fickle advertising market.” Another paywall holdout bites the dust. It’s not just Vox; fellow Vox Media property The Verge, followed suit a few months later. CNN and Reuters recently announced their own paywall plans.

And then we have BuzzFeed. Not too long ago, it seemed like the paywall-free future of online journalism, with its ability to wring maximum traffic out of benevolent Big Tech overlords. Now those overlords aren’t so benevolent, BuzzFeed News is gone, and BuzzFeed spent 2024 selling itself for parts and pivoting to AI. It still owns HuffPost, somehow, and HuffPost is still sans paywall…and asking for voluntary contributions to try to keep it that way.

Thanks to the rise of generative AI and the fall of social media-fueled, algorithmically-driven traffic, there’s a better case than ever to be made that at least some of your content should be behind a paywall.

Traffic sources that many publications came to rely on have dried up. Meta is now doing its utmost to push news out of everyone’s Facebook, Instagram, and Threads feeds. I don’t think I need to say more about how Twitter’s relationship with journalists and journalism has changed, but feel free to search “lazy linking” for the latest example of this. If you look it up on Google, the answer will probably come to you in the AI Overview (powered by ~*~Gemini~*~) that Google has forced atop into everyone’s search results. Scroll way down for the actual search results, but good luck finding a quality, human-produced website amid the ever-increasing pile of AI slop that search engines can’t or won’t detect and deprecate.

Which brings me to the other big reason why publishers who resisted paywalls for so long are putting them up now. Free content will be increasingly synonymous with AI slop and other low-quality content that’s barely worth anyone’s time to read, let alone pay to advertise on. A paywall tells readers that there’s something behind it that’s worth paying for. Readers who once balked at the thought of paying for news may well find the prospect more attractive as the free alternatives go away or get worse.

The cruel irony, of course, is that so much journalism and so many journalism websites helped create the AI slop producers, whose bots scraped the “open web,” copyrighted news websites very much included, for training data. One way publishers can get any kind of return on the value they unknowingly provided to AI companies? Stop providing it for free. Paywalls can be a way to stop the scraping — not a foolproof one, but let’s assume that paywalls get better at blocking scrapers now that we see the need for them to do so — and then publishers can license that content to AI companies. Which is exactly what’s happening right now, and hopefully will not (but probably will) end the same way those news partnerships with social media companies did.

Readers who are willing and able to pay will get content that they made an affirmative choice to consume, rather than something they came across by passively clicking on it (full disclosure again: I work for a very-much-paywalled news site now). Publishers will have to make sure they’re giving readers their money’s worth. Maybe that’s addictive word puzzles, maybe it’s market-leading coverage of a certain niche, maybe it’s really talented writers, maybe it’s scoops, maybe it’s investigations, maybe it’s opinions and analysis. And publishers will also have to figure out what kind of paywall works best for the audience they have or want. That might mean paywalling everything, or it might mean a “freemium” model that balances the need to have some readers paying for their journalism with the reality that not all of them will.

Yes, there will be a lot of people who can’t or don’t want to pay for news. They’ll be getting it from the diminishing number of free news sites, the scraps that paywalled sites throw at nonpaying readers, and an exponentially growing pile of AI slop, misinformation, and “something I saw/heard on social media/Reddit/some guy’s podcast.” We have an idea of the kinds of problems this information diet causes, but we probably don’t yet know how bad things can get. In the end, we’ll all get what we paid for.