Online magazines
October 2019
The steep decline in the sale of newspapers is often blamed on the internet, but whoever is to responsible, most have lost over half their readers since 2000. I recently saw a newspaper editor ask a group of about fifty businesspeople how many of them had paid for a newspaper that day; two hands went up. I’m surprised he didn’t burst into tears.
However, I am afraid that the papers have, to some extent, brought this tragedy on themselves. When the internet emerged, they panicked, and most of them decided that they would simply publish everything online for nothing but carry on charging for the paper edition. I wonder why they thought this odd arrangement would work; inevitably, print sales dropped; worse, online advertising revenues proved feeble.
Worse still, readers quickly lost the habit of paying for their news and comment, but writers still must be paid. So, what are the options for generating income from online publishing? No one knows; there are three independent websites launched this year that offer serious journalism but use three different business models.
First, there is thearticle.com, which publishes thoughtful comment pieces on many subjects every day, is free to read and pays its writers partly by sharing the advertising revenue with them. Inevitably, this means that advertising adorns the site, you can’t escape it. It also offers its own social media platform which they hope will become a place of ‘entertaining exchanges and civilised conversation’.
The second is tortoisemedia.com, which also offers regular opinion pieces, (about one each day), which are generally longer than those in thearticle.com. It costs either £24 a month, or £250 for two years if you pay upfront. This feels expensive to me, even though it means that there is no advertising. My monthly digital subscription to The Spectator is only £4.99.
The third is an American import: theathletic.co.uk, a subscription (£60 annually) sports website which is new in the UK but has already gathered over half a million subscribers in the North America, each paying about $60 annually. Investors’ funding has allowed them to recruit relieved sports writers whose traditional employers, newspapers, are fading away. Initially it will focus only on football, which is very shrewd; the international appeal of the English Premier League may help them to sell subscriptions worldwide.
Each of these is trying a different approach to generating money from online journalism: advertising, subscription or subscription with niche specialisation.
Maybe they will all flourish; maybe none will. My own feeling is that the subscription model is a more secure way to run a business, and I am not alone; Mozilla, who make the excellent Firefox browser, is testing an advertising free news service, also £60 pa, which will aggregate the feeds from a number of online publications that you would otherwise have to pay for, or that accept advertising which Firefox will strip out.
There are other ideas; Axate.com, for example, is a payment method that makes it economic for sites to collect very small fees – a few pence – in return for access to specific articles (archive material, perhaps); substack.com is a site that makes publishing paid-for email newsletters easy.
My own view is that people don’t like advertising much, and most will happily pay a little to avoid it, especially if they feel they are supporting a worthwhile concern with a sense of community. There is also a growing rediscovery by readers of a very old truth: in a world of fake news, the source of your news and comment has a huge bearing on how reliable and worthwhile it is.
Perhaps, after a flurry of excitement over something for nothing, we are remembering that you do, after all, tend to get what you pay for.
Extra for the Website
Links from the piece:
The Athletic: https://theathletic.co.uk/
The Article: https://www.thearticle.com/
Tortoise Media: https://www.tortoisemedia.com/
Axate: https://www.axate.com/
Substack: https://substack.com/
Firefox’s partner that is providing the advertising free news service: https://scroll.com/
Very USA -centric at the moment, but you can see how it works.
Information on the decline in newspaper circulations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_circulation
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