Salon.com Editor Looks Back At Paywalls 246
Techdirt pointed out an interesting retrospective by Scott Rosenberg, former managing editor of Salon.com, about their experiments with paywalls and how repercussions can last a lot longer than some might expect. "More important, by this point the public was, understandably, thoroughly confused about how to get to read Salon content. It took many years for our traffic to begin to grow again. Paywalls are psychological as much as navigational, and it's a lot easier to put them up than to take them down. Once web users get it in their head that your site is 'closed' to them, if you ever change your mind and want them to come back, it's extremely difficult to get that word out."
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do women need affordable botox? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Last I remember of Salon.com was sometime in 2000 or so, they had some decent stuff. Then the paywall went up ages ago, and I forgot they existed. Except for a few times throughout the decade where Google led me to an article of theirs, only to end up being blocked of by the paywall.
Half of me thinks this is just them screaming "LOOK WE DON'T HAVE A PAYWALL ANYMORE". That is, assuming they actually don't.
Re:He's correct: bootstrap to survive (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, if you ever read TFA, you'd see that the paywall - while it made their future success a lot more challenging - was the only thing that did save them when the money ran out. It was basically put up a paywall and live, hurting, or don't and die out due to lack of revenue (which makes future developments moot). They did what they thought they had to do to survive, and survived, giving them the chance to painfully recover once they were able to drop the paywall.
Re:I got tired of them when they went too far to . (Score:4, Insightful)
People keep saying that, but can you point even a single article on wikipedia which is outrageously incorrect and has been this way for more than a month that it might take to notice vandalism. Fox news on the other hand...
Paywalls will fail unless everyone does it (Score:3, Insightful)
paywalls without a sane business model? (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't understand is paywalls that seem to have been erected without any sane business model in mind. For instance, here [sciencedirect.com] is a physics paper that I needed to look up today. It describes a particle-physics experiment from 1979 that, as a side benefit, ended up producing one of the classic high-precision tests of special relativity. I teach at a community college, so we don't have scientific journals at the library. My wife teaches at a university, so she has electronic access to journals, but the access to this particular publisher's journal only goes back to 1995. So I find the article online, behind a paywall, and I'm all set to pay $10 for a copy, just to avoid the hassle of going to a university library and photocopying it. I click through on the link to buy a copy, and they want $31.50. That's just crazy. Since the price was insane, it motivated me to get in the car, drive 20 minutes to a university library, and find the article down in the basement stacks where they put old journals.
To me, this seems like totally irrational behavior on the part of the publisher. For any product you want to sell, there has to be a price that optimizes your profit. Price it too high, and you don't get enough volume. Price it too low, and you get volume, but not enough of a profit margin. I simply can't believe that $31.50 is the sane, profit-optimizing price for a single academic paper from 1979 -- especially not when it's electronic, so the marginal cost of distribution per copy is essentially zero. My guess is that some of these traditional print publishers simply have their heads in the sand. They believe that the advent of digital music has decimated the music business, so the lesson they take home is that anything digital is like dog poop -- don't touch it, or something bad will happen to you and your business.
Re:salon.com? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not 13 years old (much older) and haven't heard of it. I'm also not acting like a complete shit sack like you are.
Re:salon.com? (Score:4, Insightful)
By 2001, sure, but it had a bunch of hype in 1999 when it bought the WELL and had an IPO. I'm under 30 and remember that!
Re:viewers weren't stupid, they were pissed off (Score:2, Insightful)
You. aren't. reading. accurately. Your .sig ("Please read and at least attempt to understand comment before replying, kthxbye.") is extremely ironic here.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
That was the biggest point in TFA -- it's easy to put a paywall up, it's hard to get readers back if you then take it down.
fast forward 10 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Fast forward 10 years to the present. I would gladly pay 30 dollars a month if all the stuff I read online was written by a professional with classical training in english or journalism. This web2.0 junk means we're all crappy authors who, as I am right now doing, stream their consciousness into textarea boxes, never a second glance at the same sentence for proofediting; rushing to the submit button to beat my peers in the subtle effect that I will feel smarter than everyone who posted thereafter.
Re:I got tired of them when they went too far to . (Score:3, Insightful)
So, can you link to a politically focused article which is factually wrong in the key facts presented?
Re:Do women need affordable botox? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Did Salon drop their paywall? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I got tired of them when they went too far to . (Score:3, Insightful)
This is known as Ad hominem fallacy [wikipedia.org]. Can you show how the entry on Sarah Palin was factually wrong in the key facts presented, rather than just casting suspicion on the sources?
Re:paywalls without a sane business model? (Score:5, Insightful)
I teach at a community college, so we don't have scientific journals at the library. My wife teaches at a university, so she has electronic access to journals
You miss the point. You're not the costumer. The universities are. By charging an outrageous per-article price, the publishers muscle universities into subscribing to entire catalogs.
Of course, in our trying times, university libraries are dropping journal subscriptions left and right. Once this happens enough, the most prominent researches stop publishing with those journals because they know nobody will read their work if they do.
It will be very interesting to see where the equilibrium settles with this.
Re:How paywalls could work (Score:2, Insightful)
I believe the "paywall" approach would work if there was one dominant way to pay for a "pass" (or a micropayment account) that would unlock millions of sites.
As with most technologies, the porn industry got this down to a science years ago.
Re:I got tired of them when they went too far to . (Score:3, Insightful)
If you can get past the left-right paradigm then you'd see that MSNBC and CNN are on just as bad as Fox.
Really? Please point out to me the anti-government rallies that MSNBC or CNN organized and sponsored, so that they could report on them.
And what about Register Walls? (Score:4, Insightful)
Paywalls are bad, so are Register Walls.
What is a Register Wall? The kind of nonesense you get if you go to the New York Times website.
I have no idea if they still require me to login to view their content, but they used to.
The fact that I have no idea if they still require me to login shows just how entrenced the damage to your reputation is..
I simply won't visit the New York Times website because I don't want YET ANOTHER PASSWORD to remember. Any site that wants me to register just to view content, I don't join.
Apart from Amazon, any site that wants to create an account just to purchase, I pass. I recently tried to purchase "Getting Real" but Lulu.com wanted me to register to make a purchase.
Why can't I just provide my name, address, credit card info, etc, then purchase? Why do I need to waste time creating an account, then have that information stored by them forever?
They did not get the sale. Their loss. I can read Getting Real online for free.
Re:salon.com? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you know about something doesn't mean everyone else does.
I'm too young to remember Jaws, Howard Cosell, the Dick van Dyke Show, James Cagney, flappers, and ragtime, but I know what all these are. It's called "cultural literacy" [wikipedia.org], and without it, much of the world WOOSHes by you. Reading helps.
Salon hasn't been relevant in a long time, partially because of the paywall, but I still see regular allusions to it in the media.
Shut Up !!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Shut the fuck up! Murdock is about to institute pay walls! We want him gone! Please please shut up!