Making a living from writing is extraordinarily difficult — ask me how I know this — and I have often been tempted to put much if not all of my non-novel writing behind a paywall (SubStack, etc.). There are two problems with this action: the first is that my blogging has never been a serious attempt to make money, which is why I have to resort to the occasional ad hoc beg-a-thon for crises, and Patreon for “subscription” support. (And to those of you who participate in the latter, thank you again: you have no idea how much it helps.)
The second reason I don’t charge for access is that to be perfectly frank, I don’t think my blogging is that valuable in the grand scheme of things, and charging for access would be somewhat… impertinent on my part. Put baldly, anyone with a little spare time can find pics of beautiful women, cars, guns and so on for themselves. As for my commentary: well, I know that many people — in the beginning, anyway — told me that my blog made them realize that they weren’t the only ones who felt this way, especially whether it came to political outlook and social perspective. Of gun love, we will not speak. But is it all that valuable?
And that’s all I care to say about that.
What I really want to talk about is how the various online media are starting to charge readers, most often not for their entire opus, but for certain articles only. Here are a few examples:
- The Daily Mail:
- The Sun:
and we all know about - PJMedia:
This, as opposed to other outlets who have pretty much set upon putting their entire publication behind a paywall, like The New York Times (lol never gonna happen), The Epoch Times, Britain’s Daily Telegraph and so on. In several cases, I would really like to read their stuff but I can’t afford the subscription — not individually, but cumulatively, all those subscriptions would add up to a considerable amount which I cannot possibly afford. (Ditto TV/Internet streaming services, but that’s a story for another time.)
Look, I don’t have a problem with any of this. It costs a great deal to run a media company — although I would argue much less than when they were reliant on newsprint for their distribution — but even with the economies of Internet publication, they still have to pay for content (writers, photographers) and production (editorial/site maintenance staff etc.) as well as hosting bandwidth, which means that they have to charge for access. TANSTAAFL, and this is as true for them as for any other business which offers a product to consumers.
We consumers have been spoiled in this regard, because when the Internet started, so much of the content came free and we became spoiled thereby. So now when we get confronted by a paywall, we get all huffy and say, “It ain’t worth it!” and in many cases it isn’t.
I know that many people find my reading of the often-dreadful Daily Mail inexplicable, but let me nevertheless use them as an example for how I treat the mini-paywalls. Here’s an example of yesterday’s Mail headlines:
I find this interesting. If the Mail thinks that Gold-Digger story is enticing enough to make me want to join their little subscription club, they are sadly mistaken. (Given the profile of their average reader, however, they may not be altogether wrong.) And the prurient reader will find several examples of the Pineapple Sack type, all for free.
The only one of the four example articles which interests me at all is the one about pay-per-mile driving charges, not because it would affect me or most of my Readers, it being a UK phenomenon; but because if the stupid Green Nude Heel program were to be implemented Over Here by various Green politicians of the Biden/Harris/Obama stripe, it would very much be relevant. And as I so often say: stuff that happens Over There will often make its way Over Here at some point, so we need to be vigilant.
Anyway, while there may occasionally be a paywalled article in any of the places I frequent for my daily news, generally speaking the PPV aspect is mostly an irritant — and as I’ve illustrated above, often not even that because the topic, details and/or commentary thereon is of little interest to me.
What I’m discovering is that there are a few writers / commentators whose stuff I might be tempted into paying for on a subscription basis — Victor Davis Hanson and Jordan Peterson come to mind — but honestly, they are few and far between.
And Megyn Kelly would have to broadcast her show in the nude to get my subscription dollar, and maybe not even then.
I am not at all averse to media putting adverts and commercials in their product to generate revenue, similar to what newspapers and broadcast TV stations have always done — provided that said ads are not too large, too many, too obtrusive or too repetitive. And the internet print outlets have only themselves to blame for the arrival of services like AdBlock, when the ads suddenly started shouting at me or auto-loading some fucking mini-movie which interrupted my reading. I know the rationale for such commercials — I worked in the advertising business for years — but I reject it utterly. There is a reason why TV channels could only run a few minutes’ worth of commercials per hour back in the day, and that’s because when the commercials became all-pervasive and a considerable irritant, then government had to step in and we all know what happens in such cases.
Anyway, what we’re dealing with now is a media environment which is constantly changing, much as the broadcast media changed with the arrival of cable. All I can say is that everyone, from the DailyMail to PJMedia to Insty to humble bloggers like me, needs to be aware of their limitations.
I think I know mine, but I’m not so sure about the big guys.
