I would assume not everybody who is now in the click bait "journalism" and blog spam business could actually be a journalist. So if those would simply be starved off (which is a big if, bordering on utopia, I admit that), there would be a lot more eyeballs for those who remain; add to that figuring out micro-payments and getting rid of the bloated ad networks (if you must have ads, display a few curated ones for things you actually can endorse), and suddenly the situation is a lot less bleak.
If there was "free food" but after a while it was watered down so much and had so many additives that it just made you sick and left you hungry, why wouldn't you go back to normal food? Yes, it's infinitely more expensive than "free", but getting sick from it and still being hungry also has all sorts of hidden costs. So, where's the free market with people operating in their own interest, right?
Sure, but remove any mention of micro-payments from my comment and the point is unchanged. I would consider it a minor and optional detail, at least compared to people caring enough about the quality of journalism that hacks would have no audience. I did call that utopian after all.
But just because there is a big distance between here and there doesn't mean there's not a "there" there, and if people cared enough, they would find a way. Yes, it's vague, but this island seems to be sinking, the next one looks better to me; that's all I can say from here. People liking instant gratification over attention spans and smart long-term decisions is not something to adapt to, much less exploit, it's something that we will either deal with, or something that will deal with us.
And in regards to micro-payments I think it would also help if anonymity wasn't under attack so much. When people seriously drive towards abolishing cash in the physical world, of course introducing the equivalent of cash on the web can't really work; I'm not saying it would be necessarily trivial otherwise, but there's a really hostile climate towards it on top of it. It's also a political and social problem, not just a technical one.
The ITU spent a bunch of time figuring out how to make different payment schemes work on the Internet. For the most part we do not want them, but maybe some of the pieces can be used to implement micropayments, carefully so as to avoid the Comcast/Netflix extortion problems the other parts of the ITU proposals could create (AIUI/IIRC).
Plenty of people pay for the FT, New York Times, Economist, New Yorker, Atlantic, et cetera. One can't complain about click bait/advertising and paywalls.
It is true that many pay for digital subscriptions but I did not interpret the "will people pay for it?" as just a non-zero number of subscribers.
Instead, "will people pay for it?" is often interpreted as shorthand for "would enough people pay enough money to make it economically viable?" (E.g. good salaries for journalists, strong profits for the publisher, etc.)
Yes, those websites you mentioned are attracting paying subscribers to avoid paywalls but as far as I can tell, nobody is making significant profits from it. For example, NYT digital subscriptions are growing -- and ad revenue from online is growing -- but the profits (if any) are not replacing the lost profits from traditional print ads. For online subscriptions, many publishers are losing money or barely breaking even. No newspaper including NYT has solved the economic puzzle of digital subscriptions bringing the type of money that 1990s paper classifieds + ads brought. So far, the answer to "will people pay for it?" appears to be "no".
From what I can tell, the kind of publishing that works very well on subscriptions is industry-specific for a specialized audience. For example, the NationalJournal (costs $7000 to $25000) for following blow-by-blow legislation in Washington DC or Gartner Group (~$20k/yr) for business analysis news. On the other hand, the mass audience journalism like NYT and USAToday is replicated on too many other free sources. As a result, mainstream publishing will always depend more on heavy-handed advertising rather than subscriptions for the majority of revenue.
> On the other hand, the mass audience journalism like NYT and USAToday is replicated on too many other free sources.
This is huge. For a story that anyone can cover ("Cat Stuck in Tree!"), there's mass-market competition where a hundred players can run their own versions of the same story. If one of those players is willing to work for free (or Reddit karma, or 'exposure', or whatever else), then the value of that information drops to ~$0.
Mass market journals used to get by on marginal costs, but those are ~0 too now. What they have left to offer is writing quality and accuracy, but its increasingly looking like those aren't worth what they cost. And the quality dilution of high-end journalism has made the problem worse, by driving journalists into ever-more-direct competition with the free sources they can't possibly outprice.
> No newspaper including NYT has solved the economic puzzle of digital subscriptions bringing the type of money that 1990s paper classifieds + ads brought.
Now we're really getting to the heart of it: in an economic environment where growth is valued above all else, including actual value, publishers can't accept that they might have to make less money.
Honestly, though, I am highly skeptical that for-profit businesses controlling our media is even a good thing. Look at NPR, which is supported entirely by donations and grants: they don't make much money, and incidentally they do some of the best reporting I've come across.
Ultimately, I think the NYT and its ilk aren't "failing" at subscription models, they're failing because they can't compete with a myriad of more local news sources. It's hard to maintain a business when you have to send reporters to Cairo to report on Arab spring or to Tokyo to report on the Fukushima reactors, and local readers can get eyewitness reports from Redditors and Twitterers. It doesn't help that major news sources are increasingly untrustworthy and sensationalized. Ads are allowing them to delay the inevitable, but I think the end result will be decentralization. There's no reason for me to get my news about the Arab spring from the NYT when Al Jazeera has reporters who have been on the ground there for decades and have far more context; there's no reason for me to get my news about Fukushima from the NYT when I can read the English version of the Japan Times. News Aggregators make this easier. And incidentally, there are plenty of small news sources operating on subscription, pay-per-article, PWYW, donation, or other business models.
Of course you can. People are completely free to complain if the car market only support the extreme ends of lemons and Ferraris, a situation that can occur when the market balance between buyer and producer starts to break down.
The marginal cost of providing content is now essentially 0, and there are few-to-no good models for how to handle capital costs when they can't be subtly rolled into marginal prices. That doesn't mean any of the existing solutions are acceptable.
A paywall subscription to the Boston Globe will run me (long term) $7/week. That's $0.30/week less than they would charge me for a daily physical paper.
Full access to Buzzfeed, meanwhile, is 100% free and still isn't worth what it costs.
So yes, I'll complain. I'll complain that I have a choice between (malware-serving) advertisements, value-erasing sponsored content, and usurious paywalls that start at monthly subscriptions.
I know this isn't an easy problem. Microtransactions (pay per article) are unappealing to consumers. Tipping (Patreon) isn't a stable revenue stream for large organizations. And no matter what you paywall, someone will put it up for free. Even academic journals haven't beaten that reality. But for all that, I still don't have to like the existing answers.
A paywall subscription to the Boston Globe will run me (long term) $7/week. That's $0.30/week less than they would charge me for a daily physical paper.
But in order to make that a strong argument, you are implicitly assuming that the marginal cost of the physical version is significant. It's probably easy to argue that it is significant compared to the marginal cost of online distribution, but is it significant compared to the capital costs?
In the same vein, what are you including in your model of marginal cost? Are you including printing press and datacenter operations in your mental calculation, or only the cost of distribution itself? Because with those, the marginal costs are much closer to eachother than without -- although they're possibly still an order of magnitude apart, I really have no idea.
But will people pay for it? You cannot pay your rent or student loans with exposure.