Paywall x

Paywalls provide businesses with consistent revenue. When people pay a regular monthly or yearly membership fee it is easier how much  to determine how much money you have coming in on an annual basis. 

This isn’t always the case if you’re relying on one off payments or purchases for your revenue. This leads to a feast or famine dynamic that many people are unhappy with.

Paywalls are useful for protection purposes. Many companies offer services or access to web content for a fee, ie: music streaming services. 

Companies selling a products only benefit from creating revenue in a physical location that is only made available to the customer at the point of sale. Businesses focused on the intangible can allow access to their site or services at all times. A company that does not have tangible inventory benefits from a paywall in place in order to function as an online business to generate higher income. 

When a user see's that a site has a paywall set up, they assume that something exclusive is on offer. That within itself can be self justifying in some cases.

Paywalls can be more effective than Adverts.
Adverts generally produce revenue if a potential customer clicks on them and the rates are generally low, 0.1% in fact. So if you are relying on a model that requires 10,000 clicks a day in order to generate enough revenue then surely its not the way to go. Paywalls are an excellent way to legitimise the content being provided, which in turn helps to separate the prestigious sites from the lesser sites.

Paywalls: For and Against 

FOR

- Industries not on Paywall are beginning to collapse
- People who do not understand the idea of subscriber fees argue that paywalls won’t work, and that those who advocate for them, don’t understand the Internet. This is not true. These people do not understand the first thing about journalism. It costs money to run a business of this sort, to place reporters at key points to provide us with what we desire. Journalism is a profession, it requires dedicated, hard workers who in turn require a wage, Until newspapers recover a revenue stream for their online product, they have no future.

AGAINST

- Upon asking many young individuals how many were on facebook, they all answered yes. Most implied they would not be able to live without it as if it was some kind of addiction. I went on to ask if they would pay £3 a month for a membership if the need arose and they all happily said yes.
- I then asked if they would pay £10 a month and half of them said no.
- The above statement shows that it would not work unless you are keeping within their means and providing enough content to keep them interested.

For

Q. What does David Simon mean by ‘slow suicide’?

Most people have started getting their information from either social media, watching tv or listening to the radio nowadays. reading newspapers generally helps with your mental stimulation and can slow down aging the brain and without this our society will lack in critical thinking. By the way everything is going right now David thinks that in the future no one will be reading newspapers and that source of information will die out.

Q Why does he mean by saying anti-paywall people “don’t understand the first thing about actual journalism”?

David is claiming that you need skill and dedication to be a journalist and that people who are anti-paywall will not have the capability to replace journalists.

Q What does he mean by “journalism is a profession”?

He's saying that a person who writes for newspapers, magazines, or news websites or prepares news to be broadcasted is actually a profession or a teaching.

Q. What do you think made 1 million people pay for the NYT(New York Times)?

Against

Q What does he mean by “Band-Aid to cover a bullet hole”?

Q How much would you pay for Facebook (or any other social network)? Why this much?

Q. What would make you pay to read a newspaper? (Value-added content)