Isn’t there something fundamentally healthier about a web where you directly pay for what you use? (Not saying they shouldn’t have micropayments, etc. but at this point I’m ready for the adtech industry to stop sucking the oxygen out of the room)
I'm not certain it would be fundamentally better. It seems possible! But it will have new dynamics at scale, and our current predicament already suggests that we aren't great at predicting what will emerge from them.
But I wanted to follow on here because I think the Web's dynamics around cost/money apply a lot of selective pressure once most things grow bigger than a hobby until they're big enough to leverage network effects.
Information is a public good, in an economic sense. It is not, generally, something people pay for, and historically hasn't been
The initial age of directly-paid content -- a small number of largely business-oriented, small-circulation newspapers, of which the WSJ is a descendant -- existed only from about the mid-18th through mid-19th centuries. By the 1850s, mass-circulation advertising-supported penny papers had become a norm, and a problem, as they were driven by oitrage, hoaxes, scandals, and direct manipulation, the clickbait of the day.
There's a wondrful contemporaneous account of this I cannot recommend highly enough, Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism, from a UC Berkeley lecture delivered in 1909:
During the 1930s the new medium of radio saw huge debates on public vs. private control of the airwaves. Notably, the US adopted a private model, the UK public, with the BBC, citing the dangers of private and foreign influence. Robert McChesney has covered this in Telecommunications, mass media and democracy: battle for control of US broadcasting, 1928-35:
"Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, described knowledge in the following way: “he who receives an idea from me,receives instruc-tion himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me”. In doing so, Jefferson anticipated the modern concept of a public good. Today we recognize that knowledge is not only a public good but also a global or international public good.We have also come to recognize that knowledge is central to successful development. The international community,through institutions like the World Bank, has a collective responsibility for the creation and dissemination of one global public good—knowledge for development."
A media readers are required to pay for directly is one that's available to few (especially on a global scale), which is incentivised by that revenue stream, and which seeks other forms of revenue, notably advertising, with all the ills that entails, again covered 110 years ago in Hamilton Holt's little book, an summarised by publisher John Swinton, quoted anonymously in that work:
There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
>Information is a public good, in an economic sense. It is not, generally, something people pay for, and historically hasn't been.
Just by being public good does not make something necessarily free. For example street lightning.
If you seek information on "Does God exist?" you can get different answers depending whom you ask. Some of these sources made a lot of money in the process, because their information had certain non-zero value to those receiving it.
Also certain types of information cost resources to produce. I pay for Youtube because I want to support certain kind of information creation that I consume while not having my intelligence insulted with ads. The same for MIT Technology Review and Nautilus.
IMO there is nothing wrong in information costing money but the two problems I see are:
- Absolute pricing models create inequality. $1/week for WSJ is very different to someone making $5,000/week vs someone $50/week and they both 'deserve' to have access to it.
- The user experience of walled gardens is terrible, as you have to subscribe to each independently
"Public good" is a specific term of art in the economic sense. It doesn't mean that the good has no cost, but that its price fails to correspond to either that and/or the value, where costs of production, price of exchange, and value of use, are three distinct concepts quite often confused in economic discussions (a topic for another day, though I've written on this at https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/48rd02/cost_va... I've also just learnt that Marx anticipates me by a century and a half).
A public good:
In economics, a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be excluded from use or could be enjoyed without paying for it, and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others or the goods can be effectively consumed simultaneously by more than one person.
The problem then is that attempting to enforce per-use payments for access to public goods is tremendously inefficient.
You cannot effectively and with low consequences restrict access. The cost, particularly at a global level, will mean that there are many, often billions, who won't have access.
Your own ability to pay for content means that you've got an influence that those who don't lack. This ultimately gets us to a Patronage model of content. That's an option, but what you end up with is the patron's interests unduly represented. If you lived in 18th century Europe, your preference in large-ensemble music or visual artworks would best be strongly similar to that of the Catholic Church. I had the realisation, watching a computer animation festival in the late 1980s, that the role of the church in modern computer graphics was largely replaced by tobacco companies, who'd financed a large share of the entries.
There is also the contrast of information which the audience seeks vs. that which the creator or publisher wishes to have distributed. The former is copy or content, the latter is advertising and propaganda. They are not always clearly distinguished. And the economics of each are dramatically different.
The world I'd like to see is one in which a means-to-pay funding model, some semblance of a universal or basic income, a modest performance bonus, and universal access, are strong if not global norms.
Effectively, markets and information play together extraordinarily poorly.
> These sites have to make money somehow or they won’t exist for long.
Crowdfunding (Kickstarter, Patreon etc.) provides a successful model for funding content quite directly, without slapping a hefty paywall onto it. This stuff is not rocket science, it actually works quite nicely.
First of all, they are probably doing both things today.
Second, not necessarily the same people that complains about adds complains about paywalls.
Also, If you don't live in the US, 99.99% of wsj' contents is irrelevant, excepting that one article you read once an year. So subscribing is not worth it.
Meanwhile it excludes a ridiculous amount of people of a very important subject for the whole world.
Please track the hell out of me but don't paywall on subjects that matter.
