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How much money should someone need to spend online to have full access to creator content?
In Freddie daBoer's recent interesting post contrasting the intrusive ad model with paid content model I find myself nodding along mostly but I didn't come away completely convinced. This post is mostly my unorganized thoughts after reading this piece. I understand and am sympathetic to the need of professional writers to earn an actually living if we want them to be able to write full time, and a good one at that given their importance as sense makers. And I do think the ad model is quite toxic.
What I mainly have problems with is the extremeness of each option. If this cnbc report is to be believed online advertisers spend around $140 billion dollars a year, divided naively and entirely among the 250 million American adults gives us the very rough estimate of $560 per year. The number feels intuitively close but I think the point stands even if it is off by quite a bit. So if I decide to pay the rate the advertisers were paying for my access to various sites how far does $560/year get me. We can start at a premium daBoer substack subscription at a seemingly reasonable $50/year, Scott Alexander is asking for $100/year and we're already at nearly a fourth of our budget!
The difference is conversion rate. DaBoer, Scott and the NYT are all aware that the vast majority of their ad based readers are not going to fork over for the premium model, the ones that do seem able to easily make up the difference for many writers and content creators but I'm less convinced than daBoer that this is a sustainable solution. I do subscribe to some writers and content creators that I like but I like far too many such that if each put up a $5/month paywall, even with a generous software engineer salary I'd have to start picking and choosing very quickly.
It's more than reasonable for writers to optimize for the total amount of dollars flowing into their wallet each month but we should be aware that this is actually quite bad for readers and the open internet in general. Some of the magic of the internet is that we're able to plug into a global conversation and as more and more paywalls go up that conversation becomes more fragment and trying to follow a thread can become increasingly frustrating. This probably doesn't matter much for pure entertainment content but for sense makers and political writers who at least purport to trying to educate and persuade the general population this could exacerbate the process of creating echo chambers and keeping good arguments away from who most needs to read them.
Think of the children! I still remember a time when I was young on the internet with no credit card. It's all good and well to expect adults to pay their way but much like the poor kids don't have income at all, disposable or otherwise. The internet kids are going to come up in under Freddies paradigm is very unlike the open and free internet I grew up with. I think in many ways for the worse.
Freddie only really touches on the phenomenon from the perspective of someone who is also writing a blog,
Makes some sense from the perspective of someone who floats around and comments on things but works less well for communities like this one where we come together and discuss articles. It's one thing to as a writer choose not to comment on something paywalled to save the money but being locked out of these secondary discussions is a larger cost.
This is perhaps the thing that most frustrates me. I'm the type of person who would rather buy a piece of media I'm only going to consume once than rent it just in case I ever want to return to it. I actually quite dislike the model where I pay someone for temporary access to something.
A potential solution is ads plus a paid membership to remove them, something like how the basic attention token works where you can decide how intrusive to make ads and get paid in the token from the advertiser to be used to forward on to some content creator. You can either endure enough ads to afford access or turn off ads and load your BAT wallet occasionally with real $. Perhaps another option is bundling in the direction the TV networks go. Maybe I should be able to subscribe to the rationalist diaspora a la cart or get them all for $40/month distributed according to how much some central entity thinks they draw new subscribers.
What does the motte think about paywalls and potential alternatives.
Re: the Compact article and paywalls for news sites, I can accept the idea of paying a subscription to an individual writer (like Freddie or Scott), but an article on some publication I may not have heard of, let alone read a physical issue of? No fucking thanks, and I probably will be fine reading a pirated/de-paywalled version of it.
Anyways, the subscription model is more equitable for the content creators, but at the same time...how much money should one make writing the kind of stuff that Freddie deBoer writes? As you get at, writing Discourse and making money are at cross-purposes. I think, at best, something like what Freddie does should be paid out of a broad or universal fund instead of him having to see how many people subscribe, in exchange for no paywalls.
There's also different kinds of content creators: YouTubers rely on a combination of ad money (less reliable these days), sponsorship deals (product placement), and patronage services (this is probably where the bulk of their money comes from today). Creators of certain types of content (art in particular) use patronage-type services and "fansites" (which means that, if you have the desire and ability to save the content to your computer, you can effectively get a lot of value out of one month's subscription). You don't have to support a creator for a whole year or even more than one month, though you are cutting yourself off from their work for a time (which can bite if their content is offered with a time restriction), and limiting the social access you have to said creator (a big aspect of subscribing).
As I hinted at earlier, I think the ideal system would be either some sort of UBI for creators, or some sort of BAT-style micropayments-per-access like you've mentioned.
This was an angle I was considering going, what sounds right to me for the upper echelon writers was something like $350k+/year or so sounds fair to me if compared to white collar intellectuals, they're at the top of their pareto distributions. If you compare them to rock stars or other entertainers then you could justify much higher. It does seem like one thing the internet has definitely done is make potential audiences wide enough to elevate what once might have been a cushy newspaper columnist job to heights that before were once in a generation levels.
350k/yr?! Christ, no wonder we have a glut of shitty writers! Why on earth would anyone pay that much for their thoughts?
Twain, Asimov, etc didn't command such a price. Are these people the defining voices of culture? No. Unequivocally no. So what, de Boer writes a half-decent thinkpiece twice a year - and what difference does it make? Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars should require at least a little impact. The same amount for preaching to the choir (which it seems like he's doing, given that I only find his sticks through the Motte, under the "omg look at this semi-outgroup fellow using our talking points" section) seems quite excessive.
Eh, this is like saying "Why should someone be paid millions of dollars a year for being good at throwing a ball?" Why does the lady who turned her shitty fanfic into Fifty Shades of Gray deserve to be rich? For that matter, how much is the average software engineer working on new and better ways to serve you monetized content actually contributing to society?
People are worth what someone is willing to pay them.
Well, yes, people are worth whatever the market will bear. But the prices talked about are a little absurd, aren't they? The fact that you can make this much money from putting pen to paper means that there a demand that is unmet, clearly - I'm just questioning the quality of the product. And (myself obviously excepted), we've seen better writing even here. How much is great writing worth? I'll grant that it's worth a living, perhaps, depending on market conditions, but why should wannabe authors not be subject to the same economic pressures as the rest of the world?
Why?
Point at any of my examples, or any other career, and explain to me the objective measurement of how much their work "should" be worth.
I don't understand where you're getting the idea that they're not. Do you think anyone who starts a substack is making Scott or Freddie numbers? Even if they are actually good writers? The vast majority are not.
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