Why we should be paying for content
My life can be measured through my consumption of magazines and their digital descendants. From my 1980s Twinkle comics through to the 90’s boyband filled pages of Fast Forward, the early teen years of Sugar, Bliss, J17 & More, the celebrity obsessed university days of Heat, OK & Hello, on to the Elle, Vogue & Harpers subscriptions and holidays with shared copies of Grazia and Marie Claire, a lot of money has gone on glossy pages and carefully crafted content.
In more recent years though, my spend on written content has been a lot less. Yes, there’s the many unread copies of Harpers stacked up from the subscription I’ve not yet got round to cancelling, the New Yorker, New Statesman or Vanity Fair that might accompany me on a train or plane, but they’re nothing compared to the page views I’ve racked up on their online editions, or to the hours I’ve spent reading pieces across the English-speaking internet, expanding horizons and covering subjects too varied to begin to think about.
Over the past decade, this eclectic collection of online snippets has become the way I consume articles, stories, reports and features. I’m always one click on a Twitter link away from the latest piece from a favourite or brilliant new writer, and I don’t have to leave the sofa to read it. Not only do I not have to pay for any of what I read, I don’t have to go anywhere to buy it, carry it home or skip through pages I’m less interested in to get to the ones I bought it for.
When the Times introduced a paywall in 2010, it seemed like some form of elitist madness. Now however, not so much… As online ad spend moves away from classic display advertising in favour of everything Google and Facebook, it becomes more and more difficult for online publishers to make money. And the thing is, writers need to be paid in order to continue to be able to work as writers. In a time where online reach is global (compare the Guardian’s 155m monthly unique web users to their average daily print circulation of 138k) and stories in reaction to news events published within the hour rather than the day, week or month, we expect to be able to access large amounts of great content on everything we have even the slightest interest in, which means a lot of writing needs to be done.
The job losses at digital publishers in January 2019 have left us with a clear message that it’s no longer sustainable for us to get what we want for free. We’re paying for Netflix subscriptions, Spotify and books on Kindles, but seem to have a barrier when it comes to doing the same for journalism. The closure of The Pool last week really brought this home, with many of my favourite writers being left owed the sort of money that even the successful Crowdfunder which has been set up is unlikely to recoup. From the comments online, I’m not the only one thinking that I’d have been happy to sign up to the £3 Editor’s Circle subscription if I’d have known it was what I needed to do to be able to continue to read their work.
So from now on, I’m not taking great content for granted. I’m going to start with a Guardian subscription (worth it for Eva Wiseman alone), follow it up with the New Statesman and start clicking on a fair few Patreons and ‘buy me a coffee’ links. At a cost of less than I used to shell out on my addiction to celebrity glossies, it’s totally worth it.
