People have been running social platforms and media companies for literal decades, after all, all while Musk was busy with cars and spaceships and whatnot. A fair number of lessons have been learned! But Musk — so resolutely convinced of his own genius — has dedicated himself to making old mistakes new again, compressing a lifetime of bad ideas into six short months.1 It’s his most reliable pattern: announce a crazy new policy, preferably on a weekend; face huge blowback from users; reverse the policy, claim you were misinterpreted all along or just pretend it never happened.

So when I saw this tweet on Saturday afternoon, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

Rolling out next month, this platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per article basis with one click.

This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article.…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2023

Since embeds of his new longer-than-280-characters tweets don’t show the full text, here’s what it says:

Rolling out next month, this platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per article basis with one click.

This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article.

Should be a major win-win for both media orgs & the public.

Fiiiiiiiiiinally, Elon turns his attention to micropayments. (Pretty sure this is in the Book of Revelation somewhere.)

The idea of news publishers charging readers by the article is not a new one. At least once an hour, someone tweets about “why hasn’t anyone figured out how to let me buy one article????” Literally dozens of micropayments-for-news startups have come and gone; dozens of publishers have run tests of various models; none have gained much traction.

Even today, well into the 2020s, you can find people saying the dream is an “iTunes for news” that — as the iTunes Store did 20 years ago — allows you to buy a single song (an article) rather than the full album (a subscription). (They say this despite the fact that approximately zero people still buy MP3s that way; instead, they pay a monthly subscription fee to Spotify or Apple.)

I’ve long been a micropayments skeptic. Not because I have any philosophical issue with the idea; I’m all for publishers making money and readers consuming news. My skepticism is driven by it being a strategy that sounds appealing but works poorly in practice. Others have written about the problems with micropayments at great length, but here are, to my mind, the most significant:

Friction at the story level.

What do people do when they hit a news site’s paywall? We have some data on that question, from a Gallup/Knight Foundation survey last fall. They asked American adults: “Suppose you were trying to access a news story online and had to pay to keep reading or watching it. Which ONE of the following would you be most likely to do?”

48% said they would “try to access the information elsewhere for free from a different news outlet.” 28% would “move on to something else or to a different news story.” 7% would “try to find information about the news story on social media.” 4% would “sign up for a free trial if available.” 3% would try to “get the story through friends or family who already have access.”

A measly 1% would “pay for access to the story or outlet.”

In the overwhelming majority of cases, a person faced with the need to pay a news site money will say “no, thank you.” You can view that as an artifact of subscription models, or you can view it as evidence of how transient most news stories are in people’s information lives. It’s hard to evaluate how much an individual article is “worth” before you’ve actually consumed it — and there is always free competition available, either on the same topic or in the broader universe of “things to click on in my feed.”

Friction at the payment level.

If an individual publisher sets up their own micropayments system, getting money will require readers setting up an account, attaching a credit card, and all the usual stuff that moving money online requires. Not many people will do that to read a single news story.

So maybe they sign on to one of the many micropayment startups that want to create an industry-wide network of news sites using a common payment platform — either as part of a pan-publisher subscription or on a pay-per-article basis. Unfortunately, none of them have the scale to be appealing or the appeal to build scale. (“Just sign up with your NewzBux account!” isn’t much of a pitch to your readers if they’ve never heard of NewzBux, or InfoCents, or FactCoins, or whatever.) And the companies that might be able to start with scale (Google, Facebook) are not ones that publishers trust with their money. And whoever owns the pipes, they’ll want their 30% cut.

Most paywalls aren’t that hard.

In a digital universe where every news story is behind a hard paywall — one impenetrable to the non-paying reader — then a micropayments model might make sense. But that’s not the digital universe we live in. The number of completely paywalled sites is low and typically either hyperlocal (a county-seat weekly with no competition) or high-end (think The Information or Politico Pro). Nearly all news sites will let a random web user read a story (or two, or five) for free. It’s only after a given number of clicks that the wall goes up.

If you want to think of that as “news sites already offer micropayments for those first five articles — they’ve just set the price at $0,” be my guest. And for those times when someone really wants to read just one article, that free allotment allows all the paywall workarounds that the savvy digital news consumer knows about. (We’re all adults here; we can talk about incognito windows.) If most paywalls aren’t that hard, there’s little pressure for a paid product to get around them on a single story.

No one agrees on what micropayments are.

Is a micropayment 10 cents for one article? That was the number Elon Musk was thinking about in this video from November, when he complained that he should be able to pay 10 cents to read an especially good Philadelphia Inquirer story despite not living in Philadelphia.

.@elonmusk describes the issue of reading articles with paywalls. In clips never shown before in our interview he alludes to the value of what Twitter can bring. He also talks about how the media wants to own their subscribers. @kgee @EliBurton_ @klwtts pic.twitter.com/WsA2lUHo0S

— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) November 1, 2022

If there is a sustainable price for journalism, it isn’t 10 cents an article. A large scale data analysis from Medill found that digital news subscribers don’t even visit those news sites on most days. For small local news sites, the typical subscriber visits once every three days. At larger sites, it’s once every five days. Those visits can include consuming multiple articles, of course, but the point is 10 cents an article would be a radical price reduction for most subscribers — and thus a radical revenue reduction for most publishers. Price points will have to be higher — and thus less appealing to fly-by readers.

Publishers don’t want to cannibalize subscribers.

It’s not at all unusual for a business to insist on their product being purchased in a particular quantity. Try to go to the grocery store and buy one peanut M&M, or one tablespoon of ice cream, or a single Corn Flake. They’ll look at you funny, because the businesses that manufacture those consumer goods have been structured around selling bags, pints, and boxes of them, respectively. Go ask the people at Tesla if you can buy a Roadster that’s only for the weekends — at 2/7ths of the price. The economics of information goods (like news) aren’t identical to those of physical goods, but they both require sustainable business models, and for most quality news sites, that requires paid subscriptions.

And that’s the root problem, from publishers’ point of view: If you sell subscriptions for $15 a month, but you sell individual articles at 15 cents each, you’re telling any subscriber who reads less than 100 articles a month they’re an idiot and should give you less money. There aren’t enough payment-willing fly-by customers to make up the difference for even a few lost subscribers. You’re encouraging your best customers to think of you as an occasional treat rather than a service you pay for — and to pause before every headline they click to estimate its worth in cash. It shouldn’t be surprising than “we’ll charge you $10 a month until you tell us to stop” is more appealing than “we’ll charge you 10 cents now and maybe you’ll come back again someday.”

As Tony Haile once smartly put it, news subscriptions are like gym memberships. Imagine a gym that charges $50 a month for a membership — but also lets anyone pop in for a single workout for two bucks. Why would anyone pay for a membership again? “If you would take the micropayments version of a gym membership, it would be like, ‘I can turn up and I can pay a couple of quid, and I can go into the gym whenever I want to use it.’ No gym works like that.”

All that said — these problems are not insurmountable. Smart people might come up with solutions, even if they haven’t so far. Indeed, I’ve long believed that if anyone could create a micropayment system for news that worked, there were only two real possibilities: Apple and Twitter.

With iPhones, iPads, and Macs, Apple controls the devices that most paying digital news consumers use. They have hundreds of millions of users’ credit cards already on file and attached to your identity. And with Apple Pay, they have a nearly frictionless payment platform that has already been integrated into countless apps and websites. If they decided to offer a “Read With Apple Pay” button for news sites, the technical problems of micropayments would mostly go away. (Along with 30% of publishers’ revenue, no doubt.) And Apple News+ is the closest thing to an all=news subscription that currently exists.2

Twitter, meanwhile, is the center of the digital news universe. There is no place online with more news-curious users clicking links to new-to-them news sites. And it showed interest in the subject, buying Tony Haile’s Scroll and integrating its network of ad-free news sites into Twitter Blue and teasing some sort of paywall integration on the way.

But that was the old Twitter. One of Musk’s first decisions after taking charge was killing off the remnants of Scroll — the closest thing to a foundation for a pan-publisher revenue model anyone had.

Unless you are one of the few Twitter Blue subscribers, Twitter doesn’t have your credit card number. It has no ready payment platform for publishers to integrate into their sites. Twitter would likely only be interested in a payment system that goes through Twitter, not via links that go to a publisher site from Facebook, Google, or elsewhere.

But let’s be honest: The biggest problem is Elon. What mainstream publisher would trust Elon Musk with their money right now? The guy who refuses to pay the rent on his corporate HQ? The guy who has spent the past six months dumping on the media, banning reporters, declaring their work a “relentless hatestream” from “media puppet-masters” that you “cannot rely on…for truth“? This is the guy who says he has a “major win-win” for publishers? The same guy that complains “media is a click-machine, not a truth-machine” thinks the answer is tempting people to pay with a single headline?

(Not to mention that Musk has no deadline cred remaining, and saying that micropayments will “roll out” later this month could mean this summer, late 2024, or never.)

Maybe someone will figure out micropayments for news someday. I think it’s unlikely at scale — but I could be wrong! But I am quite confident the man who has spent the past half-year destroying the news media’s favorite online space won’t be the one to do it.

1. I believe it was Techdirt’s Mike Masnick I first saw using this metaphor for Musk, specifically around content moderation.
2. Pro tip: Apple News+ now includes, along with roughly all the magazines, The Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times, The Times of London, The Globe and Mail, and the metro dailies in Charlotte, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Kansas City, Miami, Raleigh, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, plus a few more. If you run into a random local-news paywall, there’s a pretty decent chance that searching for the headline in Apple News might find it. It’s now a much better product for newspapers than it was at launch.

The fact that these first-day cancellations are more common among annual subscriptions than monthly ones points to another reason for early churn: New subscribers may be using the cancel button as a way to turn off auto-renewal. They don’t want to forget they’ve signed up for the subscription and — 365 days later — accidentally be charged for a full-price subscription.

Another group flagged as high risk for cancellations? Inactive subscribers. These so-called “sleepers” are paying subscribers who haven’t visited the site in the past 30 days.

Piano found that, for the average subscription website, 40% of subscribers are sleepers. The percent of disengaged subscribers was reduced during the early days of the pandemic when news usage skyrocketed but the portion has risen steadily since the early months of 2020.

It makes sense that sleepers churn: They aren’t getting much value from their subscription. Yet they don’t churn right away. In any given month, 90% of sleepers will simply continue to stay inactive. It’s only when they wake up again and come back that their cancellation rates soar, generally accounting for about 30% of active churn.

This makes re-engaging sleepers difficult. How do you bring them back into the fold and “wake them up” without prompting them to cancel?

Piano recommends not shaking sleepers awake for anything less than a major news event or “especially appealing content.” Better yet, the report advises, “engage subscribers before they become inactive, building habits so that they don’t fall asleep in the first place.” (Their 2021 report found that 60% of sleepers nod off during their first two months as subscribers.)

As in previous years, Piano found that social media referrals generate low conversion rates, especially compared to users who arrive directly from a home page. Lavishing attention on just one channel or referral source won’t improve paid conversion numbers, though.

“The number of channels visitors are referred by — across search, social and direct — is a stronger predictor of likelihood to subscribe than the performance of any single channel,” the report found. The pattern holds true post-conversion, too; the more channels readers use to engage with your content, the more loyal they are as subscribers.

Piano, which offers dynamic paywall options that can test the best time or content to convert users into subscribers, found email registration could be an important step along the way. The conversion rate for anonymous visitors is just .22% but jumps to 9.88% for registered users, according to Piano.

You can read the rest of the report here.

The New York Times bought the sports news site for $550 million in cold hard cash back in January, but it’s only this week that bundle subscribers are being offered the chance to hop The Athletic’s paywall.

A slide deck presented to investors by The New York Times earlier this month announced the addition and shed light on what the Times hoped to gain by acquiring the 5-year-old sports news site. The Times sees a “highly attractive opportunity” to cross-sell individual subscriptions and — crucially — add value to its bundle because of the “modest” overlap between subscribers to the Times and the 1.26 million with a standalone subscription to The Athletic, the deck explained. The Athletic joins Cooking, Games, Wirecutter, and, of course, news in that all-access digital bundle.

Unsurprisingly, The New York Times sees multi-product subscribers as the most valuable. They pay the most, retain the best, and engage more than any single-product subscriber group. Bundle subscribers churn at rates 40% lower than subscribers who pay for the basic news-only subscription, according to the Times.

In addition to bolstering its bundle, the Times plans to implement a more flexible paywall at The Athletic to give potential subscribers a chance to sample the sports content. It will also use the Times’ digital advertising muscle to “unlock significant advertising revenue” at The Athletic, which currently brings in under $10 million in ad revenue each year through limited sponsorships. (The site’s founders originally envisioned an ad-free site.)

The Times, which has been experimenting with personalization including geotargeting in its news division, also highlighted The Athletic’s customized notifications. “Following one or more leagues is one of our strongest predictors of retention,” according to the Times.

You can see the full slide deck prepared for investors here. Current home delivery and all-access digital subscribers should head to the Times to claim their access to The Athletic.

With the short-lived metered paywall out of the way, the vast majority of Quartz content will now be free for all. Frequent visitors to QZ.com will be asked to register their email after reading three articles per month. The only content that’ll remain subscriber-only is a handful of premium emails, including the recently-launched Quartz Africa, The Forecast, and the Weekend Brief.

Quartz CEO and co-founder Zach Seward claimed the decision was made after reader surveys showed a majority of Quartz members — there are about 25,000 of them, and an annual subscription costs $100/year — didn’t subscribe for the exclusive access anyway. He believes those members will continue to pay their annual $100 subscription fee because they support the site’s mission.

“Generally our journalism is focused on identifying better, more sustainable forms of capitalism, helping people figure out tricky problems at work, separating viable from unviable solutions to major problems like climate change,” Seward said. “If we actually mean what we say about that mission — and it’s not just a marketing slogan — then it seems clear to us that the best way to achieve it is by making as much of that as freely available to as many people as possible.”

He added, quickly, “That was true, of course, three years ago when we put the paywall up in the first place.”

A lot has happened in the intervening years. The Covid-19 pandemic’s effect on advertising forced Quartz to make large layoffs in early 2020. Later that year, Seward and the staff bought the company from owner Uzabase. (The publicly traded Japanese company had paid $86 million for Quartz in 2018 and sold it back at a substantial loss.) The news items left some wondering whether Quartz, despite “spinning out genuinely innovative features” as a digital media darling, was caught in the “mushy middle,” as Steven Perlberg wrote, of “not quite niche enough to be essential to a small group of readers, but not quite big enough to compete at scale.”

The site still makes most of its revenue through advertising but, going forward, Quartz is not abandoning reader revenue entirely. Seward said Quartz has seen the most success with vertical subscription products like Quartz Japan, and will continue to develop subscriber-only newsletters.

Quartz is dropping its paywall!https://t.co/3dI7b78Dt6

If you love visual, data-heavy stories, here’s some great work you may have missed if you weren’t a @qz member. Now free to access!

— Amanda Shendruk (@AShendruk) April 14, 2022

Quartz is going against the grain by dropping its paywall. Though news orgs like The Atlantic and Slate have dropped paywalls in the past, most have gone back and reinstated them and the general trend in recent years has been toward asking readers to pay for journalism. (The most visible being, of course, the uncommonly successful New York Times.)

But there have been rumblings, recently, that a paywall may not be for everyone. Or, at least, not for every reader. This February, the Austin American-Statesman became one of four Gannett newspapers to experiment with dropping its metered paywall and a handful of news organizations have adopted Sophi, an AI-powered dynamic paywall engineered by folks at The Globe and Mail.

Quartz will celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, not an insignificant achievement in digital media. Seward said the site is focused on staying obsessed with “what’s changing” rather than “reporting on status quo aspects of business.” It prompted me to ask about trying to see around corners, either through one’s reporting or by anticipating shifts in what might work in the business of journalism.

“It’s complicated and takes time to figure out and unravel. It’s hard to do in a single story,” Seward noted. “The quintessential story for Quartz is one where you’re sort of working that out over time — piece by piece.”

By the time they got on dry land, plans for what became the Swiss Digital Alliance — including TX Group, CH Media, NZZ, Ringier, and public broadcaster SRG — had been set in motion.

Some of their news sites are free, others require a paid subscription. Most had their eyes on better data in order to sell digital advertising, but others — the public broadcasters in the group — were barred from that revenue stream.

The founding media partners all agreed, however, that having more first-party data and increasing the share of registered visitors would allow them to build better relationships with readers and more relevant news products. Their collective first step has been OneLog, a single sign-on system being used across a variety of news sites owned by Swiss Digital Alliance members TX Group and Ringier.

Each partner decides how often — and on what types of content — to ask users to login, noted Tamedia chief product officer Christoph Zimmer.

“The differences are quite substantial. For media with a subscription model, a login usually leads to a trial subscription, so that’s a pretty straightforward incentive,” Zimmer said. “However, there are also media with a free offer that make certain content accessible only to logged-in users, such as user comments, raffles or even specific types of articles. The common idea is to convince users to log in. How this is done depends on the positioning of the brand.”

OneLog has nearly a million active accounts and readers can already use the same sign-in system to log into more than a dozen news sites — including ones among the most widely read and trusted in the country, like 20 Minuten, Blick, and Le Matin.

When TX Group — which owns the Zurich-based national newspaper Tages-Anzeiger and boasts the most paid subscriptions in Switzerland — completes the transition to the shared login system in early 2022, the number of active OneLog accounts will grow to 2 million. (In a country with around 8.7 million inhabitants, that total represents nearly a quarter of the population.) OneLog expects that the popular public broadcaster SRG, a Swiss Digital Alliance founding member, will also adopt the log-in next year and the group is working to bring smaller, more local publishers on board, too.

Being able to use the same login for, say, The New York Times and The Washington Post and NPR and your local news site would be nice, right? The Swiss Digital Alliance hopes the lack of friction will prompt readers to log in even if a news site has no paywall. Even before implementing the single sign-on technology, the media companies launched a campaign telling readers how the move would benefit them and the news organizations they rely on.

“The first phase has been to let users know it’s important for us to know them and that they can help us and support us by logging in,” Zimmer said. “For brands such as Facebook or Netflix, it’s very clear you need to be logged in; it’s useless otherwise. But looking at media brands, it’s something that’s relatively recent.”

Chief operating officer of Ringier AG’s Global Media Unit, Patrick Rademacher, echoed the comparison.

“I have never heard a single person complaining [about] having to register for Netflix. The big difference is that for Netflix, it has never been another way, right?” Rademacher said. “We have the challenge that we have to tell our users, why does this change and why do we ask for registration now for something that has been without registration before.”

Adopting the login technology across multiple publishers and titles has been accomplished, somewhat surprisingly, without much incident, according to Zimmer and Rademacher.

“In our newsrooms, they said there’s going to be a huge shitstorm because users don’t like to register. If you mention the word login, there’s going to be a shitstorm,” Rademacher said. “Nothing like that happened. It all went very smoothly.”

To make the process even easier for readers, OneLog can accept fingerprints as easily as a password. Apple products, which already enjoy a high market share in Switzerland, are particularly well-loved by Swiss news subscribers, Zimmer noted, so it’s been important for OneLog to incorporate Face and Touch ID. (The team at OneLog — which does not collect behavioral data itself or share it between the media partners — says it’s “in frequent contact” with data protection authorities.) The media companies will continue to offer third-party logins, through Google and Facebook, though they note the percentage of users who opt to login that way remains in the single digits.

The collaboration between competitors has been made both easier and more difficult given the unique media environment. The Swiss media industry is fragmented along three major languages. Out of 8.7 million inhabitants, roughly 6 million live in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, another 2 million in French-speaking areas, and the rest mainly in Italian-speaking ones. (Romansch, one of the four official languages of Switzerland, is spoken by less than 1% of the total population.)

“[Having] different language regions doesn’t facilitate things, but the Swiss media industry wants to work together where we are not in competition,” Rademacher noted. “I think the basic principle of the industry is that we would like to collaborate in fields where we are not competitors, but we all have the costs to — for example — to build a technological infrastructure.”

Zimmer noted that though language barriers exist, the share that big media companies hold in Switzerland is large, compared to markets like Germany or France. That means, among other things, that fewer people had to put their heads together on that boat and agree.

An alliance, even one limited to tackling common challenges like the share of registered users, is rare among competing media organization. Portugal’s top publishers have been working on Nonio and Norway has seen success with a universal login system called aID.

In Switzerland, strong support from the top for the alliance and OneLog has helped.

“Something that happens very often is that [companies] say, ‘Let’s do something together!’ and at the first crossroad, when you have a decision to make, say, ‘No, we can’t do that,'” Rademacher said. “To have this CEO commitment from the beginning was very important.”

Knowing news consumers is key to the media industry’s shot at competing with digital and social media companies, Zimmer said. The Swiss Digital Alliance emerged from a realization that the challenges held in common outweighed their status as competitors in some cases.

“Sometimes I have the impression that is easier for media companies to team up with Facebook or Google or any other of these international tech companies because there you have an established framework and between media companies, there’s always a lot of historical baggage and sensitivities,” Zimmer said. “From a bird’s eye perspective, I think it’s really clear that it makes a lot of sense to team up and work together because we share many interests and we share the same challenges. Of course, we’re also competitors but in many areas we’re much less competitors than we think.”

David Craig, chief executive of Refinitiv, and Andrea Stone, [London Stock Exchange Group’s] chief customer proposition officer, said in the letter to Michael Friedenberg, chief executive of Reuters, that requiring Reuters’ readers to pay for content “would cause Refinitiv significant loss and material and irreparable harm.”

Reuters TRI, 1.51% derives around half of its revenue from Refinitiv, making the financial data company its biggest client. Thomson Reuters, the parent company of Reuters News, holds a 15% stake in LSEG following its $27 billion all-stock deal in 2019 for Refinitiv. The LSE’s purchase of Refinitiv took two years to complete — amid regulatory requirements and COVID-19 pandemic-driven snags.

Refinitiv pays Reuters $325 million a year (until 2048!) to provide news to its “largest financial services customers, including JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs.” There’s presumably a lot of overlap between that group of bankers and the “business professionals” that Reuters is hoping will pay for its product.

In statements to MarketWatch, Thomson Reuters and LSEG said they valued their partnership. The contract allows LSEG to take Thomson Reuters to court if they can’t resolve a dispute amicably.

The price for full access to the previously $0 Reuters.com will be $34.99 per month, after the currently free preview period, for a deeper level of coverage and data on industry verticals that include legal, sustainable business, healthcare and autos.” The homepage was switched over to a new, modular design as of Thursday morning (I noticed the changeover in the course of writing this article, when I headed to Reuters.com for the first time ever). An editor’s note says that a livestream, newsletters, and “the ability to follow our journalists and the stories they’re covering” (will they finally get bylines?) are on the way. “The Wire,” a feature that sorted Reuters’ most recent global headlines by time and was previously on the homepage, appears not to have come along for the redesign.

Who deems Reuters.com so essential that they’ll pay more than two Netflixes a month for it? In 2011, Ken Doctor wrote for us about the competition the news company faced as it tried to become better known in the consumer world:

Competition is all around, as other companies morph to meet similar challenges. There’s Bloomberg, whose hot breath Reuters can feel as the company aims to eat some of TR’s core business, with the Financial Times and News Corp’s Dow Jones taking more targeted aim, and The Economist, the Times, and AP all competing for differing parts of the business.

A decade later, Reuters faces more competition than ever. Bloomberg added a paywall in 2018 (also a decision that some found baffling) and currently charges $34.99 a month for a digital subscription, though hefty discount offers abound. The company expects to “approach” 400,000 consumer subscriptions this year, up from 250,000 in 2020. A lot of those subscriptions are probably expensed. Reuters, aiming at a professional audience, is also likely hoping that many subscribers won’t blink at sticking that $420 a year on their corporate cards.

While Reuters.com currently pulls in 41 million visitors a month, news isn’t parent company Thomson Reuters’ main revenue stream. The announcement comes days after Reuters named Alessandra Galloni its next editor-in-chief, the first woman to hold the role in Reuters’ 170-year history; at that time, Reuters reported:

Since 2008, Reuters has been part of Thomson Reuters Corp, a corporation with more-lucrative and faster-growing segments than news. Its chief executive, Steve Hasker, who joined Thomson Reuters last year, has focused on aggressively expanding the corporation’s three largest businesses: providing information, software and services to lawyers, corporations and the tax and accounting profession. Hasker’s strategy has helped boost Thomson Reuters stock to all-time highs.

Reuters News comprises about 10% of Thomson Reuters’ total $5.9 billion in revenues. Unlike many news organizations, Reuters is profitable. But it is also a drag on the parent company’s revenue growth and profit margin, analysts say, and the executive who runs the news business, Reuters President Michael Friedenberg, is pushing to increase sales and boost profitability. Looking forward, Thomson Reuters’ chief financial officer last month forecast that sales at its “Big Three” businesses are expected to grow 6% to 7% in 2023, while its news division and printing business “are expected to dilute organic revenue growth by about 1% to 2%.”

Well, that isn’t the only good news out of Cupertino for media companies. On Tuesday, Apple made a little-noticed announcement that app publishers could now offer special offers via discount codes.

You can now create subscription offer codes to acquire, retain, and win back subscribers. Offer codes are unique, alphanumeric codes that provide auto-renewable subscriptions at a discounted price or for free for a specific duration. Provide your one-time use codes digitally or offline at physical events, alongside products, and more. Users on iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 and later can redeem offer codes on the App Store through a one-time code redemption URL, or within your app if you’ve implemented the presentCodeRedemptionSheet API. Sales and Trends reports will be updated later this year to include information on the performance of your subscription offer codes.

That might not seem like a big deal, but it helps address one of publishers’ most common complaints about the App Store: that its pricing wasn’t flexible enough for an industry that’s found targeted discounting essential to a successful digital subscription strategy.

For example, just from clicking around various links on Twitter, I found all of these live subscription pitches from The Washington Post:

• Try one year for $100 $29
• Try 4 weeks for $1
• Subscribe for $10 $1 a month
• Try 12 weeks for $1

Each with its own marketing copy and target audience. Could I tell you how, exactly, the Post determines that you get the 4-weeks-for-$1 offer while you get the 12-weeks-for-$1 offer? Nope. But the Post has its reasons, which could be the result of deep data crunching or just an A/B test. Either way, the success of each individual offer will be tracked and used to optimize the Post’s overall subscription strategy. Maybe one offer does well with TikTok users, another is a hit with working moms, and another does well with college grads living in Sun Belt suburbs.

Similarly, if you spend any time on The Wall Street Journal’s website, you are generating a propensity-to-subscribe score, based on your activity: the articles you’ve read, the frequency of your visits, whether you’ve signed up for a newsletter, and dozens of other signals. The Journal uses that number to move its paywall around — give you fewer or more or different free articles — and to figure out what sort of offer to show you whenever you do finally hit it.

Publishers have found this level of customer intel useful because digital news subscriptions are competing with the endless stream of free news online. With zero-cost competitors always a click away, getting someone to hand over their credit card number can be a big lift. The Post, the Journal, and other papers can have those kinds of personalized offers because they have some level of control over their subscription backends — and the capacity to gather and analyze the behavioral data that informs them.

The same hasn’t been true in Apple’s App Store. When in-app subscriptions debuted in 2011, pricing was one-size-fits-all. It wasn’t until 2017 that publishers could offer introductory pricing to lure new subscribers. In 2019, it added promotional pricing that could be offered to existing or former subscribers. But targeting pricing to individual customers is limited with those options. And what little targeting is available is tied to bare-bones in-app behavior (like whether someone has canceled their subscription).

That changes with these new offer codes. An in-app subscription can have up to 10 different offers active at any one time — each with its own price point and duration. (Try one year for $29! Try 4 weeks for $1! Subscribe for $1 a month! Try 12 weeks for $1!) They can be limited by country. At the end of the introductory period, they can then be charged the normal full rate or some other price. Here’s an example of what it looks like from the developer’s perspective:

That’s all great — but the real gain is that now publishers can target these offers however they want, online or off. A newspaper could, for example, make distinct offers to:

• People who get its morning email newsletter, open it at least 50% of the time, and click through at least 20% of the time, but who still haven’t bought a subscription
• Attendees at an event it’s co-sponsoring
• Longtime print subscribers who’ve just canceled home delivery
• Shoppers at an advertiser’s store
• People who just won a contest you’ve run
• Local students and educators
• Football fans who only read your sports articles
• People who visit your website regularly but don’t live in your city
• iPhone users who have just hit the monthly-article-limit paywall for the third consecutive month
• People who follow your Instagram account or your star columnist’s TikTok
• Existing subscribers who just had a bad customer-service experience of some kind and to whom you’d like to give a discount for three months
• Twitter followers who have tweeted your articles at least four times this week

…ad infinitum. There really is no limit on how narrow you can get. (You are limited to 10 offers per subscription at any one time — but that limit is for the number of distinct pricing/duration levels you can set. You can target and distribute those 10 offers in an infinite number of ways. An app can generate 150,000 unique offer codes each calendar quarter.) And they can be distributed either as traditional offer codes (of the “enter JUSTCANCELEDPRINT at checkout” variety) or embedded in a URL, like the one in the “GET THIS OFFER NOW” button at the bottom of a marketing email. Apple also says it will give you data to track each offer’s performance.

Let’s be real: There are a lot of publishers who will have neither the data capacity nor a large-enough addressable audience for this sort of targeting to make a meaningful difference in subscriptions. Last week’s rev-share cut mostly helps smaller publishers; offer codes mostly help bigger ones. But this nonetheless means that, however sophisticated your subscription logic can be on yournewssite.com, it can be just as sophisticated in your iPhone or iPad app. That’s another win for publishers.

In-app subscriptions have always been a no-brainer for games, productivity apps, and other apps that exist only within Apple’s ecosystem. Publishers have been a harder sell, since the lion’s share of their subscriptions (print or digital) come from outside the App Store.

Nearly all news publishers have become more invested in digital subscription revenue in recent years. Apple, meanwhile, has also put more energy into subscriptions, which make up a big share of the services revenue that the company has been focused on growing the past couple of years. If that correlation means Apple will keep addressing publisher complaints and making the iPhone a more hospitable place for publishers, I don’t think they’ll hear many complaints.

1. Terms and conditions apply, as always in life! The biggest being that it only applies to publishers who generate less than $1 million a year in App Store revenue and that companies must apply for the new rate — your rev share won’t change if you don’t ask Apple for it.

Now: Can it do the same for podcasts?

Spotify is reportedly considering a subscription service just for its podcasts, a segment it’s invested in heavily the past couple of years. It was originally spotted by Variety’s Andrew Wallenstein

Looks like the premium podcast plan would be ad-free and some mix of exclusive extra content at price points somewhere between $3-$8. pic.twitter.com/ArK8xYg0CM

— Andrew Wallenstein (@awallenstein) November 6, 2020

The various options being subjected to Qualtricsification range from $2.99 to $7.99 a month. They all involve access to some variety of exclusive content — with or without ads, with or without early access.

Will it work? It’s hard to bet against Spotify, which has played the game very well in its growth from Stockholm startup to 144 million paying subscribers in 92 countries. But there are a number of things that make a podcast subscription service a significantly tougher sell than music was.

You’re competing with free and easy.

Music has been for sale for more than a century, dating back to sheet music and player piano rolls. When Napster & Co. came along, free music was thrilling, but also confusing and unreliable to many. More importantly, music companies were highly motivated to sue P2P file-sharing services into the ground, which they accomplished with Napster and most of its peers. A few high-profile, high-dollar lawsuits against random schmoes who downloaded a samizdat copy of The Bodyguard: Original Soundtrack Album went a long way toward discouraging P2P. So when Steve Jobs and Apple came along with 99-cent downloads — straightforward, legal, tied to the explosive growth of the iPod — the market was ready for it.

Podcasts are different. Podcasts have been free by default for as long as they’ve existed. There are plenty of apps that make the acts of subscribing, downloading, and listening to podcasts straightforward. That’s hard to compete with. Imagine if, when Spotify first launched, there was already a free product that gave you access to all the world’s music — but Spotify said that, for $9.99 a month, you could also get this super-good tier of premium, exclusive music. If the choices are “98% of the world’s music for free” and “100% of the world’s music for $9.99/month,” most people are going to be happy with the free option.

You know who else thought they had content that was awesome enough to get subscribers, despite an endless sea of free competition? Quibi.

Previous attempts haven’t gone too well.

The poster child for paid podcasting is Luminary, which launched to much excitement (and then much annoyance) last spring. It hasn’t taken off: Despite raising at least $130 million from investors, Luminary had only 80,000 paying subscribers one year in, Bloomberg reported.

But others have tried, too. Audible Channels, launched in 2016 and backed by both the might of Amazon and Audible’s audiobook dominance, never got very far. Stitcher Premium has been around for nearly four years and hasn’t set the world on fire. (It was recently bought by SiriusXM, which has its own established paid model.)

Things can change, of course. There wasn’t much of a market for paid digital news until The New York Times put up a paywall, after all, and it took the better part of a decade to really get that business whirring. But at this point, there’s been very little evidence of a market that’s just itching to pay for podcasts.

Podcasts don’t play well with each other in a subscription.

People need to be at least somewhat passionate about a podcast to want to pay for it. They need to think that its absence from their lives would be bad enough to merit 2 or 5 or 10 bucks a month. But those passions are hard to stretch across a broad-based subscription. If Spotify’s premium package includes, say, 40 shows, what share of them is any individual user going to be passionate about? HBO had to establish a reputation for quality and exclusivity — the idea that an “HBO show” was a thing — to get subscribers. Netflix had to have a huge library of existing TV shows and movies that weren’t easily available elsewhere, and then its own catalog of exclusives. A package of premium podcasts is likely to be less coherent editorially than, say, the package of premium stories you get with a subscription to The New York Times.

The subscription model is less congruent with the ad model than in other media formats.

In the digital news business, most smart publishers know not to be too reliant on a single revenue type. If you’re all about advertising, you’re subject to the vagaries of the ad market and constantly worried about attracting new audience. If you’re all about subscriptions, you risk dropping out of the public conversation and making it harder for people to sample your wares.

But news sites can generally pull this off because the two types of revenue come from two different audiences. At most, the majority of pageviews they get — and thus the majority of ad impressions they serve — come from users who click on one or two stories a month. They’re unlikely to be candidates for a subscription, but you can monetize them in this other way. Your subscribers, meanwhile, are your superfans — the 2% or 3% of your uniques who come back all the time and consume dozens or hundreds of stories a month.

What lets these two models coexist? The metered paywall. If you don’t put up a “Subscribe Now!” until someone’s fifth article, you’re letting the grazers be while serving them ads. And you’re identifying your potential superfans — those who hit 5 or 10 or however many articles.

It’s not clear how well that sort of model can work with podcasts. Limiting someone to, say, two premium episodes a month is a higher bar, technologically and in terms of marketing, that a clear free/paid split. And podcast audiences tend to be more loyal than news site readers: They subscribe to individual shows and listen to a large share of the episodes that get delivered to them, which is a level of commitment far greater than clicking a random link on Twitter.

All of that means, I think, that a podcast subscription model would make it very hard to successfully monetize those shows with advertising — which is the way nearly all podcasts are monetized. News sites could work both angles; podcasts will find that tougher.

Spotify, of course, would enter this business with a ton of advantages. It has a massive existing userbase to market to. It already charges more than 100 million credit cards every month. It’s spent a ton of money buying up high-value content, whether that’s The Ringer, Gimlet, or its exclusive distribution deal with The Joe Rogan Show.

Those are all advantages, and betting against Spotify has not typically been a good call over the past decade. But it’s still not clear the market’s there — whether at Spotify’s scale or even something smaller.

That’s the first bet from The Brown Institute for Media Innovation’s new Local News Lab, an interdisciplinary team of journalists, engineers, data scientists, and designers. The new team is in the early days of partnering with small- and medium-sized local newsrooms to help them build more adaptable or “smart” paywalls — taking advantage of machine learning many larger newsrooms might already have resources to explore. (Disclosure: I was a 2016-2017 Brown Institute “Magic Grant” recipient.)

The crux of the idea is to put an ask in front of the right reader at the right time. While many newsrooms might already have a metered paywall, the lab will try to take that a step forward: the technology might give some readers more articles, others fewer before they’re prompted to engage. The goal is to “find the readers that are at the cusp of subscribing and help the newsroom get them over the edge,” said Al Johri, the lab’s engineering lead.

“Our core objective is to really help local news organizations improve the revenue that they’re getting from readers,” said Johri, who was previously a data scientist at The Washington Post, where he was working on a project predicting a user’s propensity to subscribe.

The Local News Lab is actively recruiting small- to- medium-sized newsrooms as initial “development partners” that are willing to try new things. Those newsrooms can be nonprofit or for-profit companies, and their business models may include subscription, membership, or donation.

“It excites me to be talking about paywall modeling and content-gating in a way that is going to help local newsrooms be more sustainable — but with a very watchful eye on equity and access to information,” said Hannah Wise, the Lab’s news partnerships lead. “We are looking at it from a lens that will hopefully ensure that people who need information get the information they need.”

The team is thinking about the “smart paywall” broadly — it could adapt to a reader’s behavior or the content. Machine learning might also be able to suggest to editorial staff which stories to put or not put behind a paywall.

“One incarnation of a smart paywall might estimate your propensity to subscribe given your browsing history or what’s known about you — and then adjust the metering in more of a personalized way, maybe to give you a few more articles or bring the paywall up sooner depending upon what your likelihood to subscribe turns out to be,” said Mark Hansen, director of the Brown Institute at Columbia Journalism School.

Part of the challenge of implementing this sort of machine learning is that a newsroom might need event-level behavioral data on its audience: When a user comes to a website, what articles do they click on and what interactions do they have with an existing paywall? The Local News Lab’s team is aware that while some newsrooms already have the digital infrastructure in place to implement these experiments, others don’t. So are thinking of ways to address various scenarios.

“As we’ve talked to some of these newsrooms, we’ve heard really interesting things being tried. The machine learning layer is simply there to help optimize some of that or to maybe codify that in code so the model can be repeated in other newsrooms,” Hansen said.

That’s also why the Lab plans to open-source the code they’re writing, so additional newsrooms can replicate it down the road. Wise, who previously managed the cross-functional news labs at the CBC in Canada, is also planning on building a community around what they’re doing with the initial development partners so they can share learnings from the experiments with others.

“When you’re a small- to medium-sized local newsroom, there’s sometimes not a lot of time or space to connect with your counterparts at other organizations across the country, so we’re hoping to facilitate that,” Wise said.

In addition to Wise and Johri, each member of the Local News Lab has a connection to journalism and news, including former machine learning engineers from BuzzFeed and The Wall Street Journal.

“Everyone has an understanding of and respect for journalism and how to talk to journalists and where the ethics lie,” Johri said. “As we’re having conversations with newsrooms, we can start on the same page. We won’t make suggestions to them that are completely out of the blue — that wouldn’t fly with the higher-ups.”

A board of representatives from 11 news organizations are also advising the project, including leaders from The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, The Post and Courier, The Tennessean, the Detroit Free Press, and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Hansen envisions that in the same way a newsroom might have an editorial strategy to report on elections or a social media strategy to disseminate stories, newsrooms could have more robust strategies around encouraging conversions or unique engagement around content, “so that paywall strategies become something that is routinely thought about and aligns nicely with your content.”

“Bringing teachings from different disciplines really helps broaden the creativity in the field,” Hansen added. “That applies equally to the way we find stories, tell stories and now the way those stories are circulated.”

Though this is the Local News Lab’s first initiative, the team hopes there will be future projects with open-source software or easily deployable systems that small- and medium-sized newsrooms can use.

“We understand how important local news is to our democracy overall but also to larger news organizations — local news is where the news really starts from,” Johri said.

A new report at What’s New In Publishing, “The Publisher’s Guide to Navigating Covid-19,” looks at eight trends that have emerged globally, as well as strategies that publishers have implemented as a result of increased web traffic.

The report’s author, journalism professor Damian Radcliffe at the University of Oregon, notes that it’s difficult to make broad conclusions about Covid-19’s impact. The pandemic has forced some publications to lay off or furlough staff or shut down completely. Others publications, though, have been able to capitalize on increased reader attention and boost subscriptions.

Radcliffe looks at what we know now about the media industry so far, though even more could change in the United States as we inch closer to Election Day and watch President Donald Trump’s recovery from coronavirus. Here are some findings:

Smaller marketing budgets worldwide means advertising-dependent publications will have to pivot if they haven’t already. According to PwC’s Global Entertainment and Media Outlook report for 2020–2024, “global newspaper advertising (print and online) will fall from $49.2 billion in 2019 to $36 billion in 2024, a decline of more than a quarter (27%) over five years…[Alongside this] global circulation and subscriber revenue is expected to fall from $58.7 billion in 2019 to $50.4 billion in 2024,” Press Gazette reported in September.

People are spending a lot more time on their devices, but media consumption has fallen off after an initial surge. Smartphone usage is up 70%, laptop usage 47%, and tablet usage 23%, according to data from the Global Web Index’s Coronavirus Multi-Market study. For DataRePortal, Simon Kemp wrote, “many people say that they expect their new habits to continue after the Covid-19 outbreak passes too. One in five internet users say they expect to continue watching more content on streaming services, and one in seven (15%) say they expect to continue spending more time using social media.” All media, however, from internet surfing to TV watching, has declined since the initial surge in April. That means that news publishers have to get creative about gauging audience interest, and keeping it.

With more new readers, publishers are experimenting more with news products. At the beginning of March, we noticed that publishers were quick to launch coronavirus pop-up newsletters and drop their paywalls on pandemic stories. According to members of WAN-IFRA’s Global Media Trends Panel, more than half of the editorial executives they surveyed had launched new products as a result of the pandemic, Radcliffe writes. “Newsletters are the most common product, with some 55% saying they have launched them, followed by infographics (49%), and videos and live blogs (30%).”

Covid-19 has helped boost subscription numbers for a range of publishers. With advertising revenue down, publishers have leaned into reader revenue and membership programs to fill the gap. More and more publishers are explaining to readers why their journalism should be paid for and they’re doing so on various platforms, including YouTube and Facebook. Some success stories Radcliffe notes are:

• The New York Times now has more than 6.5 million subscribers (print and digital), adding 669,000 digital subscribers in the second quarter of 2020. In March, nytimes.com had 240 million unique visitors and 2.5 billion pageviews, up from 101 million uniques in January.
• CNBC’s website hit 1 billion page views for the first time in March 2020, more than doubling traffic from February. Subscriptions to CNBC Pro, a premium product costing $29.99 a month or $299.99 a year, were up 189% since January 2020.
• Tribune Publishing experienced a 293% increase in new digital subscriptions between March and February 2020. This included an increased conversion rate, from users hitting the paywall, of 109%.

Radcliffe also looks at audience engagement strategies, building loyalty among readers, and the ways that publishers have tried to be more accommodating to advertising. Read the full report here.

These are some of the findings from a big new report out Tuesday evening from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report for 2020 surveyed more than 80,000 people in 40 countries about their digital news consumption. (Included in the report for the first time this year: Kenya and the Philippines.)

The research is based on YouGov surveys conducted earlier this year, as well as additional surveys about paying for news in the U.S., UK, and Norway and about the impact of COVID-19 on media consumption in six countries (the UK, USA, Germany, Spain, Argentina, and South Korea).

Here are some of the most interesting findings from the report:

Some people say nothing could make them pay for news. But an increasing sliver pays for more than one subscription.

In last year’s report, Reuters noted that more publishers worldwide were adding paywalls. And this year, it’s clear that in many countries, more people are paying. The percentage of people in the U.S. who pay for news is 20 percent (up from 16 percent last year); in Norway it’s 42 percent (up from 34 percent last year). “We’ve also seen increases in Portugal, the Netherlands, and Argentina, with the average payment level also up in nine countries that we have been tracking since 2013,” the authors note.

The biggest winners tend to be large national news brands, though Norway is different:

Around half of those that subscribe to any online or combined package in the United States use The New York Times or The Washington Post and a similar proportion subscribe to either The Times or the Telegraph in the UK, though in much smaller numbers. In Norway the quality newspaper Aftenposten leads the field (24% of those that pay), along with two tabloid newspapers that operate premium paywall models, VG (24%) and Dagbladet (14%). One surprise in these data is the extent to which people subscribe to local and regional newspapers online in Norway (64%). Most local publishers in Norway charge for online news, with a total of 129 different local titles mentioned by our respondents. In the United States 30% subscribe to one or more local titles, with 131 different titles mentioned. By contrast in the UK only a handful of local publishers have put up a paywall.

Paying for more than one subscription has also become increasingly common in the U.S. and Norway, but is still rare in the U.K.:

In all three countries the majority of those who pay only subscribe to one title, but in Norway more than a third (38%) have signed up for two or more — often a national title and a local newspaper. It is a similar story in the United States with 37% taking out two or more subscriptions, with additional payment often for a magazine or specialist publication such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic or The Athletic (sport). By contrast, in the UK a second or third subscription is rare, with three-quarters (74%) paying for just one title.

Donations for news are also increasing; The Guardian continues to be incredibly successful in this arena:

In the United States 4% now say they donate money to a news organization, 3% in Norway, and 1% in the UK. The Guardian has one of the most successful donation models of any major brand, with over a million people having contributed in the last year. According to our data, almost half of all the relatively small number of donations in the UK (42%) go to the Guardian, but most are one-off, with an average payment of less than £15.

88% of people in the U.S. who pay for news think they’re still likely to be paying a year from now, and across the U.S., U.K., and Norway, “around half of those who currently have free access say that they might start paying if their free access runs out,” the authors note. “This is encouraging, and perhaps more encouraging still is that these figures imply retention rates that are comparable to those for subscriptions to video and audio streaming services like Netflix and Spotify.”

Instagram!

People worldwide say they prefer “news with no particular point of view.”

People in many countries say that they prefer to get their news from sources that “have no point of view.” In the U.S., people who get most of their news from cable TV are also most likely to prefer news sources that “share their point of view.”

Of course, the premise that it’s actually possible or desirable for any news source to have “no point of view” is increasingly under debate — and Reuters finds that “across countries, young people are less likely to favor” this type of news. “They still turn to trusted mainstream brands at times of crisis but they also want authentic and powerful stories, and are less likely to be convinced by ‘he said, she said’ debates that involve false equivalence,” the authors note.

“It is the rhetoric and behavior of national politicians that is considered the biggest problem.”

Across 40 countries, 56 percent of respondents said they’re “concerned about what is real and fake on the internet when it comes to news.” (67% of those in the U.S. say so, behind only Brazil, Portugal, Kenya, and South Africa.) Across countries, people see domestic politicians as most responsible.

But:

Political starting positions can make a big difference when it comes to assigning responsibility for misinformation. In the most polarized countries, this effectively means picking your side. Left-leaning opponents of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are far more likely to blame these politicians for spreading lies and half-truths online, while their right-leaning supporters are more likely to blame journalists. In the United States more than four in ten (43%) of those on the right blame journalists for misinformation — echoing the president’s antimedia rhetoric — compared with just 35% of this group saying they are most concerned about the behavior of politicians. For people on the left the situation is reversed, with half (49%) blaming politicians and just 9% blaming journalists.

You can read the full report here.

The Hearst-owned Chronicle, like most other metro newspapers these days, is increasingly oriented toward digital subscriptions, of which it has about 80,000. So when PG&E’s public safety power shutoff loomed, several California news organizations developed maps for readers to track how the days-long outage affected their own communities. (PG&E had one too, but it kept crashing.) But not all of them were publicly accessible.

“The outage coverage was one of our highest traffic days ever for both of our sites [the Chronicle and SFGate]. We knew that the outage map was some specific IP we created,” publisher Bill Nagel said. (The Chronicle’s map credits seven people, including three developers and editor-in-chief Audrey Cooper.) “We knew the content had value. What we’re trying to emphasize with our customers is that the content has value — that it’s either subscribe-able or worth paying for.”

The Mercury News in San Jose lifted its paywall for its map; public media outlets didn’t have one in the first place; and The Los Angeles Times kept its map walled. But the Chronicle took a different approach: showing some users an invitation to subscribe and others the ability to pay directly via the micropayments platform LaterPay. “It was a record day for us for subscriptions…and since it was our first experimentation with LaterPay, it was our best day with LaterPay,” Nagel said.

LaterPay, which we’ve written about before, is an attempt to get readers committed to micropayments by postponing their biggest initial hurdle: setting up a payment method. Site visitors can read a few articles, working up a bill, but they won’t be asked to pay until their total hits $5. Here’s how LaterPay describes itself in 2019:

You just confirm that you will pay later and you get access to your desired content — without having to register before your purchase and without having to give any payment information. LaterPay remembers all purchases made from your device and bundles them into one invoice. You can shop on any site supporting LaterPay and these purchases will be added on your LaterPay invoice. As soon as you have accrued a total of $5.00 on your invoice, we will ask you to register and settle with one of the supported payment methods. You will not incur any fees — you only pay for what you buy.

The Chronicle has so far only used LaterPay on its outage map, which is a different approach from (maybe less power outage-prone) outlets who have tried it in the past few years. The Boston Globe tested it on three sections of its site for five months, ending in January 2019, according to director of consumer analytics Thomas Brown. “We did not generate much in the way of revenue, but did sell over 10,000 articles,” he told me in January. “However, because an individual did not have to settle their tab until they reached a $5 threshold (an individual article was $0.49), it was not a big revenue driver.”

LaterPay is one of the revenue-driving experiments the Chronicle is working on. “The one thing I would tell you is that given the enthusiastic response we saw from subscription, we’re learning more and more about what is subscribe-able content and how much you serve up to our readers and potential subscribers,” Nagel said.

The LaterPay user option was framed as a more heartwarming experience than the typical “You’re out of free articles!” a paywall might bring. You could still see the map for free, but the brightest button on the page asked you to SUPPORT FREE MAP ACCESS, which took you to the Chronicle’s LaterPay page. It feels like you’re just making a regular donation — but obviously Hearst is a private for-profit company that can’t typically use a “send us a few bucks for a tote bag” kind of positioning.

Nagel said the Chronicle is still reviewing the outage map experiment and may share its findings later on, as it plans for quite possibly the next power outage. PG&E, bankrupt, sanctioned, and blamed for sparking previous disastrous wildfires, has warned that these mass outages may become the “new normal.” State lawmakers and editorial boards have warned that it better not.

But for news consumers, the new normal is that someone has to pay for news, maybe even vitally important information like where to go to charge an electric wheelchair — and it might be you.

“The moment of power outage has passed and we’re in the process of evaluating those results to determine for the next power outage which of the methods, or even a third method, we may try — simply to understand what is going to work best for us from a subscriptions standpoint, from a monetization standpoint,” Nagel said.

It’s kind of mind-boggling how big it could get: 22 of the state’s 58 counties are affected by a “public-safety power shutoff” in the northern half of the state, ranging from Santa Cruz to Tahoe National Forest to Redding. The Santa Ana winds that usually come into full force in the fall, combined with dry conditions, are apparently putting the area at risk of recreating last year’s Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive in state history. Powerful winds, ultra-dry conditions, and a downed power line — after the bankrupt utility company had warned it might shut off power but did not — contributed to that original spark. PG&E, the utility, said these widespread shutoffs might become “the new normal.”

No stop lights, no cellphone charging (but you can use your phone flashlight to find other flashlights, as this police department recommended), no classes, medications shuttled to other hospitals, and more. And this could stretch on for another five days or more.

Updated wind forecast

#RedFlagWarning takes 3 things:
Strong winds -
Dry vegetation (fuels) -
Low humidity -

This is a recipe for explosive fire growth, if a fire starts.

Have your go bag ready. #BePrepared #BeSafe #cawx pic.twitter.com/Dxv2hfr2Yh

— NWS Bay Area (@NWSBayArea) October 8, 2019

There is a #RedFlagWarning that has expanded towards the central valley and is issued for most of Northern CA and the southernmost portion of CA from today until lateThursday evening, and even into Friday for some areas, due to strong winds/low humidity. https://t.co/t4JLHQw4Vy pic.twitter.com/pxkir5bQHX

— CAL FIRE (@CAL_FIRE) October 9, 2019

What makes the Santa Ana winds blow? @CartoonKahuna explains with his illustrative touch.
https://t.co/1YSGAn4ePF pic.twitter.com/EASoclbZ15

— Lorena Elebee (@LoElebee) October 10, 2019

The modern age snow day… fire days. #California https://t.co/pEFF56H0NH

— Lisandro Orozco (@lisandroOC) October 8, 2019

There are a few places people can go for reliable information about this — though in this increasingly paywalled world, some are free, some not so much. The shutoffs are scary and serious, and national and local outlets are paying a lot of attention. The crisis brings up an important question that arises during a hurricane or other natural disaster, when some news outlets turn off their paywall:

If we're going to have news that is paid for by audiences, we have to talk about the news that should never be behind paywalls. https://t.co/OZS4ambTuh

— Heather Bryant (@HBCompass) October 9, 2019

The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times are tracking the outages with live updates and maps of the outage areas, though those paywalls are still operating as normal. Both Timeses are in the midst of a push to round up new subscribers in the California. (The West Coast Times for obvious reasons, but California is also the largest market for digital subscriptions at the East Coast Times.)

But other California papers like the (formerly San Jose) Mercury News and East Bay Times, both part of the MNG-owned Bay Area News Group, have moved their outage map and information beyond their paywall. The Chico Enterprise-Record, which covered the heart of the Camp Fire last year and is also part of BANG, is doing the same with coverage by a Report for America corps member. A Mercury News article points out:

We are providing free access to this article. Please consider supporting local journalism like this by purchasing a subscription. Click here for our 99-cent, 1-month trial offer.

The San Francisco Chronicle, owned by Hearst, which was called out in that above tweet for having paywalled map access, now has a “support free map access” button on its map that leads to a donation box via LaterPay, a German startup that began as a semi-micropayments processor.

The local TV stations, of course, offer up free information with many pop-ups; CNN is promoting its text-only site on its running updates page about the outages, though you currently have to scroll past 50 other bullet-pointed links to find the first California story on the lite site, beneath “Lauren Conrad welcomes 2nd child.” Google Maps is sharing information (including a link to the Mercury News’ coverage), and PG&E’s map is still there. Digital outlets like Berkeleyside and student newspapers like the Daily Californian are putting out information on the crisis for free as well. But local legacy newspapers, despite their cuts, are still putting out more local journalism on average than other forms of media. (How to actually do this reporting while caught in the middle of a crisis, as the Chico Enterprise-Record faced during the Camp Fire last year, is another question.)

The communities impacted by these power outages are in a time of need. They need information about their power, their friends and family nearby, their workplaces, and their options. Local and national outlets are providing this information, but at what cost?

Many Americans think local news outlets are doing just fine without their support, a Pew study found earlier this year. Paywalls are not going to go away, but a conversation could and should be started (now, if not already) about the relationship between paywalls and critically important information like the power outage updates. Maybe it’s time, while outlets are providing help to residents in need, to gently remind them that they can use some help, too. Is a stringent paywall worth the added frustration that a consumer gets in a public safety power outage?

Meanwhile, it’s probably a good time to note a print newspaper doesn’t require batteries or a power adapter.

The latest vows column is a whopper. https://t.co/8TpFYff0J8

— Laura June (@laura_june) September 25, 2019

The photo made me think they got married? Which I guess they kinda did? It’s super Vows-looking. Congratulations. https://t.co/GaUMezD3XE

— Lisa Tozzi (@lisatozzi) September 25, 2019

Congratulations to @Vox and @NYMag on their wedding, tastefully chronicled in the NYT Vows section oh wait https://t.co/HrwRIniqPe

— Christine Emba (@ChristineEmba) September 25, 2019

Looks like a photo for a Vows column. https://t.co/ehuoupcjdh

— katie rosman (@katierosman) September 25, 2019

(That reaction is a not-so-subtle reminder of how unusual it still is to see a 41-year-old woman leading the sort of high-profile company whose acquisition would be deemed worth a business-section story.)

Vox Media is, of course, one of the largest and most successful digital-native publishers, the autocomplete that pops up if you type “buzzfeed vice” anywhere on the Internet. Built out of sports site SB Nation and later expanded to include The Verge, Vox, Eater, and more, Vox Media has historically thought of itself as the Condé Nast of the Internet: a collection of premium, subject-specific media brands that can do high-gloss editorial and attract high-end audiences, but with the technology and product chops that come from growing up online. It’s the most print-like of the big digitals; you can see the DNA of magazine layout in some of its designs, and its mix of both editorial big swings and webbier front-of-book content brings along some print editorial values.

New York is, of course, the storied magazine that grew out of the late New York Herald Tribune under the guidance of editorial legend Clay Felker. It’s a city magazine in name and attitude. But like its peers at The New Yorker and The New York Times — it both reflects New York and uses it as a jumping-off point for writing smartly about anything and everything. And like the Times and New Yorker, that has given it the ability to adapt its identity to the Internet in ways most local print outlets can’t. Under the editorial leadership of Adam Moss, it launched a series of digital editorial brands with no explicit connection to New York but which took advantage of the magazine’s strengths — most notably the culture site Vulture and the fashion/style site The Cut, which for my money is the smartest “women’s” site online. (Its readers’ median household income? $186,797.) As long ago as 2010, David Carr could describe New York as “fast becoming a digital enterprise with a magazine attached.” It’s probably the webbiest of the major print-born media companies.

So the most print-like digital publisher is joining up with the most digital of print publishers. While this is being framed as an acquisition (with no dollar amounts released), it’s not hard to see why it might look like…a happy marriage. Substantial audience overlap, similar editorial values, strong reputations for quality — these crazy kids might pull it off!

You can see how the two sides are framing the meet-cute here (with a photo that even meets the Vows rule about even eye levels):

We have long admired (and often envied) each other’s businesses, which revealed themselves to be uniquely complementary as we quickly moved from exploratory conversations, through diligence, to an agreement. Sharing values, we found our capabilities — each excelling in different areas, with little overlap — naturally and seamlessly fitting together. New York Media is an exemplar of groundbreaking journalism, with a smart, trenchant voice, that has turned a 51-year-old print magazine into an inventive multiplatform company that punches well above its weight. Vox Media’s authority, spirit of innovation, and foundation in technology and communities, together with its visionary approach to expansion, diversification, and growth, have set it apart from other media companies that have risen in the past decade.

Let’s take a look at this pairing — what works and what might not.

Distinct paywall models. Just like everyone else, both companies are chasing direct revenue from readers, but they’ve had different approaches. Vox Media has been relatively cautious, experimenting with things like the Vox Video Lab. Bankoff said this spring there would be some further membership/paywall moves “later this year.”

Meanwhile, New York went all-in on a metered paywall late last year, at $5 a month. Interestingly, it’s a subscription that cuts across all of New York’s verticals — even though there are dedicated Vulture readers who have no interest in The Cut, Grub Street partisans with no time for Intelligencer, and so on.

I enjoy a lot of New York content, but I confess I haven’t ponied up those five bucks. As I wrote last year, it’s harder for magazine and magazine-like digital properties to make a subscription pitch, given that they are often a news consumer’s second read after the Times, the Post, or some other more full-service publisher. But a subscription that includes not only those New York sites…but also Vox, The Verge, SB Nation, et cetera? That’s a stronger pitch, even if it means divvying up the money among more sites. (Wasserstein said today that one of the areas of “new potential” she’s most interested in is “subscription businesses across this entire portfolio.”)

Think for a minute of the nascent streaming wars — Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu being joined by Apple TV+, Disney+, Peacock, HBO Max, ad infinitum. Knowing that consumers are unlikely to pay for lots of individual channels piecemeal, each company is trying to recreate the old cable bundle in its own way. (Are Marvel movies not enough to get you to sign up for Disney+? Well then, how about Toy Story? Or The Simpsons? National Geographic? Frozen? Yoda? Do you like Yoda? You seem like someone who’d like Yoda. What if we threw in ESPN+ and Hulu too?) They know that, given the sea of free content available and the incumbents’ advantage, it’ll take a diverse catalog of content to get people to pony up for access to the whole package.

When the digital publishing business was mostly about advertising, the purpose of moar scale was primarily about cutting backend costs and being able to do deals with a higher grade of advertiser. But as it shifts more toward subscription, moar scale is also about assembling a big-enough and diverse-enough bundle of content to appeal to a bigger audience. Sites have gotten pretty good at getting their superfans to buy a digital subscription. But there aren’t enough superfans. Yes, there are people who loooooooove The Cut. But there are probably more who only like The Cut — and also like Vox and The Verge and Vulture.

That’s an opportunity mergers like this can provide. This is a critical distinction from the print-era Condé Nast, where a Vogue subscriber had no reason to care that the same company published Golf Digest and GQ. Magazine-style content, but newspaper-style bundle.

(Side note: Vox Media and New York were two of only a handful of digital publishers who agreed to be part of the premium Apple News Plus bundle, in which they get some infinitesimal cut of Apple’s subscription revenue. Better to build the bundle than to be bundled by someone else.)

I like this deal. I like both companies involved and how they fit together. I like that there’s a legitimate growth story to be told, not just a cut-until-you-hit-profit one — which is the narrative most American newspapers are facing, unfortunately.

I’m sure roadblocks will pop up along the way, at all levels of the new operation. But I think these two have a real shot at making it work — maybe even growing old together. And the kids will probably be cute.

“Our audience is up 20 percent year over year, and active readers — readers who visit us four or more times per month — are up 25 percent,” said Michael Finnegan, the president of Atlantic Media (who will be taking on additional duties when Atlantic president Bob Cohn leaves on September 7). That audience growth — as well as the 80-plus new positions The Atlantic has added in the past 18 months, many of which are “specifically focused on having a better interaction with our readers” — convinced leadership that now was the right time to launch the paywall, Finnegan said. (The publication had originally said it would test a paywall with some readers in January 2018; The Wall Street Journal reported last month that owner Laurene Powell Jobs requested the delay to allow more time for hiring and platform development.)

All articles on TheAtlantic.com will count toward the five-story monthly limit; the homepage and section fronts won’t be included, nor will videos, podcasts, or live event pages, but stories from links on social media will count toward the monthly five. CityLab and Atlantic Media’s other brands like National Journal and Defense One remain free.

As the paywall rolls out, the question now is how many readers will be ready to pay for yet another digital news subscription. As Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton wrote earlier this year:

Only 16 percent of Americans say they are willing to pay for any online news. If someone’s first digital subscription is to the Times or the Post — how many are willing to pay for a second, or a third, or a fourth news site? Especially if that second or third site costs as much or more than their favorite national daily?

To frame it another way: There’s a segment of the population that can grudgingly be convinced to pay for a news site, out of some mix of consumer reward, civic duty, and peer pressure. But that second or third subscription requires a level of devotion that can be hard to sustain in a digital environment where the links come at you from every direction.

And so The Atlantic will continue to be open to experimentation, and to making content available on platforms beyond its own. It’s a participant in Apple News Plus and will participate in Scroll.

“We don’t want to close ourselves off to people who want to have different types of relationships with their news sources,” Finnegan said. “We’re going to continue to explore those opportunities. But we’re putting a lot of weight behind trying to build as large a direct relationship with our readers as possible…We see there are some audiences, really loyal to us, who have zero or one subscriptions, some who have many more subscriptions than that, and what we have figured out is that enough of those people have shown a willingness to pay for The Atlantic.”

When the Times added its paywall, such models were still relatively rare; today, though, they’ve become common among newspaper publishers — 76 percent of whom had one in place in 2019 — and they’ve been around for long enough that best practices are emerging. In a report released Tuesday by the Shorenstein Center and Lenfest Institute, researchers Nicco Mele, Matthew Skibinski, and Matthew Spector report some of their findings from a study of more than 500 U.S. newspapers between 2011 and 2018. A “substantial portion” of the data collected came directly from Press+, a paywall technology platform that merged with Piano Media in 2014; this anonymous data “was extracted directly from the back-end subscription system,” and only runs through 2015. The rest of the data was collected via publisher surveys “in a number of contexts, such as individual consulting engagements, industry collaborations such as the Facebook Local News Subscription Accelerator, and the Knight-Lenfest Table Stakes program.” And more than two-thirds of the newspapers studied were local, regional, or metro-area papers.

Here’s some of what separates the highest-performing publishers from the rest:

— They clearly define their markets. The researchers defined market penetration as the number of unique visitors relative to the the total digital desktop audience in that market. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune came out on top “with a market penetration rate of 31 percent, nearly double the median. The Boston Globe performed second-best of the organizations studied, with a 23 percent market penetration rate.”

— They have high “stop rates,” i.e., “the percentage of all digital users who are ‘stopped’ by a subscription prompt, a paywall, or a meter limit. The stop rate is calculated by the number of users stopped by a meter or paywall in a given month over the number of unique visitors during that period. Most papers were stopping only a tiny fraction of readers, while the ones with stronger digital businesses were stopping significantly more:

Among the more than 500 news organizations analyzed, the fiftieth percentile of publishers stops only 1.8 percent of their readership with a paywall or meter. Publishers with “sustainable” digital business report stop rates between the 80th and 90th percentiles of all publishers studied (at or above 4.2 percent of all readers). The publishers that reported more than 6 percent of unique visitors reaching their stop threshold had “thriving” digital subscription businesses — robust teams and well-developed audience engagement strategies…The large metropolitan daily newspapers studied report stop rates approximately double the industry as a whole, with a median stop rate of 3.64 percent.

The report offers recommendations on how publishers can increase their stop rates:

Most publishers’ paywalls have gotten tighter over time; slightly over half of the publishers studied now offer five or fewer free articles per month.

Over time, publishers have also played around with the content that they choose to exclude from the paywall. When McClatchy first introduced metered models, for instance, it offered 25 free articles per month and excluded clicks from social media and email newsletters, a policy that now seems way too generous. Today, “higher-performing publishers…tend to include nearly all article or content elements iwthin their meter, offering limited exceptions” (for content that still drives advertising revenue like obituaries, classifieds, and sponsored content).

Big papers like The Wall Street Journal are now using customized, or “bendy” paywalls (and Piano just announced a product that will make these “propensity” paywalls more accessible to smaller publishers as well).

— They make checkout easy (and didn’t forget about readers on mobile). The report stresses the importance of that last step in converting a subscriber: The part where you register for an account and make a purchase.

Data from 10 major metropolitan newspapers showed that, on average, publishers saw an average 90 percent drop-off of users once they enter the subscription process along the purchase and conversion funnel. On average, only 29 percent of desktop users who saw the first step of the purchase funnel (presentation of offers and pricing choices) made it to the second step (providing their email address). Only 14.8 percent reached the step of the process at which they were asked to enter payment information, and 9.9 percent reached the confirmation page indicating that they had completed their purchase.

Across the publishers studied, the differences in success rate were critical: more than 90 percent of users dropped out between the first step of the purchase process and the last. This drop-off was even higher on mobile devices; the desktop conversion rate was five times higher than the rate for mobile.

— They understand why subscribers let their subscriptions lapse, so they can prevent it from happening. (Take heed, L.A. Times.) “High-performing publishers tended to deeply understand the source of their churn — from the reason for cancellation to the causes of payment lapses,” the researchers write. As has been found in other studies, the subscribers who keep coming back are the ones who pay and renew: “Prioritizing and sharing highlights, valued stories relevant to their content histories, and new and novel offerings with a regular cadence will help increase the likelihood a subscriber perceives the value of their ongoing relationship with your news organization.”

You can read the full report here.

Well, (3) is about to go away in the web’s most popular browser; the countdown to your sweet release is on. (Or, you know, you could subscribe.)

The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The Dallas Morning News — among others — all employ some version of such an incognito catcher. The next version of Google Chrome, due out on July 30, will stop them, rendering their metered paywalls significantly leakier.

(In other news: Publishers, apply now for some Google News Initiative dollars! Google’s looking for “creative projects that generate revenue and/or increase audience engagement”! Or maybe sign up for Google’s Subscriptions Lab for publishers, aiming to “develop a sustainable and thriving business model for newspapers across North America — powered by digital subscriptions”! Google giveth and Google taketh away.)

Incognito mode has long been an easy way for dabblers to read just that one article that they really needed, since micropayments aren’t really working out and publishers weren’t too thirsty to beat them. But the reader revenue race is on, and so are the side-eyes on incognito mode users…for a little while longer.

Our Josh Benton described it here earlier this year:

Switching your web browser to incognito mode — that’s Chrome’s name for it; it’s Private Browsing in Safari and Firefox — temporarily blocks a site’s ability to read or write cookies on your device, and cookies are most typically how a subscription site knows whether you’re a paying customer or not. If you put all of your content behind a hard paywall — always requiring a login to get access — incognito mode isn’t a big worry. But if you have a metered paywall — where the same content is freely available in some circumstances but not in others — incognito mode essentially resets the meter every time.

There is one way the timing is odd, though. In order to treat incognito browsers differently, a website needs to be able to determine that they’re incognito browsers. Earlier this month, it came out that Google Chrome, the web’s most popular browser, was working to prevent sites from doing just that. Code that blinds servers to private browsing has already been added to the current Canary version of Chrome (a version used for early developer testing). New features in Canary, if all goes well, typically roll out to the standard Google Chrome in three or four months — so this sort of tactic will likely break by summer in the browser that currently has 63 percent market share.

And here we arrive at the July 30 expiration. Monojoy Bhattacharjee wrote about it at What’s New in Publishing:

Soft paywalls permit free reading of a limited number of articles per month, and the number of articles read is tracked using cookies. Where cookies cannot be used effectively — such as in incognito mode — publications have attempted to block access outright. With Chrome 76, that option is off the table.

Currently, the beta version of Chrome 76 is available for download, and there are already detailed guides available on how to get past paywalls in Chrome’s Incognito Mode.

Google viewed publishers’ ability to detect an incognito browser as a bug. But users’ ability to get around a paywall is apparently a feature.

Chrome Incognito mode has been detectable for years, due to the FileSystem API implementation. As of Chrome 76, this is fixed.
Apologies to the "detect private mode" scripts out there. pic.twitter.com/3LWFXQyy7w

— Paul Irish (@paul_irish) June 11, 2019

What sort of impact might this change have? Publishers have been moving to tighter and tighter metered paywalls as their desire for reader revenue has strengthened — mostly by cutting how many free articles you get per month, but also by using more predictive analytics to individualize paywalls and by doing things like blocking incognito browsers. The reopening on this loophole could encourage more publishers to go all in on a hard paywall, in which you can’t read a single article without first registering.

Maybe if you have an idea for a good way to make that transition, you could apply for Google’s latest Innovation Challenges, which recently opened in the U.S. and Canada with a July 15 deadline! Or Latin America-based news outlets can apply for funding for “new business models and new news products” through July 22, and the Middle East/Africa/Turkey region can submit applications tied to “reader engagement and new business models in any form” through September 2. You’ll need to put your name on the application, though — Google will definitely be able to tell if you’re trying to go incognito.

Paywalls may seem to be everywhere these days, but how widespread are they in fact? This is the question Lucas Graves and I tried to address when we set out to survey the current pay model landscape across six European countries (Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom) and the U.S.

When we first conducted a similar study in 2017, pay models had already spread across nearly two-thirds of newspaper sites in Europe. Two years have passed since then — eons in the rapidly evolving news environment — which is why we thought that it was time for a much-needed update. So what did we find?

Pay models are on the rise — but not as quickly as one might think

For our study, we collected data from four broad categories of, in total, 212 news outlets: daily newspapers (up-market, tabloid/mid-market, business, and regional), weekly newspapers and magazines, TV news (commercial and public service media), and digital-born news outlets. We sorted pay models into three categories: hard paywalls, where no content is accessible for free at all; “freemium” models, made up of a mix of free and premium content; and metered paywalls, which allow access to a limited number of free articles each month.

Our data suggest that a growing number of news organizations across Europe and in the U.S. are challenging the assumption that people will not pay for digital news.

69 percent of the newspapers we surveyed now operate some kind of a pay model, a small increase from 64.5 percent in 2017. Hard paywalls — operated by outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times — are extremely rare, with the landscape evenly divided between freemium models and metered paywalls (33 percent each). When it comes to weekly newspapers and news magazines, just over half (52 percent) operate a pay model, down 10 percentage points from 2017. Freemium models are the most widely used in this category, followed by metered paywalls and hard paywalls.