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.

I’ve tried it out and the technology (actually!) keeps me logged in. It sounded cheesy to some ears, but it turns out an uncluttered, ad-free reading experience really can make for a better internet. For publishers watching ad revenue circle the drain, the ability to offer a more streamlined version of their site to readers willing to pay just a bit extra sounded pretty good, too.

But does Scroll make more sense as a feature than as a standalone product? In the months after its launch, Scroll made moves in that direction, forming a bundled partnership with McClatchy and teaming up with Mozilla’s Firefox as part of an offering that promises fewer trackers and faster speeds.

Twitter, it seems, was thinking along the same lines. The social media platform announced Tuesday that it had acquired Scroll as part of a future subscription service. Neither company disclosed the terms of the sale.

Scroll’s entire 13-person team will move over to Twitter and work to integrate the product into a subscription service to be launched “later in the year.” In the meantime, Scroll will go into “private beta” and pause all new signups. (Current users will get to continue using the service.)

Scroll CEO Tony Haile, former Chartbeat CEO, explained the company’s marching orders in a blog post announcing the acquisition:

The mission we’ve been given by Jack and the Twitter team is simple: take the model and platform that Scroll has built and scale it so that everyone who uses Twitter has the opportunity to experience an internet without friction and frustration, a great gathering of people who love the news and pay to sustainably support it.

The acquisition of Scroll — and, previously, the newsletter company Revue — are part of something called “Longform” taking shape at Twitter.

Twitter’s VP of product, Mike Park, said the new project will give readers “a first-class experience” of “articles, threads and newsletters” both “on and off Twitter.” A recent job listing said the project will “help publishers grow, understand, and engage their audience” — so expect analytics and conversation-boosting tools, too.

Readers: we’re planning to re-launch Scroll as part of a future subscription service on Twitter.

Imagine unlocking a clean, fast-loading experience for articles (or even newsletters from @Revue) with a portion of your subscription going to the sites and writers you read pic.twitter.com/nTUwfqk9F5

— Mike Park (@mep) May 4, 2021

But — wait! We have some bad news.

The acquisition means that the handy news aggregator Nuzzel, operated by Scroll since late 2018, will be shut down. Haile explained in a goodbye-for-now post that Scroll’s work on the app has chiefly consisted of “quick fixes and duct tape” and that achieving the scale required for integration into Twitter would mean starting from scratch:

Simply cloning a service conceived in 2012 doesn’t make a ton of sense. Instead we’re going to spend a little time working out how the best of Nuzzel should be expressed in 2021. There may be elements of Nuzzel that also belong in the Twitter app or that can take advantage of new internal APIs. In the meantime, Nuzzel’s app, site and email service will go dark. 

Haile writes that Nuzzel has fans at Twitter and an internal team hopes to “take the best of the Nuzzel experience and build it directly into Twitter.”

But — at least for some of us here at Nieman Lab — a key selling point for Nuzzel was that it allows you to spend less time on Twitter by flagging stories that you can’t miss, and leaving the rest. So we’ll see!

I love Scroll but ending Nuzzel is like killing Google Reader for an even more terminally online group of media people https://t.co/tBxAnkuj2X

— nilay patel (@reckless) May 4, 2021

Joining the chorus of media nerds who are devastated by this news. Nuzzel is hands down one of my most used apps. At the same time, it’s a no brainer for Twitter to offer similar functionality in its main app. Just do it quickly, please! https://t.co/PdsQfsbpfl

— Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) May 4, 2021

This is true: For Facebook, news is 90% hassle, 10% benefit. For Google, it’s maybe 60% hassle, 40% benefit. For Twitter, it’s more like 10% hassle, 90% benefit. https://t.co/8yGi9MVq32

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) May 4, 2021

The @tryscroll + @twitter acquisition is interesting. Huge Q for publishers remains: since it moves subscriber $ & relationship to Twitter’s end, how do we ensure the upside doesn’t cannibalize subs? How will Twitter treat pubs who don’t want to play?

— Curt Woodward (@curtwoodward) May 4, 2021

Eight McClatchy publications — The Sacramento Bee, The Kansas City Star, The News & Observer, The State, Idaho Statesman, The Wichita Eagle, The Bellingham Herald, Lexington Herald-Leader — will offer an ad-free version of their site to Scroll subscribers. New and active subscribers to these sites can opt in to a discounted Scroll membership. If McClatchy likes what they see with Scroll-using subscribers, the partnership will expand.

“What happens when we make the best possible experience on our own site? What does that do for churn? What does this do for engagement? Will people stay longer and read more?” CEO Tony Haile said. “Those are some of the things that McClatchy is interested in with this partnership.”

We are excited to partner with @tryscroll to test an ad-free experience as a benefit for active subscribers in eight McClatchy markets. Thanks to @tryscroll for celebrating local journalism in this #thread https://t.co/oYP5OzaOzc https://t.co/HHHKAtiumQ

— McClatchy (@mcclatchy) December 7, 2020

How does Scroll work, again? In a nutshell, users pay $5/month for the privilege of an ad-free reading experience on hundreds of news sites. Without ads, pages load faster and there are fewer anonymous trackers. The sites also look nicer — clean and less cluttered.

Scroll then distributes 70 percent of the $5 subscription cost to individual publishers, depending on where users spend the most time. In a post announcing the new partnerships, Haile put the six month paid retention rate at 85 percent and writes that publishers are receiving two to three times more revenue per user with Scroll than they’d receive from advertising. (Scroll declined to give Nieman Lab exact figures.)

Haile originally envisioned Scroll as primarily for casual readers. For publishers, it would be an easy way to receive support from people who enjoy the site but aren’t visiting enough to commit to a membership. About a year after launch — after the introduction of The Matchup and Scroll’s own success with a Business Insider bundle — the team at Scroll started to see additional opportunities. In his post, Haile wrote:

What really excites me is what moves like this do to counteract the zero-sum game that publishers find themselves in. Now, with Scroll, a subscriber to Business Insider can also support the work of journalists at The Verge or USA Today. Each time a publisher adds a new subscriber in this model, they’re not only delivering more value but making journalism at large a little more sustainable, just as they benefit when other publishers do the same. Less zero sum, more rising tide.

So the hope is that McClatchy subscribers will see Scroll’s ad-free reading experience — not just on their local site, but at BuzzFeed, Vox, The Atlantic, and more — as part of the core value that their McClatchy subscription brings. Haile identified one critical point in the publisher-subscriber dynamic where he hopes Scroll can help:

“My dream is that when a publisher is moving you out of the discount period of your subscription, they feel it’s safe to tell you about it,” Haile said. “When a publisher can say, ‘Here’s all the great stuff you’ve got. Now it’s going to be this price.’ When they feel safe to do that without churn exploding, that’s where we’ve gotten to a level of value that we can all be proud of.”

Looking ahead, Scroll hopes to increase the pace of adding new sites and use the McClatchy experiment to show publishers the results of bundling Scroll into their subscriptions.

Haile has witnessed publishers dealing with furloughs and a lack of resources as well as leadership and product teams overwhelmed by the year’s unrelenting news cycle first hand. “There were people who told us, ‘We can’t think about next year, because we don’t know if we’re going to be around in three months.’ Everyone’s timelines got really short,” Haile said. Too often, he saw half the people trying to do twice the amount of work.

But he sees light at the end of the tunnel. “As we start to see a future beyond this pandemic, as we see a new administration coming in, and the future feels more possible for people, you’ve got a pathway to accelerate the pace again.”

A previous version of this story stated that McClatchy subscribers get a free Scroll subscription. That is incorrect.

For readers: Wouldn’t you like it if the news sites you read didn’t have so many ads and trackers and general internet gunk on them? And wouldn’t you be willing to support the journalists who produce that news you love with a low $5-a-month payment? (Most of your five bucks goes to publishers, with the sites you visit most getting a larger share.)

For publishers: Your ad revenue is profoundly uninspiring. Google and Facebook ate it. And all the annoying ads you’ve plastered across your sites alienate some of your users, or lead them to install an ad blocker to get rid of them all. Wouldn’t you like to improve the experience of some of your best customers and get a revenue stream from people who might not be willing to pay $15 a month for your paywall, but still like you and want to help?

Now, a few (albeit very long-feeling) months later, Scroll is reporting a conversion rate from their free 30-day trial that they’re very happy with — 18.5 percent become paying Scroll subscribers — and rolling out a new partnership with Mozilla expected to yield another subscriber boost.

The partnership is called Firefox Better Web, building off Mozilla’s web browser. Enable it and Firefox users will see “pages load faster while using less data and the anonymous trackers selling their data disappear,” they say. The price is the same as with straight Scroll: a discounted $2.49 for your first six months, $4.99 per month after that.

Firefox may have lost the browser wars to Google Chrome (and Safari on iOS), much as its predecessor Netscape lost to Internet Explorer in the first browser war. But it has retained a small but devoted following in part because of its independence — not being owned by Google, Apple, or Microsoft, standing up for open web standards, and a focus on user privacy. (“Internet for people, not profit.”)

That made the joint venture a natural match, Haile said. Mozilla and Scroll, who started talks a year ago, both recognized the growing tension between users who wanted a private, faster web and the way publishers have traditionally sought to make money online. “We care about the same things. Mozilla believes in an open web where sites are thriving independently and the user comes first,” Haile said. “All the things that are close to my heart.”

When early tests showed Mozilla users also cared about funding journalism, the partners felt confident in launching the program that rolls Scroll’s ad-free experience into a larger privacy-minded browser experience.

We’re working on creating a better web with @tryScroll to give you the fast, private web you want while supporting publishers at the same time. https://t.co/ILoAfBiLkX

— Firefox (@firefox) March 24, 2020

Haile, like the leaders of many young companies, unfortunately declined to give an exact headcount of paying members. But he said that, within the first 24 hours of launch, Scroll saw five times the signups they thought they would see in the first month. (Impressive! Or they are bad at estimating things!) Converting 18.5 percent of those signups to paying subscribers easily beats what Haile described as the industry benchmark for similar product offerings according to their research, 3 to 4 percent. Those who signed up for a trial via a particular publisher’s encouragement converted at an even higher rate.

Traffic traffic everywhere and not an ad to serve…

— Tony Haile (@arctictony) March 21, 2020

The coronavirus crisis is, in a way, an opportunity for Scroll, whose pitch to publishers sounds especially great when their ad revenue is evaporating around them. (Though the growing economic crisis might not help with potential paying customers who now feel less willing to part with those five bucks.) Scroll says it is fielding interest from hundreds of publishers, many of whom are seeing huge surges in website traffic but having trouble monetizing it. Haile said that even though publishers are dealing with “the mother of all firefights” right now, so many are reaching out to Scroll that the team built and released a self-service onboarding option for more nimble, tech-savvy sites who didn’t want to wait. (They’re also looking to hire to meet demand.)

The interest is coming mainly from publishers who had previously told Scroll they were interested, but wanted to see how the startup fared before partnering, Haile said.

“Many of the ones reaching out have been the ones who said, ‘This is interesting but we’re going to wait and see how it goes,'” Haile said. “I think the thing a lot of the publishers have realized is that a wait-and-see approach to new models of revenue is not going to be viable in this kind of environment. We have to be moving forward and we have to be testing.”

Haile also reported publishers were seeing $30 to $40 in revenue per thousand pageviews and wrote those figures were “double what the sites would have earned from those visitors from advertising.” (In January, Haile estimated that $25 to $30 would likely emerge as the standard as the network continued to mature.)

Firefox may have a relatively small user share, but those users are still a huge potential market for Scroll. It’s unclear, though, how much effort Firefox will put into pushing Better Web to its users. (Firefox calls it a “test pilot,” its beta-like term for more experimental products and features. It’ll initially only be available in the United States.)

This isn’t the first time Mozilla has teamed up with a content-adjacent company. In 2017, it bought Pocket, the read-it-later service, and eventually integrated its content recommendations into Firefox itself.

Amid the influx of inbound interest in Scroll, the Mozilla rollout, and a team scattered across the country, Haile said he was feeling “shell-shocked” but encouraged.

“Now, more than ever, this work is important,” Haile said. “That’s what is keeping us going.”

It’s one of the news industry’s most significant attempts to address a real problem. There are probably lots of people who like your content enough to click on a link and have an ad or two put near the free story they want to read. And there may be a few people who love your content so much they’re willing to pay a monthly subscription fee for it. But what about everyone in between — the people who might be okay throwing you a dime now and then but who aren’t going to buy subscriptions to all of the news sites they read? How can publishers get revenue from them?

CEO Tony Haile — the former CEO of Chartbeat and a major reason news industry insiders have paid attention to the startup — says Scroll was born out of his own frustration as an online news reader who resented slow-loading junk ads and dodgy trackers. For lack of a viable alternative, he knew some of his favorite outlets were laying off journalists and doubling down on digital ads in ways that “just didn’t make sense from a user experience perspective.”

One common response to this onslaught of ads has been to install an ad blocker — something roughly a quarter of Americans say they do. But that usually prevents even the most user-friendly sites from getting much-needed ad revenue too.

Haile thought there was a way to offer a better online reading experience and ensure publishers receive more money than they’d get through advertising — especially advertising sold by some distant ad network and not the publication itself. As Ken Doctor reported back in 2018, Haile and his cofounders dreamed up the basics years ago, including the idea to distribute 70 percent of the $5 subscription cost to individual publishers based on how long each user spends on the site. (Haile said early adopters will pay just $2.49/month for the first six months; Scroll also offers a free 30-day trial.)

The lengthy beta period allowed Scroll to clear technical hurdles — like figuring out how to keep a user logged across multiple sites and across desktop, mobile, and tablet platforms. But it also gave the team, which has grown to 15 employees, time to refine and expand the initial ad-free idea.

“The key thing that has changed is that we’ve felt more confident in our vision,” Haile said. “It’s not just ‘Can you get rid of ads,’ but ‘What does a better internet look like?'”

For Scroll, creating a better internet means consciously designing a system to reward high-quality content over clickbait. The startup distributes membership revenue based on the share of time — calculated per individual user so smaller publications get a fair shake — that each reader spends on their site. Every user receives a monthly breakdown of how their subscription dollars were distributed.

My favorite little thing about @tryscroll is seeing where my money goes each month: pic.twitter.com/lFlRPo88Mb

— Tony Haile (@arctictony) January 22, 2020

A better internet also means reckoning with how most people read online news. After noticing that roughly two-thirds of traffic during the beta was coming from mobile devices, Scroll built features that allow a user to start an article on a desktop computer, pick up where she left off on her phone, and then switch to listening to the article on a commute. (One beta tester noted that Scroll had “just casually thrown in” the best text-to-audio speech the user had ever heard, according to Haile.)

In a demonstration just before launch, articles and home pages in Scroll’s 300-site network loaded markedly faster than their ad-filled counterparts. In one comparison, a USA Today page took more than 18 seconds to load, and readers would still have to click away from a full-page advertisement for “Star Trek: Picard.” With Scroll? The homepage, sans ads, was fully loaded in one second. (Obviously the difference would be smaller on article pages with less aggressive advertising.)

Similarly, Haile said he hopes the Twitter-aggregating news app Nuzzel, which Scroll acquired in February, will make users feel they’re using a more trustworthy version of the internet. Nuzzel, through curators and aggregation, provides “a healthier way to interact with social,” one that directs users toward quality content without, as Haile said, “getting dragged into the morass.”

User retention, based on the beta experience, seems to boil down to a simple question: Does Scroll have the sites the user likes to visit? As they’ve added more and more partner publications, Haile said there has been a direct correlation with retention. And as the network grows, more members get more value, more subscriber revenue goes to the sites, and more sites have an incentive to join.

“We know, as an industry, that we need to experiment in new business models and yet we see so little actually happen,” Haile said. “We’ve been very lucky to work with partners that believe we need to be innovating and take a data-oriented approach.”

Haile acknowledges that the self-selected beta testers probably belong to “a more specialized, media-aware category” than the general public — more like Nieman Lab readers than normal humans — but he’s encouraged by the user behavior he’s seen so far. In the near future, he says he’ll be paying attention to how engagement patterns change after the public launch and working to recruit additional media partners — including more local news outlets — to Scroll’s network.

“We built this to see if we can build a better internet,” Haile said. “And I don’t think you can have a better internet without local journalism covering the stories that matter.”

But there’s also a third group to remember: the curators, the people who share and drive others to all that great premium content. “We want to find some way for those curators out there to sustain themselves,” said Haile, and that’s why on Thursday Scroll announced that it is acquiring news aggregator Nuzzel. Nuzzel, for those who aren’t familiar, is a handy app that creates a news feed consisting of what people you follow on Twitter and other social media sites are reading, based on how many times links are being shared. (It’s a lot like our Fuego.) Nuzzel also has a newsletter feature that lets users send out email newsletters of the stories they’re most interested in. The service was founded by Jonathan Abrams (who’d previously founded Friendster) in 2014.

From the announcement blog post:

A healthy news ecosystem doesn’t just require a thriving free press, it also needs a diversity of curators, newsletters and content discovery options that enable the weird and wonderful to surface. We want to use Nuzzel as a test kitchen to see what models works for curators as well as content creators. The simple goal is a sustainable open web where the goals of creators, curators and consumers are aligned around the best possible experience.

“Scroll is at the forefront of improving the online news experience, and Scroll will be a perfect home for Nuzzel,” Abrams said in a statement. (Haile wouldn’t share either the price Scroll is paying or how many users Nuzzel has.)

Nuzzel’s core service has been free (after a brief stint offering a premium product), and will remain so; Scroll is not acquiring its enterprise “Intelligence” product, which will instead be spun off by the engineers who’d worked on it. The only other change that users should notice, Haile said, is that sponsored content will no longer appear in Nuzzel’s email newsletters. “It would be inconsistent for Scroll to be serving ads.” Beyond that, the goal is to “do no harm” to a service that plenty of people already love. (How many people, exactly, is unclear; Nuzzel has not released user numbers.) Existing users may have seen some bumps as Scroll migrated the service over to its AWS servers this past week, but those issues should now be resolved.

Now would be a good place to also provide a brief Scroll update: It’s currently being used by “a bunch of beta users,” Haile said, and will gradually be rolled out to more users over the next couple of quarters. “It’s going to become easier and easier to become a member of Scroll. It’s something of a Gmail approach, rather than a we’re-launching-a-new-car approach,” he said.

“The stakes are high on this one. There aren’t many new business models in media, and so we probably shouldn’t screw this one up.”

Ken Doctor characterized Scroll this way last fall, when the startup was one year in: “Talk to people in the news industry about what they think of his new startup Scroll, and they hesitate. They may stumble describing its model. They’ll say it’s something they’re watching. And then they’ll tell you if Tony Haile is behind it, they expect to see something impressive.” So, no pressure — but the team is getting closer to delivering.

The bet Haile, Chartbeat’s founding CEO, is making with Scroll is that he can convince online news readers — both subscribers and non-subscribers — to pay $5 a month for a substantially better, ad-free user experience on the news sites they already frequent. If that pitch works, it could send publishers more money than they could generate from advertising revenue.

“The internet had been this thing that was done to us, not built for us,” Haile told me. Their guiding framework in creating a system for publishers to get their due: “What does the internet that’s built for you look like, feel like, and so forth.”

Last week, Ben Mullin broke the news at The Wall Street Journal that Scroll had brokered deals with Vox Media, The Daily Beast, and BuzzFeed to bring their sites onto the service. A total of 27 brands are now signed onto Scroll’s testing phase, joining USA Today, The Atlantic, MSNBC, and more. And Scroll has a serious new infusion of capital to keep it going: Investors, including The New York Times Co. and Axel Springer and led by Union Square Ventures, have now committed a total of $10 million over the past two years.

As the media industry focuses on ad-blocking, reader revenue, and data security, Scroll’s ten-person team (planning to grow to 40 by the end of this year) has been spending 2018 constructing its GDPR-compliant infrastructure, negotiating deals, and testing the startup’s model.

“Nobody has said no” outright, Haile said, of the publishers they’ve approached. But he isn’t measuring by number of publishers; they’re working to add organizations by content consumption coverage, or the top sites where potential Scroll users spend their time. “The consumer doesn’t think about how many sites are in the network, but how much time they get to spend in a better experience,” he said. The split of that consumer’s $5 (or rather, 70 percent of it, after Scroll’s cut) is distributed to publishers based on the amount of time the consumer spends with their site.

Scroll is one of a few nascent group of startups trying to connect publishers with reader revenue outside the boundaries of a strict subscription, like LaterPay, Blendle, and Invisibly. Scroll’s ad-free experience will be the same for any paying user, though it won’t get you around publisher paywalls. (If you don’t pay for The New York Times, for instance, you won’t get more free articles because you use Scroll — but the ones that you do get will be ad-free.) Scroll will also have to pitch itself to users outside those Nieman Lab niche types, in addition to publishers, to sign up.

A significant pull for publishers is Haile’s promise that Scroll can generate more money per user than a typical ad experience. Scroll’s team tested its model based on a group of Digital Content Next publishers with $7 billion in digital ad revenue from 234 million unique visitors in a year. “What that means is that cohort of people makes about $2.50/month/person altogether [through ads]. We knew we had to have a distribution pool that was bigger than that,” Haile said. Consumer research on pricing levels showed a substantial number of users willing to pay the $5, with Scroll passing along $3.50 of that.

Running the publishers’ numbers showed that nearly all organizations could generate 40 percent more than they do from ads, Haile said — all but one. (That site relied on a lot of slideshow-like content that generated quick visits with low engagement.) “The model is designed to reward engagement and loyalty. We think those things are the currency of publishing in the future, that relationship with the consumer. The better you do at that, the better you do under Scroll.”

While Scroll has been setting up shop, the publishing industry prepared to face off with adblockers and ended up taking more of a data security tack this year. Google’s in-house Chrome adblocker helped limit the peskiest of advertisements and GDPR whipped the Internet into data security shape (extra thanks to a little thing called Cambridge Analytica), but Facebook’s algorithm plot twist and, you know, just the general state of the world has reminded publishers of the urgency to grow reader revenue. Haile sees the moves as steps toward a better Internet world.

“There’s this newly reinvigorated focus on ‘how do we serve the consumer and put their experience first’,” he said. “Scroll is a symptom of that broader drive to put the consumer back at the heart of what we do as an industry again.”

Scroll through these about reader revenue beyond the standard subsciption:

• Will more than 2 percent of digital readers ever pay for news? “There is a whole universe living between ads and subscriptions”
• Newsonomics: Can Invisibly be the new revenue stream publishers dream of?
• Testing its pay-per-article model in English, Blendle launches in the United States with 20 publishers
• Discors wants people to pay for news via a low-priced subscription that crosses multiple publishers

Last fall, Ken Doctor talked with Haile about how Scroll will work. Haile said at the time:

The interesting thing for me was to look at ad-blocking not so much as a problem with publishing, but as more of a consumer signal. In TV, that was what you had — you had increasing ad loads, which led to the consumer signal that was TiVo, and then led to the consumer signal that is Netflix. Music had similar kinds of frustrations, leading to SiriusXM, torrents, LimeWire, and that stuff, then leading to Spotify.

In media, you’ve had increasing ad load, increasing frustration, consumer signals, and ad-blocking leading to…what? So, the question for me was: Is there an orthogonal way to get direct consumer revenue? Not from access, but from experience.

Is there a group of people who will pay in general for an ad-free experience across X number of sites, or whatever? I kind of started with that.

Scroll does not allow people to get around paywalls on sites that have them if they aren’t already, separately, paying subscribers to those sites. Haile explained this to Doctor, too:

There is someone who isn’t a Scroll user and isn’t a Times subscriber. They get ads on 10 articles.

There is someone who is not a Scroll subscriber, but is a Times subscriber — they get ads on unlimited articles.

There is someone who is a Scroll user, but not a Times subscriber — so they get an ad-free experience on NYTimes.com, but then after 10 articles, they hit the paywall.

Then there is someone who is a Scroll user and a New York Times subscriber, and they get unlimited articles, ad-free. Those are the four quadrants that you can possibly be.

There are two things going on there: One is access, so you get more than 10 articles. The other one is experience.

The other key thing when you’re looking at this model is the thing that got people in trouble in the past has been this desire to try and merge the two. They’ve tried to do access and experience. When you try to do that, when you try to merge The New York Times’ subscription revenues as well as their advertising revenues, that’s where the economics start to really break down. We’re avoiding all of that. The New York Times, the subscription basically exists almost in an alternate universe to our ad-free experience in that context.

In-house custom native won't be blocked because people seem to be fine with that. Random crap served programmatically is off limits though. I don't think people have a problem with advertising, I think they have a problem with friction. We should fix that.

— Tony Haile (@arctictony) February 22, 2018

Scroll publisher partners will receive 70 percent of the revenue. The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Mullin explained on Thursday how that will work:

Scroll intends to pass 70 percent of its subscription revenue on to publishers, Mr. Haile said. That money is divided up among news organizations according to how much individual subscribers pay attention to each publisher, with a bonus awarded to outlets that cultivate a particularly devoted following.

If a Scroll customer spends 10 percent of her time with a specific publisher, then that outlet would receive 10 percent of that customer’s subscription fee allocated to publishers based on attention.

The revenue set aside for publishers also includes a pool of bonus money for publishers that win over a loyal audience. If an organization is responsible for 20 percent or more of a Scroll subscriber’s attention, the organization becomes eligible for a larger share of the revenue from that subscriber.

Scroll is set to launch later this year.

Duopoly: Google and Facebook dominate the field of digital advertising — which is now the largest category of ad spending, surpassing TV in North America and the U.K. Google and Facebook have been taking almost 90 percent of all the digital ad growth in the market in the U.S. The remaining 10 percent or so is supposed to help support news media, as well as all other businesses dependent on advertising.

The immense damage done to news media by the duopoly is only collateral damage, but it’s immense damage nonetheless. It doesn’t matter if you are smartly diabolical in your intent, or a useful idiot, or even out to make a better world.

Consumer revenue: Inflated by the Trump bump, consumer (read: reader) revenue came out of the shadows in 2017.

Readers now supply The New York Times Times with 62 cents of every dollar it earns. Print advertising has become only the fourth-largest category of Times revenue. Subscription surges have been seen everywhere from the Times and Washington Post to The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Minnpost, and the big regional local-news-supplying public radio stations.

As the meltdown in digital news media (see below) has surfaced, reader revenue and reader-related revenue (from events, e-commerce, and more) becomes utterly necessary. News organizations like CNN, Business Insider, and The Athletic reflect that reality in their decisions to ask readers for direct payment.

Roll-up: This was the year that long-time family newspaper companies said “uncle.” Gatehouse bought the Morris and Calkins companies, among other smaller companies, bringing its total of dailies to more than 140 — or more than a tenth of the remaining daily newspaper industry. In fact, Gatehouse, Gannett, and Digital First Media now own a quarter of those 1,350 or so dailies. In magazines, the Big Four is shrinking to the Big Three as Meredith swallows the larger Time Inc.

With digital disruption a primary force, the quest for scale reigns in almost all media enterprise. Fewer companies are deciding what we will — or won’t — get. And it’s worth noting that even the acquirers — Gatehouse and Meredith, for instance — are running negative in the year-over-year revenues in their core print businesses. Roll-up is more an exercise in profit-squeezing and cost-cutting than it is a strategy to build bigger, better products for customers.

Second paper: Just this week, Gatehouse scooped up the remains of the bankrupt Boston Herald for a scant $5 million. That once-independent voice will form part of Gatehouse’s megacluster business strategy and likely be reduced as a second daily Boston voice.

In the last year, a civic group of investors saved, for now, The Chicago Sun-Times as an independent voice. In the Twin Cities, we have to wonder how long owner Digital First Media will keep the Saint Paul Pioneer Press (one of my alma maters) alive; it’s already seen its staff sliced by more three-quarters to 50.

With formerly monopoly dailies seeking survival, it’s no surprise that “second papers” are becoming a vestige of another time. But it’s worth marking.

Viscera: This headline made my insides hurt: “LA Weekly staff ‘eviscerated’ by layoffs, says editor.”

2017 was a year of reckoning for some of the alternative weeklies. The Village Voice stopped print. The Houston Press abruptly closed. And, yes, L.A. Weekly’s staff was eviscerated, amid the fast pruning of much secondary print media in greater L.A.

Daily newspaper layoffs and buyouts have become almost too numerous and routine to report on. (Besides, how many people are actually following the demise of the local press?)

I regularly get emails from distraught staffers. Last week brought one saying another 10 journalists had been laid off at The Denver Post, bringing the staff to 90 at the single remaining daily in the country’s 19th-largest metro area. ASNE no longer conducts an annual census of jobs lost, but I’d guess there are no more than 24,000 daily journalists working their beats at print dailies — a cut of 33,000 since 1990, when the country had 80 million fewer people (and we thought we had resolved forever the Russian threat, as the Berlin and other Cold War walls crumbled).

It’s hard to say who’s essential to the newspaper enterprises these days. Alden Global Capital (well-described in “How many Palm Beach mansions does a Wall Street tycoon need?”) has made cutting an art form. It has laid off numerous editors and publishers, as well as hundreds of reporters, but this year, it outdid itself: As CEO Steve Rossi retired, it declined to fill his position, opting for a (presumably lower-priced) COO “reporting to the board.”

Cross-ownership: Nothing’s surprising about the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of decades-long regulations except its alacrity. Deregulation advocates — led by both newspaper industry and TV industry trade groups — have advocated for the dropping of rules against media ownership concentration. Even they, though, have been surprised by FCC chair Ajit Pai’s supposed casting-off of media ownership shackles — with net neutrality overthrow just one more major “side” issue for publishers.

The media cross-ownership rules — which have prevented dailies from owning major local TV stations, and vice versa — pose the biggest question. In a world of already advanced roll-up on the TV side as well as in newspapers, who will actually merge local properties, and how quickly? We see right-leaning interests lining up, but precious few individuals or groups that appear to have the wider public, and democratic, interest in mind and heart.

2018 is the year to watch as strategists assess “value” and “combination” anew. The “new convergence” — a smart combination of local text and video, TV and print — is certainly possible, but unproven. As likely: a disharmonic convergence against the public interest.

CasualFans: That’s a Tony Haile construct, one known among the news industry’s growing roster of audience development executives. In September, I asked, “Is that all there is to reader payment?” Would more than two or three percent of digital audiences ever pay for news content?

Haile, the founder of industry standard Chartbeat and now entrepreneur behind Scroll, aims at the next 10 percent, a group he identifies as “casualfans.” “It’s taken from cable TV bundling language where Superfans and Casualfans are pretty common usage,” he said.

As advertising craters, we’ll be looking to Scroll, LaterPay, and Jim McKelvey’s Invisibly to see if there’s a new cohort of people who will pay for news.

I’ve long liked Voice of San Diego’s construct. The intent of its membership program is to moving The Informed (all its readers) to The Involved (those who receive email newsletters, comment on the site, or attend events) to The Invested (those who buy memberships).

Listen: Kicking off with The New York Times’ The Daily, it was a big year for the newsy podcast. We’ll see what the regionals, including Gannett and McClatchy, produce from their own fledgling investments in audio.

Useful idiots: We weren’t so sophisticated in years past in cataloging our types of idiots. Yet this term — used by the Russians well back into Soviet times — is a phenomenon unexpectedly reborn in 2017. We don’t yet know how many of these useful idiots —
people who blunder into furthering foreign aims through their own stupidity, avarice, or gullibility — Robert Mueller’s team will identify, beyond the Flynns, Manaforts and Papadopouloses.

As Facebook, Google, and Twitter executives got hauled before Congress, they had to acknowledge their own complicity with the Russians, however clumsy and unintentional. Said Sheryl Sandberg: “It’s not just that we apologize. We’re angry, we’re upset. But what we really owe the American people is determination” to do a better job of preventing foreign meddling.

While these executives have been off doing other things — digital world domination for the most part — nefarious evildoers (to borrow a term from another era) eagerly exploited the systems they had built.

Fake: Now an epithet that Trump tosses at news he doesn’t like, “fake” is related to the odious “alternative facts” (though that now seems so early 2017). We can add alt, or alternative, to the list of spoiled language: Once signifying pleasant choice or another view, it’s become a battleground word, its usage more ascendant among neo-Nazis than the old “alternative press.”

Our “fake!” affliction doesn’t just hurt Americans. As the Times recently pointed out, “Meet the strongmen who’ve started blaming ‘fake news’ Too.” Such linguistic nonsense has real-world impact, not just on our discourse but on lives of those opposing authoritarianism around the world. In Myanmar, the government called its genocide against the Rohingya “fake news.”

Trust: The antidote, right? We can take some solace in the assertive, aggressive reporting led by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. While many trust movements, commercial and nonprofit, have taken flight, it is the big, old brands whose names themselves stand for trustworthiness among tens of millions of readers.

It seems like an eon ago that Times executive editor Dean Baquet talked to me about using the word “lie” in print, but it was only October 2016. As USA Today pointed out in its statement of horror: “Trump apparently is going for some sort of record for lying while in office. As of mid-November, he had made 1,628 misleading or false statements in 298 days in office. That’s 5.5 false claims per day, according to a count kept by The Washington Post’s fact-checkers.”

Another word: “Mistake.” As Carl Bernstein observed last week on CNN’s Reliable Sources, “Journalists make mistakes.” But serial mistakes by CNN, ABC, MSNBC, and CBS, well-cataloged by The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, provide fuel to the arsonists who would just as soon set fire to the news media as we know it.

Meltdown: Talking Points Memo publisher and editor Josh Marshall made his point in mid-November: “There’s a digital media crash. But no one will say it.” He called attention to the suffering businesses of digital ad–dependent “startup” news media. In the age of duopoly, there simply aren’t enough digital ad dollars to support what’s been built.

Advertisers are shifting their strategies as well. Take this week’s news about giant Unilever: It’s cutting its digital ad spend by about 30 percent as it better figures out its return ad investment. Reliance on digital advertising alone won’t work.

Arc: Throughout this turbulent year, The Washington Post has moved forward with the licensing of its next-generation content management system/digital platform. The Boston Globe and Tronc’s chain of properties will deploy Arc in 2018. We’ll see how much difference it can make in helping these publishers more effectively grasp new digital opportunity. With no real competitors, it could become an industry standard.

Truth. At year’s end, we may not realize quite how much we’ve been battered by nonstop news cycles, stalked by push notifications. It can be hard to stop and absorb a particularly insightful piece of writing or reporting before something else replaces it in our consciousness.

Still, Slate’s legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick’s piece from earlier this month has stuck with me. Asking “Is it too late for Robert Mueller to save us?” she wrote:

In weeks like this one, when it seems the Mueller investigation is quite literally the only authority and sanity we can look to, it’s hard to tell whether the net losses outweigh the wins, or whether the massive national game of deconstruction and deflection and deception is even the littlest bit disrupted by news that the special counsel is closing in on a legal conclusion. Maybe it’s really too late in the slide toward authoritarianism for any major legal outcome to change the game. We crave nonpartisan and serious authority figures like Mueller because we believe they can guide us through. But having seen this White House shatter norms around the free press, civility, international diplomacy, and truth-telling, it almost defies belief that the line in the sand, the stopping point, is Mueller…

At this moment when all options remain open, we should accept the possibility that Mueller may come to represent the highest and most binding expression of law and order in America. We also must acknowledge the reality that the highest and most binding expression of law and order in America might not matter enough, to enough people, to bring the Trump train to a stop.

Lithwick correctly identifies the weakness of so many checks and balances we thought were in place. Yet she underplays the role of the national news media. Our top journalists, with brave and smart leadership, have managed to stay focused on the stories of the year, and their work still drives much of the national conversation.

We don’t know which way these teeter-totters between the rule of law and those who would trample over it will go. Which way will the American seesaw move? How strong, and smart, will its news media be in applying fair and accurate pressure?

Photo of vertical stack of newspapers by J E Smith used under a Creative Commons license.

With the seemingly sudden sense that there have got to be ways other than a full-bore subscription for readers to help pay the freighted costs of producing news, 2018 will bring multiple bold new efforts to revive the news business.

Now you can add a new venture, Invisibly, to that list. But its ambitions are far bigger than just micropayments — or just the news business.

Jim McKelvey, the cofounder of Square, spearheads and funds Invisibly. He’s spent almost a year and a half talking to media brands big and small, entertainment and news. And he’s talking about a venture he says could generate a billion dollars a month in new revenue largely for those companies. Already, I’m told, “hundreds” of titles, including newspapers, magazines, and other media, have signed up to test Invisibly, which joins joins Scroll, LaterPay, and Blendle in offering newer payment models for content.

While Invisibly’s website launched a month ago, it has been the news industry’s best-kept secret, morphing over time from “The McKelvey Project” or just “McKelvey” in publisher shorthand. Despite a well-received presentation at the SNPA/Inland conference in September and innumerable talks between Invisibly staff (now numbering 15) and media executives, public word of Invisibly hadn’t leaked.

The company still won’t speak publicly, but in more than a dozen interviews, I’ve been able to piece together some visibility into this innovative model.

Yes, Invisibly is a micropayments company in some ways, but it believes that a newer kind of advertising engagement will generate most of its revenue. McKelvey — who along with cofounding the mold-breaking mobile payment company is also board member of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — makes a pitch that is more complex and more cerebral.

He’s talked about “building a new business-model stack” for media industries. That’s makes supreme sense to those in the tech industry and remains a bit of a head-scratcher to many of those in traditional publishing.

In fact, in Invisibly’s stealth launch — with a product that will begin testing soon into the new year — we can see a clash of civilizations. There are the old newspaper and magazine companies, long grasping onto a binary subscribe/don’t subscribe model, even in the decade-long shift to digital paywalls. Then, there’s Silicon Valley’s blow-it-up, rethink-it-from-the-bottom-up approach to business disruption and business building.

McKelvey, 52, has found what all technology companies have found in pitching the press and wider media: It’s agonizingly slow going, no matter how good a deal you may be offering. This super-confident Renaissance man can seem like a character out of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” to publishers, talking about his self-made net worth, his boundary-breaking background, and his mode of travel (“private jet” and “self-driving car” come up, publishers say). He’s a self-made man in a hurry to develop Big Ideas. In taking on the media business conundrum in the digital age, he’s acting on his LinkedIn tagline: “I enjoy solving problems in almost any area.”

With Invisibly, his focus has turned to creating a new way forward for high-quality news and entertainment. In presentations, he can decry the world of mediocre content — news and entertainment — that shows signs of winning against higher-quality, more expensive-to-produce content. The solution, he believes, is finally finding new ways to support high-quality digital content creation.

As he presents what can seem like a blizzard of ideas, he has managed to impress executives enough to get some signed up for a test.

One such publisher spoke for several others with whom I talked — almost all of whom wanted to remain anonymous — with this assessment of the project: “Honestly, I’m not that invested in knowledge about what he’s doing. I’ve seen the pitch and most everyone says the same thing: ‘He’s a bit arrogant. He’s been very successful.’ It costs nothing to say ‘sure, go ahead,’ and if it works, we’ll most likely be in.'”

In his relentlessness — and, importantly, in his ideas — McKelvey has managed to convince dozens of top-drawer names to test Invisibly. Those names, according to company communications, include: McClatchy, Gatehouse, The Dallas Morning News, Hearst Newspapers, The Atlantic, The Motley Fool, and Warner Brothers.

How would Invisibly work?

So what is this “new business model stack”?

To put it simply, Invisibly attempts to move publishers beyond that subscribe/don’t subscribe model. As with the concepts of Scroll and LaterPay, Invisibly acts on this principle: Something like 2 percent of a digital audience will buy an all-access subscription, but there’s another group will pay for high-quality content in other ways. The trick in reaching them: offer more choices.

So Invisibly will offer essentially two kinds of choices to non-subscribing visitors to paywalled sites.

If a publisher wants to offer access beyond its set number of free stories a month (one of the most common metered models), it can offer payment per article, day passes, or week passes.

Or the publisher can pop up an Invisibly-served video ad. Watch the ad or answer a few questions, and you get access to the site for a set amount of time. How much? That’s TBD.

In both cases, a user’s current status is tracked through an invisible digital wallet that records how much she’s spent on content and how many ad engagements she’s had. Here’s how the company describes it:

A digital wallet will accompany visitors as they navigate content across the internet. As the visitor happens upon participating sites, the digital wallet will invisibly keep a ledger of earnings from brand engagements and expenditures from content. At the optimal time, the system will prompt visitors to sign up and improve their experience, by giving them a choice of watching or avoiding ads. If a visitor wants to avoid ads, they can add payment (i.e. a credit card) that can process all of their content and subscription purchases in one bill.

A specific revenue promise is a big part of why early testers have signed up. Invisibly promises, by contract, that those who have already signed up will keep all the micropayment and ad revenue, in perpetuity. Some time before launch, Invisibly will begin to take its own revenue share (“over 20%”) for companies that aren’t launch partners. That ability to keep revenue — and the ability to opt out of Invisibly some time before launch without apparent penalty — has built Invisibly’s list of partners.

Invisibly brags on its site that it has “verbal commitments from US digital content publishers representing 73% of the industry and we are actively transitioning these to signed contracts.”

While micropayments will be a key feature of the Invisibility partnership for news publishers with paywalls, that may end up being a small part of the initiative. Consider that much of the news web is still free, from CNN and NPR to BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice, and thousands of other sites. In fact, while preserving higher quality news sources is a key McKelvey goal, it’s the big entertainment companies, like a Disney or a Warner, that would be much bigger parts of the Invisibly network. In that regard, Invisibly could mount an alternative to paying Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon for some video content.

For those seeking new ways to satisfy advertisers, McKelvey says he’s figured out a new way to do that.

In a video on his site, he makes his pitch: “The advertiser experience in our system is going to be unlike anything you’ve seen before…The ad load is going to decrease by orders of magnitude, replaced with fewer, better engagements…Instead of interrupting users, you can engage them…For 20 years, the world has treated online advertising like it was print or television. But the web is a two-way medium, so let your customers talk back. Let them engage. But you can only do this with their permission. Which is what we’re going to get you. Once you have someone agreeing to engage with your brand, you can truly communicate your message. And it’s a lot more fun.”

Fun, and lucrative. Publishers could receive ad rates an “order of magnitude — three to four-figure CPMs” — greater than current, run-of-the-mill advertising, goes the pitch.

McKelvey eschews the world of interrupting bothersome ads — the same bugaboo recognized by Tony Haile’s Scroll, though addressed quite differently. McKelvey intends to make a new kind of peace between advertisers and consumers.

In this worldview, it’s not advertising per se that’s the problem — it’s the way digital advertising has worked. McKelvey has enlisted WPP, the multinational ad giant, as a partner as Invisibly starts up. In addition, its website includes such “supporters” as the Omnicon Group, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Procter & Gamble.

Can he offer a kind of advertising that consumers will more willingly engage in — watching a video, answering a few questions, identifying their buying wants — rather than being blitzed with intrusive pitches for things they aren’t remotely interested in?

It’s not just the ad presentation that Invisibly hopes will distinguish it. McKelvey tells publishers that part of his secret sauce lies in harnessing the power of ad tech. His pledge to media companies: I’ll make it work for you.

Invisibly says it uses the ad-targeting intelligence of the web to help media better target consumers. In presentations, McKelvey has acknowledged that such targeting can seem “creepy,” but explains it’s already the world that we — consumers and media executives — live in. Better to apply that intelligence to supporting high-quality content than not.

Consequently, Invisibly wants to use such targeting to perfect both advertising offers and micropayment offers, based on its knowledge of individual, browser-driven behavior. If consumers find themselves in the market for a new truck, or for more information about family health, Invisibly would, in theory, would take that knowledge and offer them a more relevant digital experience.

That approach isn’t a new one. In fact, as I’ve covered the serial reader revenue innovations of the Financial Times, McKelvey’s model sounds a lot like that of the FT. “Propensity modeling” is the term for it — understanding the likelihood of how a consumer is likely to respond, or not, to a subscription offer. Or to a newsletter offer, or to the opportunity to answer a Google Survey question. It’s a value exchange: money or attention paid in exchange for content.

In one grand way, then, it seems like Invisibly is taking the FT’s long-developed strategy and trying to apply it widescreen on the web. The promised land: divining enough of user identity, via ad tagging, to tell the publisher enough about the non-paying visitor (which, for most, is nearly all of them) so that Invisibly can serve the right offer (micropayment, subscription, newsletter, ad) in real time to each individual browser-known user.

While media companies are willing to test, how much will they trust in this would-be ubiquitous system? They like the idea of potential new revenues, but have some fundamental questions.

If they believe that reader revenue really has become the lifeline of the serious news business, then does offering would-be payers preroll ads get in the way of that path forward? Faced with a choice of paying something — an article fee, a timed pass, or a subscription — or simply watching an ad, will the great majority of would-be payers simply opt to watch? That’s one concern I’ve heard. Says one publisher who has declined the deal: “In short, our impression was that this is basically an ad network dressed up as a savior for news sites.”

Further, McKelvey’s reliance on user behavior signals a question about the other big digital currency: data. While each media partner would presumably have access to all its own related data, Invisibly would be building one of the biggest human-behavior data banks extant if it achieves its ambitions to sign up thousands of well-trafficked sites. What value might that provide, and to whom when?

And no matter how good these ideas are, how will they translate with actual publisher implementations? McKelvey and his team will undoubtedly try to make the publisher implementation as easy as possible, but what new kinds of frictions, new interruptions in reading, might follow as Invisibly actually gets put on sites?

What will the readers think?

Then, there’s the big — and at this point unanswerable — question of consumer acceptance and adoption.

A reader/consumer’s “wallet” will fill up silently in the background — invisibly, you might say — depending how much value his attention to commerce is affording advertisers. Consumers won’t see these wallets, or how much content these value holders will offer them. Why? In showing actual value gained, consumers will try to “game” the system.

If, though, there’s enough currency in those wallets, presto, magico, they’re granted additional access to content without paying for it in cash. At first hearing, that seems like a semi-transparent transaction — will users be okay with that?

And how much do readers really want to actively engage with ads, anyway? McKelvey would probably be the first to tell you that’s unpredictable. That’s why I understand Invisibly could continue its testing of consumer behavior for as long as a year.

Certainly, readers might respond better to better ads, but the practicality of that targeting raises dozens of questions about execution — and consumer adoption. Will the ads, questions, or micropayment asks that Invisibly will pop up seem logical to consumers? Or will they seem like new frictions in the process of consuming news or entertainment?

Consumers won’t have to sign up for or sign into Invisibly, as they’ll have to do with Scroll. That’s where the invisibility of Invisibly derives. Background targeting — that mastery of ad tech to benefit media companies — identifies them. The system “fingerprints unique individuals, irrespective of properties. Each user carries enriched 1st party data based on consumption, context, behavior and user profile,” says Invisibly’s site. “Creepy,” or just the way we are now?

If consumers do sign up with Invisibly — and they’ll be offered the chance to sign up through small linked Invisibly logos on media sites — that signup will provide Invisibly more targeting knowledge. And that would increase the value of that signup to advertisers, and thus cash to content producers.

The company itself

So where does Invisibly the company fit in here?

McKelvey has painted it as a self-funded, mission-driven company, one aimed at recovering lost value for media brands in the age of digital platform disruption and distortion.

It’s a for-profit company, 51 percent owned by a trust, and that trust is controlled by McKelvey. It’s a setup intended to keep the company independent, he’s told media executives. It couldn’t, he says, under that structure be subject to takeover (presumably hostile) from a Murdoch, Zuckerberg, McAdam, or Page.

Jim McKelvey’s company is something of a black box to media executives. But they’re intrigued.

“To be honest, we do not know enough about the tech integration to know how it will work. At this time, we are signed up for the test and will participate,” Grant Moise, The Dallas Morning News’ general manager, told me. He added:

What I can share with you is what I like about Jim McKelvey’s approach. He is being bold enough to know that the digital display advertising model is broken. CPMs are eroding due to the multiple challenges associated with digital display advertising at its core (viewability, bot fraud, etc.). The approach of devising a new model where the publisher, the advertiser, and the consumer all benefit from a strong user experience is sorely missing in the digital age.

While most publishers (including us) have shifted from a digital advertising focus to a digital subscription focus, I am glad to see that someone is trying to challenge the thinking that these have to be mutually exclusive.

As print subscriptions have plummeted, digital subscriptions have slowly emerged. It’s really a six-year-old phenomenon, as daily publishers followed The New York Times’ 2011 lead with paywalls, and digital subscriptions are still, at best, a work in progress.

Today, they offer a tale of two worlds. The national/globals — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the Financial Times — build their new and increasingly digital businesses on digital subscriptions, greatly aided this year by the Trump bump. But regional dailies, both in North America and in Europe, continue to struggle with them.

One ratio highlights the gap. While The New York Times today has twice as many digital-only subscribers as Sunday print subscribers (and three times as many as daily print), most newspapers’ subscriber totals still tilt heavily to slowly dying print. In fact, 90-plus percent of all subscriptions to regional dailies remain to print products, less than 10 percent to digital.

That disparity explains the economic divide we see between the still-transforming-but-smiling national-global press and the local newspapers worrying about their very existence after absorbing double-digit decline after decline in revenue. Reader revenue is working to transform the big press, but largely leaving the local press behind.

All publishers see the similar math. At most, 1 or 2 percent of those mammoth monthly-unique audience numbers they report will actually pay for a digital subscription. (Yes, the actual number of humans is probably a little more than twice as high, in the 3 to 4 percent range, since so many readers use two or more devices — desktop and mobile, for instance — to access news sites. For consistency, though, we’ll go with those numbers of 1 to 2 percent.)

Those numbers are still okay if you’re The New York Times with a U.S. monthly audience of 97 million, according to comScore data for August, or The Washington Post with 92 million. If, though, you’re The Baltimore Sun, The Sacramento Bee, or the Arizona Republic — with audiences one-fifth to one-twentieth that size — the math’s a lot harder.

That’s why we see that huge disparity in digital subscriber counts. The Times has surpassed 2 million paid digital subscribers, while the Post is now over 1 million.

Meanwhile, among the regionals, the Los Angeles Times now ranks first, as I reported Friday, with 105,000. Then, The Boston Globe follows with 90,000, while the Chicago Tribune and Star Tribune can count about 50,000. That’s the high end; for most of the local press, the numbers are far, far lower. Which leads to this question: If daily newspapers can’t successfully compete with Google and Facebook for ad dollars and reader revenue is stalled, what’s their future?

When they look at that anemic digital subscriber growth, they ask the old Peggy Lee question: Is that all there is?

While we can hear strains of that heartbreaking song, we can also hear a new background hum. It’s the hum of new reader revenue strategies.

Today, a few eager entrepreneurs are readying launches. Some of the activity has been fairly public, but there’s lots more going on behind the scenes. Let’s preview what’s coming.

The new entrants

Among those new players, consider Tony Haile. The Chartbeat founder is making a simple proposition with his new startup Scroll: Give me $5 a month and I’ll turn off all the ads on a lot of premium news sites.

Haile believes that that pitch (and that price point) he can tap a market far larger than that 1 or 2 percent. He’s planning for growth up to 2 million users. Haile describes his model, and the thinking under it, in an extended Q&A here.

Scroll will launch in beta early next year. Its value proposition might be easily understood by readers, or it may stumble. Haile emphatically notes that he’s not offering “all-access” to top news sites. In fact, whatever paywall limits those sites put on visitors — now often down to 2 to 5 free articles per month — stay in place.

Rather, when Scroll customers reach these “premium” sites, their pages will be ad-free. The sites will recognize Scroll customers and remove ads from the pages they visit, whether that’s a couple or an infinite number in the case of say a free site like HuffPost or CNN.

What do publishers get for giving up ad dollars on those pages? They share in a revenue share pool. Of each $5 monthly payment, Haile says $3.50 will go into the pool. Publishers will divvy up the money based on the amount of time spent on their content by Scroll subscribers.

Haile believes he’s cracked an old nut of cross-title sales, and I hear a fair amount of preliminary enthusiasm for Scroll. Last week, Haile told me he is adding one contracted publisher per week. The names in his pipeline aren’t yet public, but they’re impressive. So is the money — admittedly small bets — that is funding him: News Corp, The New York Times, and European powerhouse Axel Springer have led the $3 million funding. Joining them are Founder Collective, SoftTech, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

While Haile’s basic rev-share promise appears to be its major value proposition for publishers, I believe it may end up being as compelling as an on-ramp to subscription sales. There should be no better would-be convert to a $200 a year annual digital subscription than someone already paying something for news.

Speaking of on-ramps, consider LaterPay. The German-founded venture recently exxpanded in the U.S. LaterPay acts on the premise that readers need to sample news content.

Like Scroll, and unlike Blendle — which many in the industry compare it to — LaterPay enables publishers to offer a new paid alternative on their own sites. It doesn’t require learning a new app to use or a new discovery pattern to access news content.

Its premise seems simple enough. Publishers decide how to price individual articles — often in the 39-cent range — allowing readers a cheap taste of premium news content. Then, it doesn’t charge their credit card until they’ve consumed 10 articles. (Hence, LaterPay.) It’s a gimmick — a psychological scheme to break through a barrier to customer payment. Readers can also buy time-based passes, for a week or a month.

That’s a potential small revenue stream for publishers, and it offers — like Scroll — the promise of on-boarding new potential full-freight subscribers.

LaterPay founder and CEO Cosmin Ene has thoroughly thought through the minefield of reader payment.

For those who like to pitch an “iTunes for news” metaphor, he says, “most ones who talk the talk, don’t walk the walk. Walking the walk requires you to unbundle content and sell it in individual pieces, as well as in re-bundled form and in subscription form. After all, iTunes didn’t become known for selling the entire album, but rather for unbundling it and offering your favorite songs piece by piece. iTunes was the first truly user-centric model of the digital economy. By unbundling music, iTunes created a huge consumer appetite and created confidence in subscription models. Without unbundling, we wouldn’t have Spotify and Netflix today.”

Rather than that binary world of pay/don’t pay, Ene, like Haile, indeed believes that’s not all there is: “Walking the walk would require a diversified approach to monetizing content, allowing individual sales and time-based models and not just trying to push towards subscriptions only. There is a whole universe living between ads and subscriptions.”

Ah, that great potential in-between. CEO Cosmin Ene makes a great case for his product, and he’s now out pitching it to U.S. publishers.

He can point to some success in Germany, with a regional daily and with Der Spiegel, the highly respected German weekly. In a limited test, Spiegel both sold an increasing number of articles and grew revenue via LaterPay. But Spiegel doesn’t have a digital paywall, enmeshed in its own strategic complexity, so its test doesn’t tell us everything.

And what of Blendle? With much fanfare (and financial backing from The New York Times and Axel Springer), Blendle announced in December 2015 that it would attempt to transplant its model from the Netherlands to the U.S. That expansion has remained in beta, with the company now pivoting to a Blendle Premium in the Netherlands. “We are indeed still working on achieving product market fit,” CEO Alexander Klöpping told me last week. Klöpping also convinced Nikkei, parent of the Financial Times, to invest new money in the company this spring.

Blendle’s attractive interface won plaudits — and it’s seemed to work in its native country with relatively few major news sources, though with some hiccups — but the U.S. has proved tougher to figure out. Blendle has offered a pay-per-article approach and built its initial plans around being another node of news discovery.

The big point that Haile and Ene, among others in the would-be pay trades, point to: Will consumers want to go to a new branded site to get the branded news they expect from well-known providers?

That’s just the top of the entrepreneurs aiming to create new markets of paying but less than super-fan subscribers. Expect more ferment in this field in the year to come.

Facebook subscriptions

Then there’s Facebook, the platform that’s eaten the world, and made it part of many a news industry — and national political — conversation.

No one’s got any doubt that people read a lot of news on Facebook. Publishers, though, remain deeply uncertain about how that reading does — or could — translate to new reader revenue. Over the past year, buffeted by the political winds of fake news, Facebook has worked more earnestly with publishers on “partnership.”

This week, as it prepares to add a subscription feature to Instant Articles, it’s meeting more headwinds from publishers than it expected. While it originally had touted a subscription feature as aimed at aiding the deeply struggling local/regional press, Facebook instead turned to national players. They’re hesitating to join, and that could end up torpedoing the profile, and P.R. benefit, of the initiative.

Yet, Facebook will get some traction — and testing. For Tronc, the third biggest U.S. daily publishers, it’s a third leg in a partnership.

“We were happy with the speed and the consumer experience,” Mark Campbell, Tronc’s senior vice president of consumer revenue, told me last week. “We’re happy with the ad revenue. And so, the third leg of the stool needs to be solved if we are to continue with Instant Articles and expand it to other properties. We’ve been testing Instant Articles in San Diego since April. And on those first two dimensions of ad revenue and consumer experience we’ve been very happy. We just need to shore up our subscription-driving ability, because we can’t enable a free experience ad infinitum.”

Tronc will deploy the next test at the Los Angeles Times and The Baltimore Sun.

Money is one thing; consumer data is another. While Facebook has shown movement on that question, publishers much want a sharing of article consumption habit. Many readers actively consume news on both publishers’ sites and Facebook. How, publishers ask, can they see these customers’ behavior across platforms?

Niches

When I’ve explored potential “Paywalls 2.0” approaches in the past — another spin on getting beyond the 2 percent number — I focused on The New York Times’ digital niche tests.

That testing has been slower than the Times has liked — and it’s being rejiggered again, as the Times completes both top executive and mid-management shuffles.

Of all the forays it has it tried — the late NYT Now and NYT Opinion most prominently — it’s simple old crosswords that have found small traction. The Times now takes in about $3 million a quarter on crossword subscriptions, of which it can count 300,000 subscribers. That’s nice change, and proves out a niche point, but again, is that all there is?

At mid-year, the Times converted its highly useful and attractive free Cooking app to paid, but only for non-subscribers, at a rate of $5 for four weeks. It’s too early to know how successful Cooking may be in finding significant new revenue. In the wings are its tame-the-Platinum-Age-of-TV app Watching and something in health — if it can figure out what enough people will pay for.

Then there’s the launch of The Athletic — perhaps the dear departed National (what Grantland called “The Greatest Paper That Ever Died“) for the digital age.

We’ll plumb into it more deeply soon, but The Athletic smartly follows readers’ passion. Will enough find reason to subscribe among the welter of free sports news and information? Consider that voice and expertise — two factors that have proven out another Netherlands original, De Correspondent — may make the critical difference here. We can hope so, and will be watching.

Are they dreaming?

It’s easy to look that reader revenue landscape and say: No more than a tiny group of people will pay for news. But that sounds like an echo of “Nobody will pay for news,” and today that seems so 2009ish.

Who would have believed The New York Times’ digital numbers — and revolution? I doubt that even the Times executives who put it into place could expect the success they’ve found long after the initial McKinsey estimates.

Similarly, who would have believed that Netflix would evolve from a DVD sender to a global entertainment machine counting more than 100 million worldwide subscribers. Or that Amazon, Hulu, Spotify, and Pandora, among others, would get millions to pay for digital media.

In fact, we in and around the news industry know nothing (or close to it) about where this is all headed — or where it’s been. Consider that in the 1950s — the height of Miss Lee’s fame — household penetration of newspaper sales was more than 100 percent. That’s right — the average household took more than one paper, given the thriving popularity (and great editorial spirit) of afternoon papers arriving for the dinner hour, long after their staider morning competition had hit the doorstep.

More than one paying news subscription per household? That seems as unbelievable as the nadir of news subscription we now encounter. We’re clearly at a low point, with print circulation cratered and digital circ disappointing for the country’s 1,350 dailies. So, maybe there’s a new in-between — somewhere between that apex of “The Life Of Riley” 1955 and “Game of Thrones” 2017.

What’s the holdup?

Here’s the fascinating question: Why is seemingly so hard to get people to pay for news? It’s a tougher question that might first appear.

In the spate of answers offered up by those entrepreneurs and others in the news business, we see how many points of buying inflection — and what we might call dis-inflection — there are. Let’s briefly catalog them, some for future exploration:

• Pricing: Who’s right here? The Times with its couple-of-hundred dollar model, a model borrowed from print? Or Jeff Bezos, with the pricing philosophy he long ago espoused in Sun Valley to those who would become his newspaper-owning peers: Get ’em in the tent cheap, for less than a hundred bucks a year, and extract more value down the line? Or is it the under-$10-a-month crowd, Scroll included, who are borrowing from entertainment models?
• Sampling: The FT, the father of the metered movement, has come to believe that “trialing” is better than metering. The idea: Readers need at least 30 days to thoroughly sample a new paid product.
• Experience: Could it be that the news websites, so desperate for revenue to keep the doors open, have made the ad-interrupting experience so nasty that paying consumers avert their eyes and close their wallets?
• Ad-free: Eliminating ads — the core of Scroll’s pitch — may make sense. But, clearly, on such successful subscription sites as the Times, Journal and FT, readers don’t mind a tasteful ad presence much.
• Proximity: That’s the Facebook pitch. Fish where the fish are biting.
• Friction: There are simply too many steps to saying yes — especially on mobile. And lots of other frictions, too: UI, UX, and more.
• Currency: Civil is coming on as a blockchained, Ethereum-based news foray, while Hubii has already become the first Ethereum-based content company
• Content: Let’s not forget the basics. If a publisher can’t offer sufficient unduplicated, high-enough-quality content, nobody’s going to pay for it for very long. For regional papers that have halved their staffs (and their community knowledge), that’s a huge issue. And few talk about it.

That’s an impressive list. And within it, we see two things. First, how much we don’t yet know about the selling and buying of news products. And second, all the potential in the work being done to get better answers to those questions.

Starved for real consumer affection, news companies can only put another Peggy Lee standard, written by the Gershwins, on their playlists: “Somebody Loves Me.”

Somebody loves me, I wonder who
I wonder who she can be
Somebody needs me, I wish that I knew…

Somebody loves me, I just wonder who
Or maybe, maybe, maybe it’s you.

Talk to people in the news industry about what they think of his new startup Scroll, and they hesitate. They may stumble describing its model. They’ll say it’s something they’re watching. And then they’ll tell you if Tony Haile is behind it, they expect to see something impressive. News Corp, The New York Times, and Axel Springer have all made small investment bets on Scroll, part of its $3 million seed round that now supports a staff of seven getting ready for its beta launch. (It’s one of a number of new attempts to build revenue beyond standard subscriptions, described in depth in this companion piece.)

Will Scroll, which will launch next year, succeed? Haile is the first to tell you it’s a crapshoot: “We’ll see. It’s either going to be a massive success or a massive failure.”

The publishing world certainly knows it needs a new shot of revenue, and hopes Scroll might be on to something with its monthly ad-free $5 subscription to “premium news” across many different news sites. But under the surface of Scroll resides a set of ideas about news publishing in the late 2010s. Whether Scroll ultimately succeeds or not, Haile is tackling vital questions about publishers and their readers, about experience and payment. Chief among them: Many top news organizations have done a decent job getting their most dedicated readers to pay for a digital subscription. But how can that next tier of customer — people who read and value your work, but whose news consumption goes across many different sites and who are unwilling to pay for a dozen subscriptions — be made to pay too?

He and I had a couple conversations recently about Scroll and how it fits into today’s news landscape. Here’s a lightly edited transcript.

Understanding the information paradox

Taking (some) of the hassle out of news reading

Beyond the super fans

Related: This all feeds into a larger recent conversation also joined by Chartbeat’s Tony Haile and others at Upworthy about the relative importance of social sharing and the need to measure quality engagement in new ways, perhaps through “attention minutes.” Meanwhile, a new report covering January 2014 by analytics platform Parse.ly suggests that Facebook is becoming an increasingly big part of driving traffic to news sites (26 percent in that period), while Google’s share of referrals to news sites is dropping (38 percent).

“Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin’s Sources on Twitter During the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions”: From University of British Columbia and University of Minnesota, published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. By Alfred Hermida, Seth C. Lewis, and Rodrigo Zamith.

The study looks at the mix of sources Andy Carvin used during his social media-focused reporting for NPR. Hermida, Lewis and Zamith examine the mix of “elite” sources and “alternative voices” in a dataset of 60,000 tweets during 2010-11; they plug this data into a wider debate over how the new network ecosystem is changing the mix of media voices and sources. The researchers conclude that “nonaffiliated activists accounted for the greatest single share of tweet mentions, overall (35.3%) and for Egypt (37.5%).” However, “in the overall population of individual sources, mainstream media employees accounted for the largest group by far (26.7%).” This general mix of evidence, the study concludes, suggests of a “new paradigm of sourcing at play.”

Other noteworthy papers in brief

“Networked Press Freedom and Social Media: Tracing Historical and Contemporary Forces in Press-Public Relations”: From the Annenberg School, USC, published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. By Mike Ananny.

Ananny argues that the contemporary social media policies of some news organizations still fit into an age-old “defensive” and “conservative” pattern of distancing media members and institutions from their audiences and mitigating risks. The audience is seen in utilitarian terms — as a way of generating traffic or merely producing more efficient sourcing. Thus, old gatekeeping customs emerge in new clothes.

“Twitter in Politics: A Comprehensive Literature Review”: From the University of Bamburg (Germany). By Andreas Jungherr.

This giant literature review — 115 studies, from around the globe, across many election cycles — finds that research typically falls into one of three categories: “the use of Twitter by politicians and campaigners, the use of Twitter by publics in election and issue campaigns and the use of Twitter by various users to comment on mediated campaign events — such as televised debates, party conventions or election day coverage.” Jungherr concludes that despite the somewhat haphazard and emerging nature of the field, there are some “stable findings” being arrived at. For example, “candidates belonging to opposition parties take more frequently to Twitter than candidates from parties in government.”

“Seeking and Sharing Health Information Online: Comparing Search Engines and Social Media”: From Microsoft Research. By Munmun De Choudhury, Meredith Ringel Morris, and Ryen W. White.

This study examines what kinds/amounts of health information people publicly disclose on Twitter (and compares and contrasts with search engine use for health-related inquiries). It turns out people share a lot of health information publicly on Twitter, although “high-stigma” conditions are not as frequently shared. Based on this evidence, the researchers hypothesize some needed digital innovations: “New kinds of health information search systems may be built that support standing queries over search and/or social media to keep users apprised of new developments related to different common health concerns , since seeking new research about conditions and diversity of health content were the goals of many respondents.”

Also see a related Microsoft Research/Carnegie Mellon/University of Washington/MIT paper “Is There Anyone Out There? Unpacking Q-and-A Hashtags on Twitter.”

“Network Issue Agendas on Twitter During the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election”: From the University of Alabama, University of Texas at Austin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published in the Journal of Communication. By Chris J. Vargo, Lei Guo, Maxwell McCombs, and Donald L. Shaw.

This “Big Data” study (38 million tweets analyzed) looks at how Republicans and Democrats operated differently on Twitter and how they responded to different forms of media — both “vertical,” or traditional media, and “horizontal,” or niche forms of media that target like-minded communities. The researchers conclude that “although vertical media could best predict Obama supporters’ behaviors on Twitter, the Republican horizontal media offered the greatest predictor power in explaining Romney supporters’ network agenda.”

“Political performance, boundary spaces, and active spectatorship: Media production at the 2012 Democratic National Convention”: From the University of North Carolina, published in Journalism. By Daniel Kreiss, Laura Meadows, and John Remensperger.

An ethnographic look at the 2012 DNC and media produced there, this paper provides some interesting insights into how conventions — now so ritualized and scripted that journalists find them impossible to cover — can actually empower attendees as “active spectators.” Social media at a convention now allow non-elite participants opportunities for “public critique and accountability over both political and journalistic actors.”

“Siren songs or path to salvation? Interpreting the visions of Web technology at a UK regional newspaper in crisis, 2006–2011”: From Bournemouth University (U.K.), published in Convergence. By Phil MacGregor.

This five-year case study on Britain’s Northern Echo newspaper shows how technological adoption in a media organization is not “unidirectional”: rather, it is “neither smooth nor uniform and is marked by uncertainty as to which of several actions is rational. Doubt is spread throughout the hierarchy.” The observations will be familiar to many in news organizations, but for scholars it’s another good data point showing a complex transition to the web.

To wrap up the series, here are a variety of quick thoughts from a range of Spark Campers — including Melody Kramer, Matt Thompson, Amy Webb, John Davidow, Scott Klein, Hari Sreenivasan, Benet J. Wilson, Joe Webster, Matt Waite, Jonathan Stray, and Tony Haile — on trends they’ll be watching in 2013.

Melody Kramer, former associate producer for online media at Fresh Air with Terry Gross: The rise of the parody meme, the consolidation of news and social media platforms, the growing success of Reddit’s AMA, public radio’s transition to mobile platforms, and hyperlocal news projects like Philadelphia’s GunCrisis, which is working to document a specific topic in much greater depth than any local news organization here in Philly.

Matt Thompson, Spark Camp co-founder, manager of digital initiatives, NPR: I’m one of many folks fascinated by Nintendo’s Wii U. When the concept of the original Wii started leaking wide in mid 2006, it was a sign that gestural interfaces had arrived. The iPhone’s launch a year later demonstrated exactly how central gestures would become to the future of digital interaction. As Ian Bogost has brilliantly laid out, Nintendo’s now making a really interesting guess about how the screen experience is evolving. I’m definitely paying attention.

Amy Webb, Spark Camp co-founder, CEO of Webbmedia Group: I’m fascinated by the notion of “atomic units of news” and device-specific content. We know that consumers don’t spend hours and hours reading lengthy stories on their mobile phones. We also know that consumers spend more than 50 minutes a day reading on their tablets. So why are media organizations simply launching responsive websites that display the exact same content everywhere? Content-driven organizations that produce individual stories intended for different devices will do well in 2013. I should be able to start with a basic unit of news on my mobile phone (one that’s appropriate for my subject knowledge level), then dive deeper once I’m on my tablet, and then participate in discussion when I’m sitting at my desk with some more time. The same story package should be customized — written at different lengths, in different styles and have varying kinds of multimedia — depending on the device, type of story, and time of day.

John Davidow, executive editor for digital, WBUR: One journalistic truism has always been “follow the money.” But when it comes to economic viability for media organizations in 2013, it will be be even more important to follow the data. Data is where the dollars are when it comes monetizing online content. In 2013, the more targeted the messaging, the more money news organization will have to not only survive, but to thrive.

Scott Klein, editor of news applications, ProPublica: We’re really starting to learn how to integrate video and other forms of news data. We all loved The New York Times’s “Navigating Love and Autism” story, which integrated wonderful, short, contextual videos in the text itself and Frontline’s video “A Perfect Terrorist,” which integrated high-definition video and interactive data elements in an interesting way. I’m excited to see how this develops, and if we get a chance to try these techniques out at ProPublica, we’ll jump at it.

Hari Sreenivasan, correspondent, director of digital partnerships, PBS Newshour: Will be watching the work of the public media accelerator getting kicked off in San Francisco. Hope to see the ideas incubated there spread quickly.

Benet J. Wilson, social media/newsletters editor, Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association and Chair, National Association of Black Journalists Digital Journalism Task Force: Storination. I used it to document the NABJ and Unity conventions and felt it was great that folks could read Storifys from a single event in one place.

Joe Webster, director of marketing, SmartBrief: Content marketing or native advertising. Brands will hatch newsrooms as an extension of their social media efforts. They’ll license content from sources like NewsCred and/or create their own. There is an opportunity for legacy media to spin out parts of their editorial muscle to for-profit content creation. It doesn’t just have to be Gawker. The next time Reuters, AP, the Tribune, etc. plan layoffs, they should instead look at using the staff to create content for agencies and brands.

Matt Waite, professor, University of Nebraska: Using mobile devices as both passive and active sensors, writing software for the realtime web, and citizen science + the Internet of Things.

Jonathan Stray, project lead, Overview Project: I’m fascinated by Quartz’ concept of obsessions not beats. I think Prismatic might just be the first truly good personalized news aggregator. And I am deeply concerned about the outdated and inconsistent law on personal data privacy, because I believe that data is our generation’s civil rights issue — we just don’t know it yet.

Tony Haile, CEO, Chartbeat: Two trends have been sticking out recently. One: The move from juicing pageviews to building audiences. Advertising in publishing is struggling — RTB platforms mean buyers can aggregate the demographics they want more cheaply elsewhere. Publishers are having to move from trying to increase commodity pageviews to building a loyal audience that they can monetise in a variety of ways (paywalls, events, etc.). The promise here is that, possibly for the first time, the goals on the business and on the editorial side could actually align behind common metrics they all believe in: creating quality to build loyalty.

Two: At Chartbeat, we’re constantly watching the evolving relationship between content, brands, and advertising. Everybody’s talking about content marketing/native advertising/bespoke content (I love the name bespoke content — “I get my content from Saville Row”), and while understandably a lot of journalists aren’t in love with the former, it’s a trend that is only going to grow. Without judgement, I’m interested to see how much the church-state separation becomes less hard and fast and what that means for our ethical shibboleths.

— Andrew Pergam, Spark Camp cofounder and director of video at The Washington Post. Previously, he was editorial director of J-Lab, examining and funding innovations in interactive journalism, and managing editor for digital of NBC Connecticut.

— Mónica Guzmán, digital life columnist for the Seattle Times and GeekWire. Previously, she spent a year at Seattle-based startup Intersect.

— Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat and named one of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company this year.

Andrew Pergam

Most intriguing to me has been a design trend away from traditional layouts and into more bold, engaging experiences. In particular, I look at the new USAToday.com redesign, and the launches of Quartz, HuffPostLive, and Circa. These sites are more glamorous and appetizing, asking users to come inside and explore. USA Today and Quartz fall off the page horizontally and bring a tablet’s sensibilities — zooming and shifting content — to the desktop, too. Quartz offers a continuous page that seems to go on endlessly, and with no preexisting advertising conditions, Quartz is able to offer an experience where sponsored content seamlessly flows in.

On the other hand, HuffPost Live, the video extension of the Huffington Post, has built a video site where video takes up less real estate than engagement tools. Users are encouraged to join the conversation with their webcam, to join the chat stream, and to find more information on the current segment without navigating off the page. These integrated experiences make sense.

Finally, the Circa app seems to be a hidden gem: The concept is smart, with an acknowledgement that a story is just a series of news nuggets tied together. As the story evolves, new elements appear, and the site lets you follow those stories of interest, giving you just the updates you’ve missed. And it’s display is well imagined.

In all these cases, design seems to drive the discussion of how best to present the news — a welcome trend as we approach 2013.

In the coming year, I’ll pay particular attention to the sophisticated integration of sponsored content. In the recent past, our business has taken a sledgehammer approach to getting that square peg into a round hole. Now some major players are revealing smart ways to make advertorial content as compelling as editorial content — to name a few: Forbes launched Forbes BrandVoice and the Gawker family of sites offers sponsored posts, in a similar tone as the rest of the site. The challenge, of course, is to maintain the transparency and separation that have been hallmarks of our industry. Those needn’t be excuses to avoid integration, but they should be guideposts we use as navigate the terrain.

Mónica Guzmán

I’m fascinated by the fact-checking trend that took off in the months leading to the election. I followed critiques from Jay Rosen, James Fallows, and many others about this emergent flavor of news and the experiments in real-time fact checking of live events like political speeches and debates. Can journalistic fact-checks help hold newsmakers more accountable to truth? Are they a sign that we’re finally ready to get aggressive defending it?

In 2013, I hope to see more experiments in news monetization and community service that go beyond the commodity article into events, news apps, and other ways to offer understanding. I’m checking out the Circa app at least a few times a week; I’m excited about the idea of separating news into points, and being able to follow developing stories in a new way. I’ll hope against hope that no other newspaper will make the mistake The Seattle Times made earlier this year, when it ran ads in support of political campaigns in its own paper.

Tony Haile

What was the most interesting idea in media and technology in the past year? Personalized, efficiency-focused services like Sherpaa or Simple or Uber show a lot of promise. They redefine solutions to long-existing, often very frustrating issues.

Take Sherpaa — they finally give users direct phone and email access to guides that give them the right care options and direct them to the appropriate physicians. It’s built within the natural behavior-flow of their users — and helps people make better use of their health care.

And Simple is loved by everyone for the same reason — they’re built, first and foremost, on user experience, removing as many daily pain points banking customers experience as possible.

What was the most overhyped idea in media and technology in 2012? The Nate Silver election prediction hype — because how is data not already part of every decision we make?

Nate Silver does a great job of making data accessible and understandable to the masses with The New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight blog. I personally love that — it’s our whole mission at Chartbeat. I’m just surprised that in 2012 there are people out there who think his use of data to make decisions is shocking. Data is incorporated in all aspects of our lives — we look out the window before we get dressed in the morning to determine what to wear, we check our calendar to mentally prepare for how crazy our day is going to be (and if we deserve that mochaccino on the way to work). I hope Nate Silver just kicked some more companies in gear — they’ve got to realize they don’t have a choice but to build and take everyday actions with data. Even the White House has an open API initiative to make executive departments more focused on real-time data.

I hope in 2013, stories like Nate Silver’s are more and more commonplace.

Late last week, Chartbeat released a new product: Newsbeat, a tool that takes the real-time analytics it already offers and tailors them even more directly to the needs of news orgs. Chartbeat is already famously addictive, and Newsbeat will likely up the addiction ante: It includes social sharing information — including detailed info about who has been sharing stories on Twitter — and, intriguingly, notifications when stories’ traffic patterns deviate significantly from their expected path. (For more on how it works, Poynter has a good overview, and GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram followed up with a nice discussion of the decision-making implications of the tool.)

What most stood out to me, though, both when I chatted with Tony Haile, Chartbeat’s general manager, and when I poked around Newsbeat, is what the tool suggests about the inner workings of an increasingly online-oriented newsroom. Chartbeat, the parent product, offers an analytic overview of an entire site — say, Niemanlab.org — and provides a single-moment snapshot of top-performing stories site-wide. Newsbeat, on the other hand, can essentially break down the news site into its constituent elements via a permissioning system that provides personalized dashboards for individual reporters and editors. Newsbeat allows those individual journalists to see, Haile notes, “This is how my story’s doing right now. This is how my people are doing right now.”

On the one hand, that’s a fairly minor thing, an increasingly familiar shift in perspective from organization to person. Still, though, it’s worth noting the distinction Newsbeat is making between news org and news brand. Newsbeat emphasizes the individual entities that work together, sometimes in sync and sometimes not so much, under the auspices of a particular journalistic brand. So, per Newsbeat, The New York Times is The New York Times, yes…but it’s also, and to some extent more so, the NYT Business section and the NYT Politics page and infographics and and blogs and Chris Chivers and David Carr and Maureen Dowd. It’s a noisy, newsy amalgam, coherent but not constrained, its components working collectively — but not, necessarily, concertedly.

That could be a bad thing: Systems that lack order tend to beget all the familiar problems — redundancy, wasted resources, friction both interpersonal and otherwise — that disorder tends to produce. For news orgs, though, a little bit of controlled chaos can be, actually, quite valuable. And that’s because, in the corporate context, the flip side of fragmentation is often entrepreneurialism: Empower individuals within the organization — to be creative and decisive and, in general, expert — and the organization overall will be the better for it. Analytics, real-time and otherwise, serve among other things as data points for editorial decision-making; the message implicit in Newsbeat’s design is that, within a given news org, several people (often, many, many, many people) will be responsible for a brand’s moment-by-moment output.

Which is both obvious and important. News has always been a group effort; until recently, though, it’s also been a highly controlled group effort, with an organization’s final product — a paper, a mag, a broadcast — determined by a few key players within the organization. News outlets haven’t just been gatekeepers, as the cliché goes; they’ve also had gatekeepers, individuals who have had the ultimate responsibility over the news product before it ships.

Increasingly, though, that’s no longer the case. Increasingly, the gates of production are swinging open to journalists throughout, if not fully across, the newsroom. That’s a good thing. It’s also a big thing. And Newsbeat is reflecting it. With its newest tool, Chartbeat is self-consciously trying to help organize “the newsroom of the future,” Haile told me — and that newsroom is one that will be dynamic and responsive and, more than it’s ever been before, collaborative.