Sell Stories, Not Subscriptions

One quick caveat before we start: I’m a dismal salesperson.

Nonetheless, as both a writer and a reader of words on the internet, here’s a thought I’ve been having of late. It’s about the way so many ‘publications’ try to monetise their wares.

I’m talking about subscription paywalls. Often associated with periodicals hailing from those almost-forgotten days when there wasn’t an internet. Think The Times or The New York Times.

Here’s my thought: surely a few cents to read a particular article is an easier sell than convincing someone to jump directly into a $35 annual subscription?

Speaking with my reader hat on, I’d be quite happy to go for the former. I want a thing, I pay for that thing: that's the world that makes sense to me. But, like the supermarket that forces me to buy a bag of onions when I only wanted one, this all-or-nothing approach just makes me click away.

There's nothing wrong with the concept of a subscription, of course. Signing up to support and receive a particular publication with a particular set of values and standards, plus (one hopes) a fairly remunerated crew of quality writers. But I need to get to know a publication first. To develop a habit of reading its articles on a regular basis. Only then can I weigh up the value of a subscription in the context of my busy life.

Asking me to ‘sign up’ to your publication just because I happened to spot a link on my Twitter feed is not a proposition I’m ever going to take seriously. I’m not alone in this, as was confirmed when I was recently published behind a paywall for the first time. I tried to spread the word. I shared the link with the vigour of a London paper boy during World War II. But though plenty were interested in reading my story on the night cricket phenomenon in South Africa in the 1980s, they always said the same thing: ‘Ah, sorry, can’t read it because it’s behind a paywall.’

What nobody said was this: ‘Ooh, I’ll subscribe just so I can read your piece!’

And that, as you think we’ve established now, is something I totally get.

I may be wrong, but my gut says a handful of them might have been happy to pay, say, fifty cents to read the story. I think they could all afford that.

Publications need to remember just how many of us are living in a gig economy where irregular micro-payments are a thing and commitment isn’t. Micro-purchases belong to that world, and failing to allow for them is leaving money on the table.

They should also be aware that there’s a huge chunk of the planet with subscription trauma. The ones who couldn’t get out of arcane contracts, or had subscriptions eternally renewed because they failed to tick a small-print box 364 days ago. The very word ‘subscribe’ has become a red flag for some of us.

But one-off payments for content? That’s entirely fair. I’m on board with that.

Even as a writer, I’m on board with that because its success depends on skills that are fundamentally pre-internet: produce cracking headlines and spiffing intros to entice your reader into the story.

(What a great way for a publisher to incentivise writers too! What if a staffer bonus or part of a freelancer fee was tied to the actual revenues generated by the article in question? As a journalist, I genuinely can’t think of a more refreshing way to put a price on the engaging words one may write.)

Tearing up the script

Selling an entire publication made sense in the age of the physical copy. Short of standing in the aisle of a newsagent and sneaking a read of the cover feature, readers weren’t exactly thinking in terms of ‘buying an article’.

But now? Consumers of words are effectively able to wander into the newsagent and tear out the specific pages they wanted to read. That’s the dominant way people consume written content now, but it’s one neither ‘legacy’ newspapers/magazines nor new digital publications seem to have grasped.

I do understand that recurring revenue is the dream for media owners. This is very easy to achieve if you are Netflix or Amazon Prime. In the (legal) streaming world, there are only a couple of big platforms, and those are where most of the content lives. There’s a lifetime’s worth of watching on there, with an addictive element built in, so subscription is not a hard thing to convert.

But there’s no platform like that for articles. (E-books are another story.) The ‘platform’, if you like, is the internet itself. And you don’t need me to tell you how many million free words go up on that thing every day. It’s not ideal from a monetisation point of view. The Times is not part of anything like Netflix, much less any individual article it publishes. Moreover – and perhaps sadly – the reading public isn’t begging for a Netflix of journalism to be built.

This is a very important distinction. If you as a publisher accept it, and you accept the way people read pieces in the digital age, then you’ve got to let readers tear pages out of your publication.

But does that mean you have to let them walk away without paying for it? I don’t see why that should necessarily be the case. Paywall that piece and make them hand over a few cents! They’ll probably shrug and do it.

And then, down the line, you might just find they become a subscriber you wouldn’t have had.

Technicalities

Having said people will shrug and pay a few cents for an article, I have to admit I wouldn’t be one of them…yet. But this is not because of the money. It’s because of the process.

I’m just not going to go and dig out my credit card to spend 30 cents. Especially not when I’m dreading the time you’re going to make me spend setting up a password, noting said password, clicking verification emails, ticking boxes about cookies and all that fun stuff. Those few minutes of my life are the ones I want to spend reading the article. It’s one or the other for me.

All that may not be an issue for another generation. Or for those more willing to tie their financial lives and entire identities to a California tech giant, willing to wave their phone at things and have payment take care of itself. Or people who grasp what an NFT is. The more folks like this there are, the more realistic a pay-per-story model is.

For a grumpy old goat like me, however, I need it to be as quick and easy as handing over a nickel. And I need to be convinced that it’s as safe as it is simple. Not an easy win, granted.

Here’s a wacky idea – just email me an invoice. Now, add a personal touch: get all those delivery people cruising the world’s streets to take my coins (or card payment, via their mobile readers) the next time they’re dropping off parcels in my building. Even better, let me go and pay at my local store the next time I’m shopping. You know, as in, payment doesn’t have to happen UP FRONT. Surely you can let me have access to a couple of 30-cent stories and give me a week or two to prove I’m an honest payer? If I prove troublesome, or tried to defraud you for less than a dollar, then you can cut me off. I doubt it will have broken the piggy bank.

I look forward to the day it’s made as straightforward as this, because there are plenty of articles I’d like to read and would be willing to pay for. I suspect I would be opening my wallet on a dangerously regular basis. And by then, hopefully, the same will apply to my readers.