FT Claims Paywalls Are Morally Necessary... And Then Shows How Immoral The FT Is
from the that's-not-how-it-works dept
A few folks have sent over the thorough debunking, done by Boing Boing's Rob Beschizza, of the CEO of the Financial Times, John Ridding's recent interview about paywalls (amusingly done with staunchly paywall-free The Guardian). Most of Beschizza's debunking focuses on Ridding's slapping around the old "information wants to be free" strawman, which isn't the argument anyone is making. Yes, Stewart Brand said it a long time ago as a part of a much longer and more complex concept, but there are serious economic and business model discussions held by lots of people that think paywalls are a bad idea, and none of it has anything to do with "Information wants to be free."But what's even more ridiculous is Ridding's claim that paywalls are morally necessary. Seriously:
There is a moral dimension too, as he makes clear by drawing on the views of Henry Luce, a co-founder of Time magazine.Now, to be clear, the pronoun choices in those sentences are a little ambiguous, so it's not entirely clear if it's Ridding, Luce or Isaacson who specifically said advertising only was "morally abhorrent" and "economically self-defeating." But, either way, it does seem like all three share that general sense. There are a few problems with this, logically. First, it assumes that there are two and only two revenue streams available: advertising and subscription. That is not the case at all.
Luce, quoted in a Time article by Walter Isaacson last February, could not stomach the idea of papers and magazines relying solely on advertising revenue.
He called the formula "morally abhorrent" and "economically self-defeating." A publication's primary duty was to readers rather than advertisers. The advertising-only revenue model is self-defeating, because, eventually, it weakens the bond between publication and reader.
Second, if it's morally abhorrent to rely on advertising, then pretty much every major publication is morally abhorrent -- including the Financial Times, in getting a pretty good chunk of their revenue from advertising. Historically, if you look at publications, subscription revenue hasn't even covered printing and delivery costs -- meaning that subscriptions were effectively meaningless in terms of actually mattering to a paper's bottom line.
But, the biggest point that disproves Ridding is given by Ridding himself (and highlighted by Beschizza). Apparently, in an interview just a few months ago, Ridding talked up how the subscriptions were useful in getting advertisers to pay more:
"If you have an audience that is paying for your journalism they are engaged and that is an important message for advertisers."Remember, this is the guy who was just saying that if a publications primary duty was to advertisers rather than readers, it was morally abhorrent. But, even here he admits that the subscriptions are driven by... advertisers. If this was really about getting the influence of advertisers away from newspapers, why is he playing up the increased ad revenue due to the paywall?
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Filed Under: morality, paywalls
Companies: financial times
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Just do the math...
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Re: Just do the math...
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Re: Re: Just do the math...
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paywalls
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abhorrent to charge twice?
Seeing advertisements is a form a payment, you're paying with your eyeballs. I'm already paying *money* and then they expect me to pay *again*?
(The cable TV and magazine argument is obvious here -- why do I pay $100 a month for cable TV only to be shown ads on TV? Frankly, I consider that morally reprehensible too considering the financial reports from the majour pay-tv providers show that they make enough money from subscriber fees to fund their operations and the Ad revenue is pure gravy to them.)
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Re: abhorrent to charge twice?
Your $100 a month is for the cable provider.
Obviously not comparable to the newspaper, which provides the service and the content, but still.
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Re: abhorrent to charge twice?
You're actually subsidizing a new business model where content distribution is vertically aligned to own the creative process.
It's very likely that the next iteration will be something like Fox/NewsCorp applying Comcast ideology and buy a cable company or something, to push forward an end-to-end right-leaning content company.
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Re: Re: abhorrent to charge twice?
I just hope that when they finally make it there, there is some kind of anti-trust, or whatever is applicable there, brought down on them to prevent that type of thing catching on, and I hope it's quick. I think a lot of people will not be fooled by it, but I think that enough people will that it would be very dangerous (a single company controlling what you watch from start to finish, yikes...).
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Re: abhorrent to charge twice?
You're actually subsidizing a new business model where content distribution is vertically aligned to own the creative process.
Wow, that kind of market-speak should earn anyone an instant place on the B-Ark.
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The B Ark
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I Think hes talking about something else...
If the magazine has a great story it knows would cause major advertisers to pull from it's magazine in protest and they are the magazines only income, it's probably not going to publish the story.
However, the more a magazine or newspaper relies on pay directly from readers, the bigger the risks it can on it's advertisers. If its story is really good and results in more readership and thus more income the readers regularly it can take bigger risks on stories for the benefit of the readers.
It leaves the magazine more in control of the moral compass of it's own content as well as better able to react to what the reader's want. Thus, a better paper all around.
It seems to me you're both right, in that advertising can/does control too much of the content of most of our media, to it's detriment and that magazines/newspapers/etc could try to stick their necks out and come up with new ways of getting revenue that don't involve just the two options he spoke of.
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Re: I Think hes talking about something else...
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Morally Abhorrent? Well, actually yes!
Advertising supported news is news that biased towards the advertisers, case closed. Now, if paywalls arent the answer, then how about donations?
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Back to the future with Media
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When did this become a moral issue? Charge or don't charge, pee or get off the pot. I won't pay for news. No point whining, no point arguing, no point appealing to my 'better nature'. I'M NOT LISTENING. Just put up the paywall if you want & I'll leave you to get up to whatever you want behind your closed doors. One reason I hate Murdoch is that he not only wants to rip me off, he wants me to feel sorry for him for 'having to do it'.
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Re:
It's not only his sad moral obligation to put everything behind a pay wall it's his duty do to so as he must protect the culture, protect starving artists such as Paul Williams and, most importantly "Protect The Children".
Don't you see what a sacrifice this is for Murdoch? What stress he's under as he does all this for not just his but all our posteriors.....ahhh posterity?
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Spoken by someone who doesn't understand what the word "moral" means.
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