The Verge raises a partial paywall: ‘It’s a tragedy that garbage is free and news is behind paywalls’

I'm not sure how sustainable this model is. Especially when a reader browses via a link aggregator and therefore reads news articles on many different websites. I doubt most people want/can afford a subscription on dozens of different news outlets, as that'll quickly add up to a triple-digit monthly bill.

Something like Flattr, but maybe non-optional, would be better. Pay a fixed monthly fee and split the payment between all sites you read articles on (maybe based on how many, or reading time or whatever).

The official announcement says they did because people have been asking for a way to support the site, but it's not at all clear those people had a paywall in mind. Ars Technica has had subscriptions for years, and they paywall extra site functionality like topic filtering and a full-text RSS feed, not content.

If it is behind a paywall, it isnt news, it is an asset.

Ironically, it’s news that’s free, and garbage is behind the paywall. Verge is not what people remember it being from years ago

And that's $7/month for fewer, better ads.

Wow this is a great article, thanks for sharing. This quote in particular has a lot to unpack:

We are not chasing platform traffic, we’re not chasing social video views, we’re not doing sponsored content to make our business go like everyone else is forced to do. If you want to go play in those games, you have no choice but to do sponsor integrations. That’s just how those businesses work. We won’t do it, we sell our ethics policy.

The Verge’s decision to raise a paywall comes at a moment when many news media companies are grappling with the dilemma of an emerging gulf between the information ecosystems of free and paid news. As more media companies lean into subscriptions to drive revenue, the reach and impact of their news stories is often limited, or targeted more toward an affluent, educated audience willing to pay for news.>

That must be really challenging if you run an ethical journalism organization. Gone are the days of paying for newspapers, people now expect it for free, and that's not sustainable for a regular business. So it creates a moral dilemma for ethical journalists, who naturally want to continue to reach a large audience and worry about alienating people who can't afford subscriptions.

The free news sites don't have that same quandary. They make money by selling your data, so they remain free. Since it's what the people want, they don't think about the fact that this is achieved by unethical means. These people are already predisposed to be less educated due to income levels alone, meaning they're less likely to perform the critical thinking necessary to realize that journalism - ethics = fake news. Talk about a vicious cycle.

I know I'm not saying anything that people who've been paying attention the past 8 years don't already know, but when you really think about all the implications it's kind of astounding. >

I subscribe to more periodicals than most, I think probably almost twenty of them. I just cut out NYTimes, Washington Post, LA Times, Atlantic. I was growing disillusioned with some of their coverage- NYTimes desperately triangulating to the comfortable, safe, meaningless center, WaPo and LAT owned by oligarchs kissing Trump's ring. Atlantic just bores me lately- lots of opinion and not a lot of investigative coverage. But happy to add The Verge. I've read them daily since they were This Is My Next and don't intend to stop.

Its a tragedy but not an unavoidable one. It's a direct result of choosing to fund information via the same scarcity based model that we use for physical goods (capitalism).

We don't need to, unlike physical goods, in the digital age it is virtually free to copy and distribute information, but because we still fund it via a model that only gives it value when it's scarce, paywalls or advertising end up being the only way to pay for it.

We should instead have the equivalent of government run subscription services that allow us to provide all information to everyone while still rewarding creators, without using advertising as a middleman / drain on society.

I think the “garbage is free” narrative needs to change. AI generated garbage sure isn’t free, you pay for it with your attention and your data. Publishers need to make money somehow, and they can either do that with tracking cookies that harvest your data and sell it to the highest bidder, or in reality, both. If average consumers had any idea of how much data they give up for “free” content or services on the internet, I think more people would be okay with paywalls, and I think there would be a lot more pressure on paid subscription/service providers to use paywall revenue as an alternative to, instead of in addition to, the surveillance capitalism method that’s so pervasive right now

Well vox is garbage anyway, so no loss.

I think the Verge messed up: the announcement said there would be a full-text RSS feed for subscribers, but they've actually added full article text to the existing feed, where normally I'd only get 2 or 3 paragraphs.

Their sister site Vox made a similar mistake; their RSS feed already had full text, but once they added the paywall I got the full text of articles that were paywalled if I tried to click through to the site. It's like Vox Media doesn't fully understand how its RSS feeds work.