I received a couple of emails from Readers about my earlier piece on creeping paywalls, and indeed Jamie Wilson at PJMedia wrote a very polite rebuttal thereof.
Like I said in my earlier post, I understand exactly how this all works.
I mean, as someone who has been trying to support himself by writing for the past two decades, I understand completely the need for being paid for one’s work. I have no issue with that.
The problem I do have is that the cost of paywalls seems to be out of line with the product being offered. Back when TIME Magazine was actually worth reading, I used to give TIME subs as Christmas- or birthday gifts to friends and family. I don’t remember the cost, but it was something like $25 per annum — and that for a full magazine on a large number of topics of interest, not just politics, delivered weekly.
Compared to that, most online publications today fall woefully short. Even Cathy Gyngell’s excellent TCW from the UK doesn’t compare, and sad to say, neither does the PJMedia complex, nor even Breitbart. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy at that conservative stuff, oh yes I do. But my life isn’t just politics, as even a cursory look at my blog will show, and thus I can find little good reason to spend what seems to be an awful lot of money on what is, after all, a niche interest.
To properly entertain myself, I once worked out that I’d have to spend about $300 a month on subs. Won’t do it, even if I could afford it. And when I could afford it, I could certainly afford to spend $90 per annum on Britain’s Country Life magazine, about $100 per annum on various gun magazines, and $30 per annum on pubs like Foreign Interest and Bill Buckley’s National Review (back when it was also worth reading), and so on. All told, that’s much less than $300… a year.
When today’s online media can resolve the issue with micropayments, I would have no problem paying for Jamie’s or Stephen Green’s articles, as long as they cost me pennies. Hell, I sell my historical novels (usually, about 100,000 words or so) for a couple of dollars each on Amazon, and each one might have taken me about a full year to write, with all the research involved. A journalist/writer may charge, say, a dollar a word; but the publication needs to sell it to a reader for fractions of pennies — something which seems to have escaped our modern publications.
Right now, they don’t. Yes, a PJMedia sub doesn’t cost that much — but when they start writing content which can rival that of, say, a traditional daily newspaper (like the Daily Telegraph ) in terms of its breadth, I’ll think about it. Until then, no.
Note, by the way, that Jamie Wilson’s article is accessed through an Internet archive link because when I originally tried to get to it, I was blocked.
I also remember having and giving magazine subscriptions. I also remember “burger, fries, and a Coke” for less than $1. I asked Perplexity what a 1979 dollar would be in today’s currency and got the answer of about $4.50. After all that, what would your $25 magazine be today? And I agree that the quality of ‘journalism’ has pretty well fallen off a high cliff in that same time frame.
After I read the rebuttal, I clicked the subscribe for %74 off link out of curiosity. Came out to about $50 per month for the lowest tier. Does the amount of content PJM provides for $50 equal micro payments per article? Only if you read every article. I like the sites that allow some number of articles per week/month before requiring a subscription.
Value has always been an issue with subs. I used to read WSJ, but I found that I’d scan the front page, read a few articles, maybe, and read op eds. Really wasn’t worth it. Dallas Morning News is worse. One or two interesting pieces, a bunch of bullshit, then tons of ads.
I’d hit the London Times only to read Jeremy Clarkson. Then they paywalled it. Much as I like his writing, it wasn’t worth the cost of the subscription.
Far as PJ media goes, I had a subscription. But seemed like as soon as I got it, they added another tier. So even though I was paying, some content was still blocked. I realized that I only read one or two VIP pieces a day, if that and there was similar content for free elsewhere. So I killed that sub.
You’re right on the money with micro payments. Get a sub that’s a-la-carte.
I also used to subscribe to the WSJ back when it was a financial paper. One of the fun things about it were the headers for minor articles where the writers had some fun (I remember an article about hedge funds titled, “There’s a Bustle in Hedge Row”). From the early ’80’s to about 1995, which is when I stopped because the articles started having the exact same left-wing slant as every other publication. The editorial page was still interesting, but even the in-depth financial articles were horrible.
I still get some dead-tree publications. I’ve subscribed to Shotgun News (now retitled “Firearms News”) for decades, and get a couple of other gun mags because they’re dirt cheap ($8 a year), and never, ever renew until they offer me that same price. They all end up as bathroom readers, and I don’t think I’ve kept an article since one on “the ultimate Garand ammo test”.
I have only one (1) “subscription” to ANYTHING on-line, and that’s to a very little-known forum dedicated to my hobby-brand of photography, and I keep that for $20 a year because that allows me to post to it, and also to access the buy-and-sell marketplace within it where I’ve found a couple of very good deals on used gear (about the only kind I buy).
Other than commenting here and on a few other blogs that still allow it, I do NOTHING with the so-called “social media”. My wife and I are retirees on a relatively fixed income (for the next couple of years, then we hit the RMD’s for our retirement funds) and have managed to get by without access to the upper-crust of the ‘net. Personally I think that paywalls are a good way for a web site (or blog, or whatever) to commit on-line suicide. But maybe that’s only because I’m a cheapskate (a derogatory word for “frugal”).
My current subscriptions to magazines are:
Backwoods Home -lots of prepper and self reliant type material in the magazine that comes bimonthly
Two NRA mags which apparently will no longer be published after the new year.
Garand Collector’s Association so that I can keep getting stuff from the Civilian Magazine. That’s a quarterly magazine that keeps expiring on me.
Occasionally I subscribe to the quarterly state wildlife magazine. It’s interesting but is so infrequent that my subscription has often lapsed by numerous months before I realize it.
I had a subscription to Field and Stream for a while but that hasn’t been published in years.
I used to enjoy Smithsonian magazine and a couple of the shooting rags. I noticed that various magazine racks at Cabela’s, Barnes and Nobles, Walmart are quite bare now.
I used to pick up a one off issue of National Review or American Spectator but haven’t bought either in years.
The multimedia offerings of online articles and streaming television are just too expensive for me. They come out to about $100 per year. Pass. The online streaming portion would make me get more screen time to get my money’s worth and more screen time isn’t on my to do list.