| It doesn't take a leap of logic at all. All it requires is some fairly simple economics. Someone has to pay for content. You don't view ads, and you don't buy subscriptions. You also never donate. What do you think will happen next? Well, some businesses die, but most don't. At the Guardian, we had to rely on three things: 1. We had to make about three hundred people redundant. (This is the human cost of the problem - not that some fatcat makes marginally worse dividends, but that a print worker who's done this job since 16 is now being turned out at 42) 2. We had to diversify our revenue streams. One way became 'native advertising': content sponsored by companies, like an article on the history of whiskey with a Jack Daniels badge, etc. Editorial hated this. Oh, boy, they objected. They fought in every principle and at every point available. They relented when they realized they were next for redundancies. 3. Then there were us, in commercial. Firefighting bad ads coming via the network, trying to resist JS hogging full page experiences, writing ads in the highest performing fashion we could to make the best of a bad situation. No-one liked us. I didn't stay for long. I'd like to say I left because I was disgusted with the seediness of the ad industry, but the real reason was that the job was boring and depressing. We weren't saving the newspaper and we weren't making ads better. Personally I think the only solution is the paywall. That's how newspapers worked for 250 years: you gave your dollar and you got your daily edition. You could trust your paper because it was more beholden to you than to any other interest. Will people accept this, though? |