A Modest Proposal for newspaper websites and newspaper paywalls

These days you can’t go to a newspaper website (and many other websites as well) without running into a paywall. As frustrating as that can be, I do understand it. Print subscriptions are way down and newspapers have to make money somehow. 

That being said there are a few major annoyances with the newspaper paywall system and a few things newspaper sites could do to improve things.

Pet Peeves with newspaper paywalls

1. Not being able to read anything without subscribing. Newspaper paywalls that are very strict and don’t allow any use of the site without paying.
2. Subscription cost
3. The fact that there usually aren’t subscriptions for less than a month
4. The fact that paywalled articles still regularly come up in Google searches/ the Google news app
5. The fact that there is no way to subscribe to multiple publications for one fee. Apple News + is a step in the right direction though.
6. How difficult it is to cancel a lot of subscriptions.

Suggestions for improving things

1. Allow people to pay per article read. This could be done by micropayments at the time you want to read the article or by a stored value system where you would load funds into your account and that balance would be debited each time you read an article. This might e the easier to implement option. Especially if per article payments were under 1.00.
2. Offer weekly or daily subscription options. This would be helpful for people who only want to read one or two articles or who infrequently visit a site. I have no problem paying for a subscription to a site I visit regularly but I don’t want to subscribe for a month to a site I may only visit a couple times a year. More subscription options would fix that. Today I wanted to read an article from the L.A. Times that came up on the Google News app. Unfortunately, there were no more free articles and no subscription options less than a month offered. I only visit this sit a few times a year so I didn’t want that. I would have been happy to pay per article or for a shorter subscription if those had been options. A few papers do offer day passes but the majority do not.

1. Offer a subscription to multiple papers for one reasonable price. Individual subscriptions are often pretty pricey and especially in this economy a lot of people can’t afford to subscribe to multiple publications.
2. Make canceling as easy as signing up. I’d be more open to trying a subscription if I knew I didn’t have to jump through hoops to cancel it if I needed to.
3. Offer a discounted subscription to lower income people and seniors. Monthly subscriptions are often anywhere from 16.00-35.00. That can be a lot for someone with a low or fixed income. A discounted rate might encourage such individuals to subscribe and make it easier for them to stay informed. (I know major stories like natural disasters are usually outside the paywall but there are a lot of other things lower income people might miss out on.)

Newspaper Paywalls are likely never going away. (At least not for the foreseeable future unless they come up with a new monetization mechanism.) Hopefully they could at least evolve and become more tolerable for people.