So, you've decided to complain about a paywall…

You don't like encountering paywalls. Writers don't like getting social media complaints about paywalls. Let's talk about that.

If you’re reading this sentence, it’s because you’ve clicked a link to read it – perhaps from your inbox, or an app notification, but more likely from social media. There is every chance that you’ve been sent that link passive-aggressively by me or another writer because you’ve replied to a post they’ve written with “paywall”, or similar.

So, before we get into the main thrust of this post, let me say this: thank you for clicking. Not many people do, and fewer people do with each passing month.

Especially thank you if you clicked this link after being sent it passive-aggressively: I’m going to try to convince you to support writers when we share work we’ve made that’s behind a paywall, and you likely don’t agree with that right now – but you’ve clicked the link anyway. No-one does that any more! So thank you for giving it a go.

Let’s get stuck in. I’m going to get to why the horrible, horrible economics of the internet have ruined everything (and AI is making it worse), but first things first:

Why are you sharing a link that lots of people won’t be able to read?

This is one of the main objections I see when I share articles behind a paywall. If I’m posting the article, I must want people to be able to debate and discuss it, and if most people can’t read it, that’s impossible – lots of people are shut out.

Worse, writers have a habit of complaining if people get angry at an article based only on its headline, or an “out of context” sample shared on social media. If I’ve seen a paragraph or two of an article and it looks like hot garbage, isn’t it a bit much to ask me to pay to confirm that? (Spoiler: yes, it is)

Let me be honest about the main reason most writers share our articles on social, as it’s hardly a big secret: it’s because we want you to read it.

We want you to read what we write for lots of reasons. If it’s political, we want to change your mind or fire you up. We want you to praise us, if you like it. We’d love it if you shared it further. But ultimately, most writers want to be read purely for its own sake. You can say that’s something driven by the online world – the desire to feed the algorithm, to farm engagement, to see the number go up – but it’s much older than that. Anyone who’s created writing, like any other form of art, does so because they want it to be consumed.

That’s the basic level sorted, but there’s also brutal commercial logic at play too. As the economics of journalism continue to degrade, more and more writers work on a freelance basis – we get paid when we get published, and we don’t when we don’t.

One way to make sure that we get commissioned often is to demonstrate that our work reliably delivers an audience, and our personal social media followings are one tool in our arsenal to help deliver that. Sometimes promoting stories on social is part and parcel of the deal with a publication – it’s contractual.

Bluesky doesn’t pay people to post, however big their followings. Pre-Elon, Twitter never did either. Anyone who posted there did so for free. For professional writers, that meant we hoped for payoffs in other ways – such as getting ourselves noticed by commissioning editors, or driving an audience to our Substack, books, or other paid work. We’ve been hoping to monetise you this entire time. Sorry.

It’s still really irritating to click a link only to discover I can’t read the piece, though

Yes, it is. Sorry again! There’s a bunch of reasons we still share this way, though. Partly it is that we tend to assume that our social media followers are more likely to be subscribers of outlets for whom we write regularly.

One of my gigs is as political editor for The New World, and I’ve written for that outlet for nearly eight years. By now, I assume that some portion of my followers are following me because of that – so statistically, a much higher percentage of my followers will subscribe to it than the online population as a whole.

Presumably, too, a higher proportion of my followers who don’t subscribe are the sort of people who might find it interesting as a publication. Outlets notice which writers and which articles attract new subscribers their way – and they really like it when that happens.

So, once again, it’s in our interests to try to drive people towards them. This is even more true if we’re sending you to our own Substack, where we’d get almost all of the benefit to a new subscriber, and where hopefully the synergy between our social media following and potential paid customers is strongest. You’re exactly the people we want to be hitting that paywall, I’m afraid.

That said, almost every paywalled website can be read for free. Most sites will let you read a small number of articles for free if you register – and there are still plenty of free email services if you worry about getting spammed at your main inbox. Where possible, we try to share “gift links”, which are free for the first few hundred people who click them.

Opening an article in a private browsing window will often jump the paywall, and “reading mode” sometimes works, too. There are also a range of sites that illicitly jump you past any paywalls, and also deny the site concerned ad revenue – you are obviously free to use these, but don’t be surprised if writers you like get upset (or even mute or block you) if you reply to their posts with those links.

Writing is generally how we pay our rent, feed our children and/or cats and otherwise keep body and soul together, and we need outlets to pay us, which means we need them to get revenue. So if you reply to our work with ways to deny them that revenue, that’s bad for us – and sometimes it feels personal. By all means use them, especially if it’s a site you dislike for principled reasons (or you can’t afford a sub), but no need to show it off, eh?

All of these, though, mean I don’t actually feel all that guilty when I share a paywalled link. If you want to read the article, and don’t want to pay, in almost every case you’ll be able to do so.

Why is everywhere asking me to pay, now, though? The internet was free for so long.

This is the big thing, and this is what has changed. The whole economic model of content is transforming, mostly because the old one stopped working altogether. The old model was simple – it was ads.

A single online advertisement always generated a tiny amount of cash, usually a small fraction of a cent. But media outlets found they could get audiences that were far larger than they’d ever attracted in print – newspapers with a few hundred thousand print readers got tens or hundreds of millions of page views a day. Each page they viewed had a few adverts, many of them viewed a few pages, and the revenue stacked up. Until it didn’t.

The problems emerged on both sides of the equation. Ads stopped working nearly so well, and traffic to websites stopped flowing – pretty much the perfect storm for any business trying to work on the internet.

When it comes to ads, the problem is fairly obvious: when’s the last time you saw a great online advert, thought “this is really helpful, I’m going to click it and buy that”. For most of us, the answer is probably “roughly never”. Online ads were never particularly good, and so they had low click-through rates. This meant those adverts got more and more annoying and intrusive, which meant more of us took steps to avoid or block them. All of this was made worse by rampant ad fraud from unscrupulous middlemen (who would fake ad views to defraud advertisers). Everything about trying to make money from ads has been getting worse, all the time.

While all of that was happening, traffic was getting harder to come by. Once, Facebook generated nearly as much traffic for publishers as Google – until Meta realised it didn’t need external links to news after all. Today, Facebook and Instagram generate almost nothing. Twitter was never a great source of traffic, but under Musk it has collapsed to nothing. Bluesky doesn’t have enough users to move the dial.

That leaves Google – and Google still drives more traffic to publishers than anything else, for now. One thing to acknowledge is that the companies who own the media got greedy here. Instead of producing quality content that readers actually wanted, they paid terrible wages to people to produce articles matching Google searches: “what time does the England game start?”, or “what films has Judi Dench in?”, so that people searching for one basic piece of information had to view ads on the newspaper website.

Google realised, correctly, that users having to click through whichever newspaper ranked top on a question, scroll through lots of waffle written to pad out the article, and hope their browser didn’t crash under the weight of all the ads, just to find out TV times was a bad way of doing things – so it started just answering questions directly at the top of search results.

This caused righteous indignation on behalf of the media owners, but was obviously much better for users. Junk articles produced for almost nothing, to get passing ad clicks was the end point of the advertising model of the internet. Now that AI exists, it can be extended even further. No-one needs writers, and no-one needs newspaper publishers. The ad-driven model of publishing never worked all that well, but it’s truly broken now.

That leaves publishers having to find a new way of doing things, and that’s subscriptions – and that means paywalls. (If you’re wondering why you can’t just pay 20p to read an individual article you like here and there, I tackled that a few years ago in an article for Columbia Journalism Review)

Is it a shame that we can’t give out the best quality news and writing for free? Yes – and given writers want as many people as possible to read our best work, many of us miss the open internet, too.

But newspapers had to be paid for throughout most of their history, and TV news is generally part of a paid subscription, or in the UK requires a paid TV licence. There is no long, proud history of writing being free – it was a recent phase, and a brief one.

Food, clothing, housing and heat are even more important than my hot takes (imagine!) and none of those are supplied for free, either. While we’re still in a capitalist society, writing is going to need a business model, just like everything else.

And for those of us still working in a tough industry in search of a sustainable business model, that means that we’re going to share paywalled work, in the hope that at least some of you will find it’s worth paying for.

On the subject of paying…

If you’ve followed this Substack for long, you’ll know it’s been very intermittent – at least until recently. In the last month or so, I’ve published about a horrible AI experiment I did, creating an always-on 24/7 podcast that you can still torture yourself with. I’ve written on the UK’s new age verification system, and what’s really going on with it. I’ve got several more posts in the pipeline, some of which might even be good.

Given I’m posting here regularly again, and having written a full post about payment, it seems like a good time for me to turn subscriptions back on. So if you previously had a paid subscription, that will resume today – with however much time you had remaining on your sub left before you’re charged again.

If you didn’t subscribe before, but you’re enjoying what I write here, please do consider becoming a paid supporter. I can’t promise much in the way of paid subscriber-only content at the moment, as I haven’t decided what ‘model’ this newsletter should use.

I enjoy being able to write something that doesn’t go through other outlets and editors, and posts on here have done nicely without any official promotion in recent weeks – but I can hardly write 1,500 words explaining why we can’t work for free while working for free.

So, if you enjoy what I’m writing here (or want to keep funding that godawful AI podcast), please do consider becoming a paid supporter – it makes it so much easier to justify taking time away from paid work to write here. And if not, thanks for at least reading this far and thinking about it.