Newspaper Drops Paywall, Moves To Reader Patronage, Generates 37% More Revenue
from the it's-freeing-in-more-ways-than-one dept
The problems and unfairness of the copyright system are so manifest that many would like to adopt alternative approaches. But that’s a big step, and one that undoubtedly requires a certain courage. Every example that shows how the move worked for others is important, since it not only demonstrates that alternatives exist, but that they work. Here’s another data point, reported by the News Revenue Hub:
The Forward has a storied history. Founded in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily, it soon became a national publication — and the most widely read Jewish newspaper in the world. In 1990, the English version of the Forward launched as a weekly publication. In 2019, the Forward went fully digital.
And on December 5, 2023, the Forward marked its latest milestone: The publication removed the paywall for all of its coverage.
The results have been amazing:
In the first three months since dropping the paywall, the newsroom welcomed 1,254 new donors who hadn’t previously paid to access their coverage. From December 5, 2023 to March 15, 2024, the Forward received nearly $583,000 in donations under $5,000 — a 37% increase over paid subscription revenue during the same time frame the previous year.
In December, the month the Forward removed the paywall, the nonprofit saw a 103% increase in reader revenue under $5,000, compared to the same time last year. That includes 176 new monthly recurring donors, averaging $16/month. Previously, an annual digital subscription brought in $51.21, just over $4/month.
It’s great to have those figures showing how trusting your readers to support you can work. Too often sceptics claim that people are only too happy to get something for nothing, and to access online material without ever giving back. The experience of The Forward is an excellent counterexample to that. Another crucial point to emerge from the News Revenue Hub post is the importance of preparing thoroughly for the paywall removal, not least by carrying out research among current readers and supporters:
“A lot of important research needs to happen before a news organization can be ready to take down its paywall,” [Mary Walter-Brown, the News Revenue Hub’s founder and chief executive officer] explained. In particular, the Hub helped the Forward with deep audience analysis, surveying each audience and donor segment to gauge their feelings about removing the paywall and moving to a volunteer donor model.
We learned a lot from those surveys,” Walter-Brown said. “For example, we found that the Forward’s older demographic was motivated by making content available for future generations.” Survey results also showed that most Forward readers were willing to convert their paid subscriptions to donations and consider increasing their gift amount to fund more reporting.”
The report about The Forward moving away from paywalls to donations makes clear how important the support of the News Revenue Hub was in this case. The latter describes itself as “a nonprofit B2B that helps news organizations build membership and crowdfunding programs.” The News Revenue Hub is itself funded by “individual donations, member fees, and foundation grants.” The latter include support from Democracy Fund, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, The Granada Fund, Google News Initiative, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and The John and Florence Newman Foundation. In other words, an organization that helps news publishers move to what is effectively a patronage model, is itself funded in the same way. That’s interesting to see, since Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) also suggested that a shift back to this tried and tested funding approach could offer a viable alternative to today’s dysfunctional copyright system.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.
Filed Under: business models, journalism, patronage, paywalls
Companies: the forward
Comments on “Newspaper Drops Paywall, Moves To Reader Patronage, Generates 37% More Revenue”
For another example, this approach is a large part of why The Guardian is probably the last news outlet I’ll stop supporting/”subscribing” to.
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I stopped even reading the Guardian a long time ago because although it’s not a right wing mouthpiece like The Torygraph or The Daily Heil, it does tend to report right wing talking points first and fact check never. That’s to say nothing of the ableism inherent in its reporting, a problem it shares with The Independent and its child publication i.
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Sounds like standard American reporting, MAGA gaslighting about “far left media” notwithstanding.
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Showing that even the ‘left wing’ is right wing in regard to certain minority groups.
Mr journalist, tear down that wall!
Paywalls are especially weird when you’re just scrolling random articles from a news aggregator. I’m not going to subscribe to the random midwestern city gazette just because one headline sounded intriguing enough for me to click.
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Even for something major like the New York Times, I know I come across its articles once in a while; sometimes hitting the paywall, sometimes not. But it’s not like I’m building some mental or actual score-card of how many articles I’ve read from each source, how good they were, and what the competition looked like. So if I suddenly need to assign a dollar value to each and decide whether it’s worth what they’re asking, I’m at a complete loss; how could I possibly know?
And of course that ignores the general inconvenience of another login, the privacy implications (newspapers have a long history of abusing subscriber data; it’s just expected), and the potential difficulty of canceling (if I’m even able to notice that it’s no longer worth it).
This story is interesting, but a Yiddish-language paper is such a niche market. There are only about half a million potential readers, and I guess not that many competing Yiddish-language papers. So, the readers will have a pretty good idea how often they’re reading this, and the patrons are probably making an intentional choice to prop up the language. The model won’t necessarily generalize to larger markets where there’s lots of competition.
Copyright was designed to eliminate the need for patronage.
How does that work in politics with billionaires funding extreme candidates?
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“Copyright was designed to eliminate the need for patronage.”
How so?
I do not recall reading this tidbit in the history of copyright. Perhaps I missed something.
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Not the AC you replied to, but it may be because it guaranteed payment even if the patron refused to pay out.
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I’m not aware of any such history of that, or in general of copyright being explicitly intended to replace patronage.
Patronage has sometimes been suggested as a replacement for copyright in the modern world. The Street Performer Protocol, crowd-funding, Patreon, and such. But, until recent decades, there was little scalability or diversification to patronage. A group that was willing to do the right type of art to attract patrons might’ve been able to get one or two, and then they’d have to keep those patrons happy or they’d be in big trouble.
When discussed as a modern copyright replacement, “patronage” means something almost entirely different—not a return to the way things used to be.
Billionaires can be a bit of a tricky problem. Ideally, one should take as much of their money as possible, while not depending on it at all, but that’s easier said that done. Over-dependence on individual patrons would bring us right back to old-style patronage and all its associated concerns.
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In countries with automatic copyright that can’t be waived? How does that work, exactly?
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The result could be published under a public-domain-equivalent license, such as Creative Commons Zero (its “fallback license” would take effect) or MIT-0. There are no known countries that forbid this, although “moral rights” could in theory cause some trouble.
But if we’re talking about “replacing” copyright, the general idea is that copyright laws would go away entirely.
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Thereby waiving copyright, something which, as AC already pointed out, just isn’t possible in some countries (publishing under a Creative Commons Zero license dedicates the work to the Public Domain).
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A public-domain-equivalent license does not necessarily waive copyright. MIT-0 and 0BSD don’t; both start with a copyright notice.
…unless that’s not allowed for some reason, in which case the copyright holder grants anyone permission to do anything with it. That’s kind of the whole reason CC0 was created; see its “fallback” section.
A court could also reject that, of course. I’m just not aware of any instance of it ever happening, or any real basis for it (excepting moral rights, which were mentioned).
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Hey John Smith, copyright was never intended to protect your mailing list.
Techdirt could implement something like this. I can’t contribute with $5 atm because my currency is too devalued against the dollar but I can spare $1 or $2…
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Or they could throw up an Ethereum address for the more paranoid among us.
But is it just a war response glitch
In the future when the Israel-Hamas war is over enough to be out of the news, it will be interesting to see what happens to their revenue.
They may just be experiencing a pro-Israel charitable donations spike due to the war. Analogous to the Trump CNN bump, that evaporated and caused another business model scramble (they’ve turned slightly more to the right).
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The Israeli campaign in Gaza will be “over enough to be out of the news” like the American campaign in Iraq was for 20 years after the mission was “accomplished.”