The journalism industry has been plagued with a general worry since the mainstream integration of the internet: how do we make money?
Before, it was simple. You pick up a paper, you pay money, you read the paper. Now, online publications are expected to be free, and as a result are posting a lot of internet stories that might catch attention, but might also have dubious sourcing.
Twitter 2.0 appears to have a solution. Elon Musk is looking into pay-per-article subscriptions for publications. In an interview conducted in June of 2022, Musk outlined a paywall bypass system, in which Twitter users would pay for one-off articles in-app, rather than subscribing to various publications.
And it seems he’s moving forward with the idea, telling Twitter: “Rolling out next month (May), this platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per-article basis with one click. This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per-article price for when they want to read an occasional article. Should be a major win-win for both media orgs & the public.”
But as Social Media Today puts it: “Except, this very model has already been tried, and abandoned, many times, by various publications and platforms as they seek new monetization opportunities.
“The key problem? By offering smaller, one-off payments for single article access, that then de-values subscriptions, which are far more valuable for media entities.”
