How Does a News World with Thousands of Subscription Walls Survive?

Why aren't more publications offering a per-story payment option?

Any path to a sustainable journey for humanity has to include ways to spread and support the availability of solid, useful online news, analysis and commentary - from local to global scales.

But how?

At the deepest level, the digital divide still denies several billion people access to life-changing or even life-saving information. See the latest International Telecommunication Union data.

But even for those who are online, it's getting harder for publications and the public to connect fruitfully outside a few high-level giants.

Publications at all levels have largely centered on subscription models. The same is increasingly true for independent journalists on Substack and the like. (My Sustain What column is free, for now, because Facebook is supporting the first cohorts of Bulletin writers.) [This post was originally on Bulletin!]

But paywalls, particularly those that kick in right away, lock out people with the least money and often the greatest need, and, in massive proliferation, simply build a world of competing fences instead of the open World Wide Web that was first envisioned.

If you're like me, you want a way to pay for a great individual article in a regional or specialized publication you might never visit again. Often that's not possible.

I posed this question on Twitter and it has generated a solid conversation:

In their focus on subscriptions, are tens of thousands of online publications limiting audiences that would come with a per-story micropayment option? I can't subscribe to 200 sites even though there are discrete stories on particular ones I'd pay to read. Anyone feeling this?

If you've been frustrated by this pattern and have ideas how to sustain the generation and availability of valuable information across diverse geographies and communities, weigh in below.

Reading:

The best overview I've seen exploring options is this 2019 piece for What's New in Publishing by Esther Kezia Thorpe: "Why micropayments aren’t dead…yet."

She explored lessons from Twitch, where content creators can be supported both through subscriptions and "cheering" using micro-donations bought in bundles.

In 2018, Mia Shuang Li wrote a piece for Columbia Journalism Review describing how a huge Chinese platform was using a micropayment tipping model:

Tencent, WeChat’s owner, has also capitalized on the fact that the platform is the world’s most popular mobile payment system by installing a “tipping” button. If a reader likes WeChat content, they can tip the creator a small amount of money with one click.

But these are fairly old posts. given how fast online media models evolve, I'd love your help identifying where things might go next.

~~Send me feedback (including corrections!), tips, ideas here.