Wednesday 17th March: Subscription bait is different from clickbait

March 17, 2021

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With the indentured servitude of clickbait-spewing content farms fresh in our collective memory, any proposal to pay journalists based on traffic generally gets a fiery thumbs down. And the Guardian's reporting of just such a proposal at the Telegraph has sparked furious indignation on the journo socials.

Avoiding the pile on though, Adam Tinworth points out that the Guardian's framing of the news is 'unhelpful' because nobody is reading the detail.

The discussion of the piece there is full of performative outrage at incentivising clickbait, and precious little discussion of the nuance of trying to encourage journalists to write pieces that contribute to a subscriber-based business model.

Adam isn't saying the Telegraph's plan is perfect (no one actually knows what the plan actually is). His point is that to dismiss, out of hand, any link between journalists’ compensation and them doing work that supports subscriber acquisition and retention undermines the future of paywalled sites. Take a breath everyone.

The rumour was that Facebook was going to join Twitter in challenging Substack's dominance of the paid newsletter space. But it looks like Facebook is also throwing in a free website to woo journalist-creators with Groups and Pages to round out the offer.

Despite Japan's tech-heavy economy, most news media in the country remains stubbornly stuck offline. Japanese journalist and Google News Lab fellow Daisuke Furuta discusses what's preventing journalism in his home country from embracing digital.

Digiday is reporting publishers in the lifestyle, business and finance spaces 'flocking to Clubhouse' to meet audiences where they are. Interestingly they are already talking about testing ways to monetize the platform, mostly around subscriber conversion.

This week's podcast:

On this week’s episode The Big Issue CEO Paul Cheal tells us about the magazine’s fight to survive lockdown, the innovations that got it through and how those changes have spurred new ways of thinking about how the Big Issue will work in the future.

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