Digital media and the choice of walls
I felt that I ought to have something supportive to say when I read Andrea Carson's article on paywalls for The Conversation a couple of weeks ago. I've tended to think of the word "paywall" as a kind of swear word used by free-content advocates to disparage those with the gumption to charge for their work, but authors like Carson seem to have taken it on-board as the standard technical term for enforcing a paid subscription. For Carson, a paywall is a legitimate business model by which quality journalism might be funded. (I still prefer to just say "subscription" myself, though.)
Free content and open source advocates, on the other hand, insist that the world can and should provide quality content for free. There are, indeed, cases in which such content is made available for free, for various reasons. Michael Brown's comment on Carson's article, however, points to one elephant in the room: significant amounts of free content is funded by the public. It is not ultimately free, but funded from tax revenue.
Carson mentions what seems to be another elephant in the room inhabited by free-content advocates, but I didn't think much about it until I read David Waller's more recent article on advertising. Waller reviews a recent book by Joseph Jaffe and Maarten Albarda claiming that organisations can reduce their advertising budget to zero by using charismatic mouthpieces, customer relationship management and social media. The last one bemused me since social media is itself typically supported by advertising, and I find it hard to get excited about ad-supported advertising. Yet advertising is the main, and maybe only, alternative for private content providers looking to meet their costs without the dreaded paywall. Would open content sound so noble if we re-badged it, truthfully, as "ad-enabled content" or its mechanism as an "adwall"?
In one section of The Happy Economist (2010), Ross Gittins points out that it is tremendously arrogant to insist that one's own interests or activities transcend economics. It sounds noble enough to say that one's work cannot be reduced to monetary terms, but economists know that the real question is not about money but about the distribution and use of resources. (Though many of economists' biggest fans do not seem to be very good at explaining this.) Getting back to paying for content, the real question is not whether or not it should free, but what is the most effective way of resourcing it? Do we resource it by public funding, by subscriptions, by advertising, by charity, or by something else? Or, do we not resource it at all and allow it to wither because we'd actually rather use our resources on something else?
