The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free
Nathan J. Robinson writes in the Current Affairs:
[T]he New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free!… This doesn’t mean the paywall shouldn’t be there. But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free.
We wonder why people picked up fake news and spread lies. They don’t want to pay for content; therefore, they rely on free shit.
Robinson on ads:
It’s hard for small media institutions to figure out the right balance of depending on ads, paywalls, and donations. The money has to come from somewhere, after all. A lot of the times, that means a heavy dependence on ads—the traditional model of magazines has been ad-revenue based, not subscription-based—so that paywalls are actually the less corrupted model; a podcaster who sells their product on Patreon rather than giving it away but filling it with mattress and “box-of-shit-a-month” ads has an important kind of freedom: they only have to please the audience, not the sponsors.
I am experiencing with magazine-style advertisement on this site and I will avoid selling it mattress and “box-of-shit-a-month.” I want to sell ads that actually like seeing myself. We’ll see how it goes. If it doesn’t work out, I can just take down the ads and replace them with pretty pictures.