Reason Paywalls Will Not Work

News is an angry bull in an endless china store. There's always more news and it's always breaking. Not only that, but there are many bulls each in their own stores. Even worse, the china is the same: once broken, it's broken in all the stores. Rupert Murdoch's plan to paywall all News Corp media websites is like doubling the price of a drug after it's gone generic. He's just shooting himself in the foot, once for each website he locks down.

The reason that internet users won't pay for online information isn't because they're lazy and used to getting it for free. People used to get water for free, then paid for it in their homes, and now in bottled versions of the same water. Internet users won't pay for breaking news-- and that's the key, breaking news-- because it is so widespread that by the time it would take to pay for said news, it could be found at a dozen other free websites.

Before radio and television, the newspaper was the fastest source of information. Then radio, later television, shoved the newspaper out of the prime instant gratification spot, the most lucrative place to be; like the walls of product immediately preceding a store clerk. Now the internet has shaven the period for instant gratification razor thin margins, where one can get breaking news as its happening, sometimes before it's even broken.

Today, people buy newspapers for leisure-based intake: read over a meal, during a cab ride, waiting for a meeting to start. All situations that are rooted in passivity. When a person comes to a website, they have a thirst, a desire to discover something now, not later. A paywall interferes with this process and leads to brand-disgust, a symptom that's hard enough to recover from in the real world, but many times more difficult in the digital world. There's no incentive to provide feedback when all the offended person has done is sit in a chair and click on a link.

By far, the worst crime of a paywall is that it cheapens the value of the big headlines and reduces the already-low value of the secondary articles to practically nothing. Secondary articles are important: they pad the content so there are more pages for potential advertisement impressions. By lengthening the gratification process on the big ticket items, the website has negatively impacted the reader's desire to surf for the lesser items which fuel a website in the long run.

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