The Paywall’s Final Frontier

I’ve been on the internet long enough to consider the paywall an inevitability in many cases.

The advertising market is not sustainable in a real way, and lowers the quality of the overall experience, and forces editorial focuses to shift in favor of noise over signal.

But I also worry, a lot, about what paywalls can do to the discourse. If all the high-quality information is hidden behind a paywall, that means that lower-quality news and content streams more freely and easily, and that threatens the overall quality of the what we talk about—which leads to broader cultural decay.

So, to me, I find it disappointing that CNN is apparently about to drop a paywall on its website, which celebrates its 30th anniversary next year. The news originally broke from The New York Times, so I’m breaking my no-NYT rule to share it.

In some sense, CNN is extremely late to the party—although it attempted to build a paywall around its premium video content with its previous failed experiment CNN+, this time, they’re doing it the old-fashioned way. They’re not making new content for the endeavor.

As my pal Simon Owens put it in his media newsletter:

Imagine if The New York Times had spent the last 15 years solely focused on how it could juice more revenue out of its print product. That’s basically been CNN’s strategy prior to Mark Thompson’s hiring.

They may be a laggard on this front, but early on, they were actually setting the pace for the rest of industry, as I explained in a 2022 story responding to the demise of CNN+.

Say what you will about CNN’s news coverage—it’s still a giant among journalism websites. (Tim Reckmann/Flickr)

And despite the fact that the network has skipped out on aggressively monetizing this model, it nonetheless remains a top-tier media outlet. Per an analysis of SimilarWeb data by Press Gazette, it is the top-viewed news site in the U.S., with more than 440 million visits in August. (And that number was actually down by 16% month-over-month.) The second-most viewed, The New York Times, had 361 million visits. It is more popular than MSN and Google News combined, despite the fact that both are in the top 10. Fox News may beat CNN in the ratings most of the time, but on the Web, CNN.com is king.

The widespread belief is that most quality news outlets have a paywall these days, but this list of top sites actually does an excellent job of puncturing that myth, at least at the tippy-top of the mainstream. Just two of the top 10 sites in the Press Gazette analysis, The New York Times and USA Today, have a paywall, and USA Today’s is way cheaper than NYT’s. Three of the sites in the top ten are aggregators, and most of the others aim very broad. Lower-brow news outlets like People, the Daily Mail, and The New York Post are well-entrenched near the top 10, while headier media outlets like The Washington Post, the BBC, The Guardian, and NBC News, are further behind in the top 20. (Notably, of those, only the Post has a paywall.)

Overall, of the top 25 news sites, just six have paywalls, and five more are aggregators that may link to paywalled content. (One of those 25, amazingly, is The Drudge Report.) As very mainstream news goes, paywalls are still the exception. But CNN moving in that direction could change things quickly—and might open up a lane for broadcasters, which have largely avoided paywalling their news websites, to do the same.

I presume, given CNN’s nature as a media outlet for the masses rather than the classes, the cost of subscribing to CNN will likely be around the $5-per-month mark, possibly even less, along the lines of USA Today. But no matter how small the paywall is in practice, it may be enough to scare off some existing readers, causing the site’s traffic to fall.

Paywalls worry me as a creator and consumer of news, because they ultimately have the effect of locking information down, and when information gets locked down, we suffer from the gap in the discourse. When blatant misinformation is free and the actual reporting is not, we suffer for the gap—and have to hope that other organizations can fill it. In a perfect world, good information would be inexpensive or even free, but the truth is, it costs more than ever, and it’s often been subsidized by other successful elements of a business.

That’s especially true of CNN.com. CNN, even amid its declines amid the broader failings of cable television and despite attacks by political figures, is one of the largest news organizations in the world. It has 37 bureaus, a sizable number for an individual news outlet and more than The New York Times has. (The Associated Press, by comparison, has around 200 bureaus.)

But that’s the problem. CNN is facing the same pressures every other company associated with the cable industry is. In a way, it almost feels like the company has been propping up a giant news site on the back of carriage fees.

One has to wonder if C-SPAN is getting a paywall next. Oh wait.