In Graphic Detail: Subscriptions are rising at big news publishers – even as traffic shrinks
In a world where traffic is decreasing, publishers are moving more heavily into subscriptions - with very good results.
This is exactly why micropayments — a model akin to Spotify’s streaming payments where each pageview receives a share from a reader’s monthly budget for all articles — are not the right solution for news.
“For a bunch, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, growth isn’t just continuing, it’s speeding up, and likewise so is The Guardian’s paid reader contribution model. Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s subscription business shows signs of normalization after a 2024 spike, and Daily Mail is still ramping up its relatively new subscription business, which launched in 2024 in the U.K. and expanded to the U.S. and Canada in February 2025.”
In news, value is not necessarily tethered to popular traffic. There’s a specific demographic (typically older, wealthier, and more highly educated) that is more likely to pay for it, and there’s a lot to be gained by news organizations if they optimize for gaining that audience. The news organizations that have doubled down on paywalls, and things like them, are often doing better than the ones that aren’t.
That can be a tough pill to swallow for the folks — like me — who believe that news should be available to all for the good of democracy. Of course, other models are available: specifically, non-profit newsrooms that operate with a philanthropic model. Like other public goods like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, it turns out that a specific set of wealthier individuals and foundations are willing to pay to ensure that a resource can be made available for everyone.
Unlike paywalls, though, that tends to put newsrooms at the mercy of large foundations and high net worth individuals. Non-profit newsrooms have done a good job of trying to prevent funding coming with strings that might affect their decision-making (The 19th’s endowment campaign is particularly inspiring), but it inevitably must still happen. Paywalls force the issue by ensuring every reader pays, distributing the load: they democratize funding even while restricting access. On the other hand, that makes the newsroom more subject to market forces.
But none of this is about traffic. If you tether your payment model to the number of public pageviews you receive, you incentivize your newsroom to create clickbait. You’re ensuring that you have to compete for views for every single article, instead of building a direct relationship with a recurring member who is buying your product because they think it’s worth it overall.
[Link]
