As a disclaimer, I must say I am not associated with the project at all. I just stumbled across it on the internet and thought it was an interesting one.
So, as I said, I stumbled across this project called PressPay. The business model goes like this: Publications sign up for this and feature a like button at the end of each article. Meanwhile, you as a user sign up for this and pay a monthly subscription. You click the like button on each article that you like, and the subscription that you pay is shared between the publications whose articles you liked (and the platform, of course, which seems to be taking a 20% share though).
In their reasoning, they state that ad monetization is basically not covering enough of the cost, and that subscription based models are pretty much limiting free access to information.
What do you think about this press monetization model? Do you find it viable? Do you think it could actually lead to a better media quality, or are there some hidden dangers that lay ahead if this model ever becomes more widely used? Do you have something similar in your country? And most importantly, do you recommend me to try it out? 😁
I’m sceptical at best. The track history of tech firms swooping in to “save” journalism is that of an ongoing shitshow.
Facebook was supposed to save newspapers. So was Twitter. And instead, users got used to reading a clickbait hed and summary and felt no need to click through to sites, depriving them of ad revenue.
And here we have yet another example of trying to profit off other people’s journalism.
I’m not against the concept, as microtransactions have proven notoriously difficult to figure out, and slicing up the pie of a single subscription by site views is an intriguing approach. But given that readers are humans, many will try to game the system (e.g., “liking” the hell out of stories with a certain political slant).
So this project takes a 20% cut of others’ work, but it’s unlikely that hard news is going to be rewarded. It’s going to be opinion and analysis and clickbait and outrage pieces getting all those likes. Once again, history teaches us that people are far more likely to interact with stories intended to evoke emotion, and forcing them to click on something to get the ball rolling on a slice of the action only further distorts this.
OK, so the outlet still gets paid some small pittance, right? Well, look at what that does to the motivations …
Let’s say there are only three publications on the platform, just to simplify the problem.
Pub A is primarily invested in hard news. Pub B does investigative journalism. Pub C focuses on salacious stuff that can charitably be called “news adjacent.” The “likes” are probably going to split somewhere around 10-10-80 for percentages. This disincentivizes putting out actual journalism under the model and forces Pub A and Pub B to consider altering their coverage to get a bigger slice of the pie.
That’s not a solution, it’s a deepening of the crisis affecting U.S. newspapers. And this company whistles on its way to the bank, having taken 20% from journalists who already make shit money.
I’m sure as an investor pitch, this looks innovative and can be spun as finally cracking the code to make people pay for news. But the reality is this will change nothing about human nature or the perception of news value. Someone pumping out LLM rewrites of celebrity gossip will make far more money under this model than, say, ProPublica.
I have a couple of decades in newsrooms under my belt and got to see firsthand the hell that seemingly innocuous decisions made. Outlets dug their own holes by making everything free, then inserting so many obnoxious ads that when Facebook offered that chance to feel informed from snippets, it was sort of a relief for users.
Journalism does need a new funding model, but it certainly isn’t this.