Charging, Rusbridger says, “removes you from the way people the world over now connect with each other. You cannot control distribution or create scarcity without becoming isolated from this new networked world.”
charging brings many costs:
• It creates the expense of marketing (when, online, your audience will market you for free, if you deserve it).
• It reduces audience.
• It reduces advertising revenue.
• It reduces links and clicks, which reduces Googlejuice, which reduces discovery, which limits growth.
But more than any of this, pay walls curtail a news organization’s relationship with its public, with its customers. On the internet, it’s in those relationships where value lies.
So media companies are becoming in part, retailers. Does it make sense to put a toll booth at the door to your store to keep people out?