Published: March 4, 2025
[Git commit message for funsies: filthy filthy defense of paywalls]
About twenty years ago, as advertising revenue dried up, many news organizations started requiring a subscription of some kind to access their content online. The internet as a whole has been pissed off at them since. For the longest time, I was one of those pissed off people... but I've come around. I think paywalls are good. I think they're annoying, but they should not go away.
Traditional media have long used advertising to subsidize their operating costs and lower (or eliminate, in the case of over-the-air broadcast media) subscription fees for the consumer. I've been sitting on a longer essay about this for a really long time [update: posted here], but in my opinion, the inner workings of how these publishers have historically sold advertising is the only ethical model for doing so. Even on the internet, traditional media outlets have been slow to adopt the modern trend of micro-targeting based on the collection of highly invasive personal data. When advertisers got high on the bang-for-the-buck you get with trashing everyone's privacy, they left traditional media outlets in the cold. The revenue could no longer keep up, and the free ride for online readers was over.
Humans like getting things for free. I know I do, it's a great feeling to know someone has put in the work to create something to inform, entertain, or assist me without expecting anything in return. I deeply believe that knowledge should be free. At this point, you're probably confused by the seemingly hypocritical stance I've taken — after all, I did say paywalls are good literally two minutes ago.
The free culture and free software movements have struggled with this for decades. In the English-speaking western world, the first thing you think of when someone uses the word “free” is probably “something that doesn't require payment”[1]. That's understandable; English in the modern era is more heavily influenced by usage rather than rules. That's why it's such a frustrating language to learn. The more important definition of “free” (at least in my opinion) is the one relating to freedom, without restriction, as in liberty. I'll use the French loanword libre to refer to this definition.
Because English is such a metamorphic language, it can be easy to see where this confusion may have started[2]. Perhaps freedom was the first word to evolve as a synonym to liberty, which is very clearly a descendant of the original Latin liber (loosely meaning “unrestricted”). It's also important to keep in mind the Four Freedoms from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union address[3] — they plainly demonstrate the concept of “freedom of” and “freedom from”[4]. From here, consider the phrase “free of charge” and how it could be shortened to simply “free” over the centuries. Fast forward to the 21st century, and we have a single word — free — that means both libre and “available without payment”. The Spanish language has a word for the second definition — gratis.
The free software community has come up with extremely easy to remember phrases to make this more accessible to the average person: “free as in speech” for libre, and “free as in beer” for gratis. To show an interesting play on this, there is a photo by David Orban from 2008 floating around the internet showing someone selling “FREE BEER” at a conference in Japan for 500 yen. Buyers would get a frosty pour of beer as well as the recipe to do with as they please.
Now that I've laid out the difference between libre and gratis, hopefully my stance seems a little less hypocritical. While I fundamentally believe knowledge should be free (libre), the people who have the skills to research, curate, write, and distribute knowledge and information should be compensated for their very important work. I also believe people should be paid a fair and living wage for their work.
If you believe people should be paid for their work, but that somehow doesn't extend to people who create informational, educational, or entertaining content that you consume, that is a gigantic cognitive dissonance I would encourage you to address. I mentioned earlier that advertisers had gotten high on the return on investment of invading your privacy, but if you're one of these people who are bitter over paywalls, consider whether you were spoiled by the benefits of these same advertisers not invading your privacy. Your interests are at odds with modern internet adveritising at a fundamental level.
We can debate all day about whether traditional media outlets were simply incapable of adapting or refused to adapt. I contend that those incapable of adapting to this new landscape gave up, slapped endless streams of clickbait “sponsored content” grids on their web site, and laid people off at the expense of the quality of their content. Other outlets stood on their principles and refused to adapt, instead putting up hard paywalls and requiring a subscription to access their content. As long as these publishers set a fair price for these subscriptions and do not generally care what their subscribers do with the content they've paid for (and the subscribers don't abuse the privilege by republishing that content on a similar scale), I see zero problems with paywalls as a concept.
When we approach content paywalls with the care and nuance they deserve, that grants us the immense power to opt out of the invasive online advertising ecosystem... and that's a better feeling than getting stuff free of charge.
...although here in America, we have somewhat of a civic emphasis, however flawed, of the other meaning. ↩︎
Don't get too excited — these are detective skills, but they're nowhere near good enough to get you or I into even the worst police service on the planet. ↩︎
Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear ↩︎
“Freedom of” almost always implies “freedom from” but that doesn't go the other way. ↩︎