A Hard Paywall Can Be A Huge Barrier Between A Customer And Paying You
Paywalls are one of those things that have had us scratching our heads for a while. We had questioned the New York Times for its paywall and have shown that it might not be quite as successful as it...
View ArticleRupert Murdoch Admits Defeat: Now Wants London Times To Appear In Search Results
Remember back in 2009, when Techdirt reported that Rupert Murdoch hated Google so much he had decided to block the search engine from indexing his titles, even though this would inevitably cut down...
View ArticleStudy: Paywalls Work Better If You Beg
Brian LaSorsa points us to the news of a new joint study by Columbia and Indiana University, indicating that online readers will be slightly more accepting of paywalls if you plead the threat of...
View ArticleOdd Logic: If You Value Your Readers, You Should Make Them Pay
We've done the "paywall' debate over and over again, and it's hardly worth rehashing. However, the latest discussion among those who focus on such things is the fascinating experiment by uber-blogger...
View ArticleScientist Explains Why Putting Research Behind A Paywall Is Immoral
There's been plenty of debate recently over "open access" to research and the morality of locking it up behind a paywall. Some have been arguing that Aaron Swartz's apparent plan to release JSTOR...
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Silliest Argument Ever: Just Because A YouTube Paywall Launches It Means More...
On Tuesday, as rumors were spreading about YouTube's plans to launch a paywall we reminded folks that Google had actually tried this twice before and no one paid. On Thursday, the folks at HuffPost...
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A Human Right To Science, Locked Behind A Paywall, Inspires New Meme
We've spoken out for a long time about why paywalls are generally a bad idea. Sure, they can earn some companies a bit of money that may slow down their decline, but there's little evidence that they...
View ArticleYet Another Newspaper Paywall Goes Bust: SF Chronicle Gives Up After Just...
I know that within newspaper circles it's become popular to claim that we've now entered the era of the paywall. Paywall supporters love to point to the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal -- along...
View ArticleSurprise: Paywalls Cause Massive Falls In Number Of Visitors - And Boost...
As Techdirt has been pointing out for years, newspaper paywalls make no sense. By stopping people from reading your stories unless they have a subscription, you diminish your influence in the media...
View ArticleAnother Newspaper Paywall Bites The Dust
For many years, we've warned newspapers that rushed headlong into paywalls that it was a fool's game. While, yes, their traditional advertising business was struggling, the idea that people would come...
View ArticleLots Of Newspapers Discovering That Paywalls Don't Work
For many years, while some journalists (and newspaper execs) have been insisting that a paywall is "the answer" for the declining news business, we've been pointing out how fundamentally stupid...
View ArticleSpotify (Basically) Tells Its Free Users, 'Go Pirate!'
Spotify is pulling the plug on free access to some artists' newest releases, according to The Guardian. Currently, Spotify's 50 million paid users fork over £10/month to play their music offline...
View ArticleBoston Globe Blocks Readers Using Privacy Modes In Browsers
While the Boston Globe has had a paywall on its site for some time -- the metered sort that lets you read a certain number of articles for free before insisting you sign up for an account with a...
View ArticleThe Sad Legacy Of Copyright: Locking Up Scientific Knowledge And Impeding...
We've repeated this over and over again, but the Constitutional rationale for copyright is "to promote the progress of science" (in case you're wondering about the "useful arts" part that comes after...
View ArticleResearch Shows That Published Versions Of Papers In Costly Academic Titles...
The open access movement believes that academic publications should be freely available to all, not least because most of the research is paid for by the public purse. Open access supporters see the...
View ArticleHated Science Publisher Elsevier To Help EU Monitor Open Science - Including...
Techdirt has written many stories about the publisher Elsevier. They have all been pretty negative: the company seems determined to represent the worst of academic publishing. It's no surprise, then,...
View ArticlePublisher Helps To Keep Sci-Hub In The Public Eye By Trying To Bully It Into...
As Techdirt has pointed out a number of times, attacking the huge free online repository of academic papers, Sci-Hub, is wrong from a number of viewpoints. It's wrong because Sci-Hub is not a site...
View ArticleThe Media's Paywall Obsession Will End In Disaster For Most
We've written about paywalls for many, many years -- often in fairly critical terms. It's not that we think that paywalls are somehow "bad," but that (1) for most publications, they won't actually...
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Misleading Subscription Practices At The Financial Times
We've spent years highlighting how ISPs especially tend to really screw customers over with things like hidden fees or (a personal least favorite) "low introductory prices" that hide the price jump...
View ArticleDoes The Spotify Gimlet Purchase Signal The End Of The Open World Of Podcasting?
If you follow this kind of news at all, you probably have heard that Spotify has recently purchased two podcasting companies: Gimlet Media and Anchor. Gimlet makes a ton of high quality, highly...
View ArticleEU's New 'Open By Default' Rules For Data Generated By Public Funding...
The EU's awful Copyright Directive is rightly dominating the news at the moment, but there are other interesting laws being debated and passed in the European Union that have received far less...
View ArticleBig Win For Open Access, As University Of California Cancels All Elsevier...
As Techdirt has reported over the years, the move to open access, whereby anyone can read academic papers for free, is proving a long, hard journey. However, the victories are starting to build up,...
View ArticleThe Next Step In The Podcast Wars: Two Companies Looking To Be The Netflix Of...
A few months back, we wrote about the concern that Spotify buying Gimlet Media and supposedly betting big on podcasts could signify the end of the open era of podcasts. The fear was that Spotify would...
View ArticleThe Paywall Conundrum: Even Those Who Like Paying For News Don't Pay For Much...
For years, we've tended to mock newspaper paywalls -- not because we don't want to see news publishers get paid (that would actually be good!), but because it just doesn't seem like a really...
View ArticleOnce More With Feeling: Nearly All General Interest News Paywalls Will Fail
Just a few weeks ago we pointed out (for not the first time) that news paywalls for general interest publications did not seem likely to succeed outside of a very small number of exceptions: mainly...
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