One other thing about your site: it's ad-free (so far). I obviously don't mind paying my way (So What is only one of the sites I subscribe to), but I start having second thoughts when, along with the paywall, there is ad after ad. Seems to me that news sites would have a lot more luck if they chose one approach: paywall with no ads, or ads with no paywall...
I suspect they’ll go the same way as the streaming platforms. Start with pay with no commercials, get people “hooked”, and then insert commercials (or pay more for no commercials).
CNN does not have the quality of journalism today that I’d pay for. I subscribe to lots of things, but unless the quality of their offering goes WAY up, they will have a hard time with a paywall.
Once they leaned WAY into both siderism, I started to trust them less. It was so obvious and right about the time they fired Chris and so many others. They immediately lost their status as primary news source with me. I am also tired of the ridiculous shopping section.
Unless CNN removes all the annoying ads for paid subscription I will just leave and go to PBS and NPR websites for free. I already support my local PBS station which is in my opinion a much better use of my money than supporting a giant corporation.
Now, we have to watch a 30 second ad for every video clip - and often the video clip is only 1-2 minutes. That's are ridiculous ratio. I never watch the clips any more.
I completely agree. if the pay version of pay version of CNN stripped out the ads on videos clips and all those irritating news-like ad links at the bottom of the page, that by itself would almost be worth the subscription.
The pay for content portion, I agree, is a fact of current/future life. However, at least for the time being, CNN has a bigger problem…… I watched CNN religiously since the FIRST day (yes, I’m old) and always loved their political/election coverage but, starting in 2015 (guess who showed up then) their coverage of trump kept leaving a foul taste in my mouth. Nobody will be able to convince me that all the coverage they gave him (I specifically remember Anderson Cooper’s “talks” with him) was NOT instrumental in his win. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the town hall where he was given the opportunity to lie about easily fact-checked items with no pushback (I “left” the next day and never looked back). This was instrumental in trump’s “comeback” for 2024.
Yes, I know the problem is not exclusive to them but, that was my news source choice and where I first saw “sane-washing” and corporate “shyness” to call a lie a lie. Of course, the face on the screen takes a lot of the blame even though it is management that directs their actions/inactions.
So, long explanation just to say that those problems and others like it have convinced folks to look for specific sources and allowed entities like Substack to give folks like you a (paying) outlet and folks like me, a choice on how we like to consume our content. I foresee (not too distant) future were entities like Substack thrive and corporate paywalls fade away……..
A few years ago my hometown newspaper, NEWSDAY, decided to do the paywall thing. I was pretty pissed and didn't subscribe. A few weeks later they opened back up most of their coverage, although it has since gone back to a pay model.
I wrote the digital editor and asked what was going on. He was quite blunt:; after about 30 days, only 17 people had bought the service. 17 subscribers out of a few million residents on Long Island!
The problem for America as a society and the news media itself is deadly. If most of the folks are required to actually pay for good news, they will lean even more heavily onto free sources, mostly FB and TwXter. These folks ain't buying the good stuff no matter what they offer. So many folks absolutely hate the media, and generally, folks that hate something don't buy it.
Which will lead to even more disinformation and sane-washing.
"The problem for America as a society and the news media itself is deadly. If most of the folks are required to actually pay for good news, they will lean even more heavily onto free sources, mostly FB and TwXter. These folks ain't buying the good stuff no matter what they offer. So many folks absolutely hate the media, and generally, folks that hate something don't buy it."
I can't argue against CNN's altering its biz model. But it's not a helpful trend in the effort to inform the public. As the polls show, a large % of Americans labor under misapprehensions of basic facts. ( Read , for example, the May 22, 2024 article in the Guardian re its poll with Harris.) Many don't consume any news at all; many just scan headlines. These trends allow cynical pols to lie with abandon.
Part of the problem (for me) is the "all you can eat" pricing model that EVERYONE - Substack, streaming, reading, CNN, and all the rest - employ. Imagine if the only way you could eat at a restaurant would be to pay a fixed $900 a month, allowing you to eat as much as you want, as often as you like, at as many of a set of restaurants as you choose. Not enticing for the casual diner, is it? As someone who pays ONLY for this Substack SoWhat plus the occasional temporary promotion offered by BusinessInsider, NYTimes, Seattle Times, Apple TV+, AmazonPrime, Max etc, I would pay for a hybrid pricing model:
* charge me a $1/month base, plus a per-item fee or a per-time-unit charge
* offer the existing all-you-can-eat pricing structure
* and some hybrid of the two - say $5/month including 10 hours or 10 pieces of content, after which the per-unit charge kicks in
* AND THEN the kicker: make the billing software smart enough to assess my usage each month, and automatically charge me the CHEAPEST of the tiers for that month (automatically moving me to the "all you can eat" plan if I consume 20 items that month, then the base $1 plan next month if I read/watch nothing)
I consider you a big fish - that's part of why I subscribe. But I also pay for WSJ, NYT, WaPo, Atlantic, Economist & others. I'm just not sure there are a lot of people who care enough about news and being informed. The people who read your posts are by definition interested people but maybe that 10% of the population? I wish more people wanted to learn but experience tells me otherwise.
With that said, I tell people your content is great and encourage people to join the team. I enjoy the fact that you give us news and also a peek at you as a live human vs talking head. Keep up the great work.
Americans have a very unhealthy relationship with money. The key is to figure out how to exploit this relationship. I know SO many people that will impulse spend $5 to buy more turns or credits or whatever nonsense on some iPhone game app so they can play for 15 more minutes. I know SO many people that will spend $10 on DoorDash to have a $10 McDonald's meal delivered to their desk at work during lunch. These same people would agonize and hedge for weeks - if not months - to spend $5 to read your blog all month. Smh.
I disagree that CNN needs to lean into their personalities. Objectively, nearly all of their personalities are partisan to the left. You only caught my attention at CNN because you had a few decent articles that were down the middle (those don't go over very well these days in this space though). Leaning into their personalities = leaning into their obvious bias (see Collins appearance on Colbert).
I think a re-brand to REAL objective breaking news is a good idea. You can find some really interesting articles on CNN, you just have to dig for them.
At this point, IMO, there are other ways to get news for free and my money is going towards independent journalism, content creators, podcasters of my choosing. It’s not necessarily the actual dollars but there is only so much time I can put into reading/listening to news. If it’s breaking news, there will be tons of places to get the news and prefer to support people like Chris than the MSM.
I think pricing is the main issue more than the paywall itself. In some sense, the problem is similar with streaming services now vs cable in the past. Before you took a little bit from a huge number of people using cable packages of a bagillion stations and had access to everything including CNN. Now with streaming you can pay a "smaller" fee but with the proliferation of streaming services it adds up quickly so those of us that don't want to drop a huge chunk of money on streaming have to pick and choose carefully especially as services have raised their prices (although things are starting to consolidate back into bundles for multiple streaming services). All to say, if I use it a lot, I am willing to pay more but most streaming and subscriptions I only use every once and a while so dumping a hefty monthly or yearly fee to read a few articles a month isn't going to happen for me. Whether it's a substack or CNN, I feel like offering multiple price points for different (and especially more minimal) uses would go a long way to allowing more users to pay and amortize the costs better so it's generally lower for everyone while also being a viable business. The Economist does a bit of this with their unlimited and espresso subscriptions as an example (although I think the espresso could be structured much better to allow more user choice which content is accessible).
Along these lines, I appreciate your pricing Chris. I took advantage of when it was $50/year and since I follow most of what you publish and it's a reasonable enough price for me I'm happy to pay it. I've wanted to subscribe to a few other substack contributors you've recommend because I like their stuff but as it trends to $80-100/year it starts adding up to a place I just forgo having access because I'm close to the total budget I want to spend on content and they don't make the cut.
Totally agree, sir! ("sir" alert there). Please see my earlier post above in which I propose multiple pricing tiers AND billing software that's intelligent - and considerate - enough to automatically move you to the cheapest tier for you each month based on the prior month's usage
One thing the Reuters study gets wrong is the number of people paying for content in the UK. It is closer to 100% than 10%. Everyone who has a TV pays a license fee which supports the BBC. We Americans are freeloading on the government supported Beeb.
I totally get where you're coming from with this, but what's weird is that within living memory, this wasn't true, and content creators back then (before the Internet) thrived with content that was free to consumers: "The creation of content — reporting, analysis etc. — is not free. And, therefore, the consumption of it can’t be either."
Historically, broadcast television, including network news and local news, was literally free to consumers and supported itself with huge advertising revenues. Local TV news was a particular profit center, which is why there were so many different local TV newscasts (early in the morning, late in the morning, around noon, at 6, at 11, and so on, every single day). Yet consumers didn't pay a cent.
Very similarly, magazines (including news magazines) sold advertising based on their circulation, so magazines often went out of their way to provide multiple free issues to potential subscribers, or provided "trial subscriptions" of several months for a token payment in order to increase their subscriber base. The more subscribers (including those who paid little or nothing), the higher the ad rate, and their business was almost 100 percent based on ad sales based on their subscriptions.
I wish a genius could come up with a similar mechanism for online news content, but I'm beginning to feel that it's harder to do than with those past examples.
The problem is that we need more people who interact with news. The free/ad driven model worked when there were 3 major networks. Then there were 4. Then CNN was a 24 hour news network, but then .fox and MSNBC jumped in. Meanwhile, all other forms of entertainment exploded, and there were cable channels for everything. Network news shrank from a nightly hour to a half hour.
People stopped consuming news. They had other distractions on TV. They stopped reading newspapers — either local or national.
The problem I have with news going behind a paywall is that fewer and fewer people will access it at all. They disconnect and become unengaged citizens. If they rely on Twitter, who the hell knows what they will get or how accurate it is?
I don’t know the solution, and certainly analysis and personality could be a part of it. I also think it would be part of that equation if anchors stopped being afraid of their subjects across the board. Stop relying on access journalism. Don’t be afraid to upset the subject. Fact checking them when they lie is a good start, and those segments tend to go viral and yield the most hits anyway. Do that more. Note when they don’t answer a question or when they flat out engage in gaslighting.
I know one thing — 60 Minutes is still going pretty strong, and Trump just ran away from them because he was scared to do a tough interview from someone who was pretty unconcerned about access.
One other thing about your site: it's ad-free (so far). I obviously don't mind paying my way (So What is only one of the sites I subscribe to), but I start having second thoughts when, along with the paywall, there is ad after ad. Seems to me that news sites would have a lot more luck if they chose one approach: paywall with no ads, or ads with no paywall...
I suspect they’ll go the same way as the streaming platforms. Start with pay with no commercials, get people “hooked”, and then insert commercials (or pay more for no commercials).
CNN does not have the quality of journalism today that I’d pay for. I subscribe to lots of things, but unless the quality of their offering goes WAY up, they will have a hard time with a paywall.
Once they leaned WAY into both siderism, I started to trust them less. It was so obvious and right about the time they fired Chris and so many others. They immediately lost their status as primary news source with me. I am also tired of the ridiculous shopping section.
CNN has become Fox Light, a more “fair & balanced” version of the news! Not good for my taste!
Unless CNN removes all the annoying ads for paid subscription I will just leave and go to PBS and NPR websites for free. I already support my local PBS station which is in my opinion a much better use of my money than supporting a giant corporation.
Now, we have to watch a 30 second ad for every video clip - and often the video clip is only 1-2 minutes. That's are ridiculous ratio. I never watch the clips any more.
I completely agree. if the pay version of pay version of CNN stripped out the ads on videos clips and all those irritating news-like ad links at the bottom of the page, that by itself would almost be worth the subscription.
The pay for content portion, I agree, is a fact of current/future life. However, at least for the time being, CNN has a bigger problem…… I watched CNN religiously since the FIRST day (yes, I’m old) and always loved their political/election coverage but, starting in 2015 (guess who showed up then) their coverage of trump kept leaving a foul taste in my mouth. Nobody will be able to convince me that all the coverage they gave him (I specifically remember Anderson Cooper’s “talks” with him) was NOT instrumental in his win. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the town hall where he was given the opportunity to lie about easily fact-checked items with no pushback (I “left” the next day and never looked back). This was instrumental in trump’s “comeback” for 2024.
Yes, I know the problem is not exclusive to them but, that was my news source choice and where I first saw “sane-washing” and corporate “shyness” to call a lie a lie. Of course, the face on the screen takes a lot of the blame even though it is management that directs their actions/inactions.
So, long explanation just to say that those problems and others like it have convinced folks to look for specific sources and allowed entities like Substack to give folks like you a (paying) outlet and folks like me, a choice on how we like to consume our content. I foresee (not too distant) future were entities like Substack thrive and corporate paywalls fade away……..
A few years ago my hometown newspaper, NEWSDAY, decided to do the paywall thing. I was pretty pissed and didn't subscribe. A few weeks later they opened back up most of their coverage, although it has since gone back to a pay model.
I wrote the digital editor and asked what was going on. He was quite blunt:; after about 30 days, only 17 people had bought the service. 17 subscribers out of a few million residents on Long Island!
The problem for America as a society and the news media itself is deadly. If most of the folks are required to actually pay for good news, they will lean even more heavily onto free sources, mostly FB and TwXter. These folks ain't buying the good stuff no matter what they offer. So many folks absolutely hate the media, and generally, folks that hate something don't buy it.
Which will lead to even more disinformation and sane-washing.
We're screwed.
"The problem for America as a society and the news media itself is deadly. If most of the folks are required to actually pay for good news, they will lean even more heavily onto free sources, mostly FB and TwXter. These folks ain't buying the good stuff no matter what they offer. So many folks absolutely hate the media, and generally, folks that hate something don't buy it."
Boom. That is exactly the problem with paywalls.
I ain't got a good solution. News costs money. If folks don't want to pay, and advertisers don't pony up, we got a huge problem.
Enter DonOld and JD to fill the void.
I can't argue against CNN's altering its biz model. But it's not a helpful trend in the effort to inform the public. As the polls show, a large % of Americans labor under misapprehensions of basic facts. ( Read , for example, the May 22, 2024 article in the Guardian re its poll with Harris.) Many don't consume any news at all; many just scan headlines. These trends allow cynical pols to lie with abandon.
Part of the problem (for me) is the "all you can eat" pricing model that EVERYONE - Substack, streaming, reading, CNN, and all the rest - employ. Imagine if the only way you could eat at a restaurant would be to pay a fixed $900 a month, allowing you to eat as much as you want, as often as you like, at as many of a set of restaurants as you choose. Not enticing for the casual diner, is it? As someone who pays ONLY for this Substack SoWhat plus the occasional temporary promotion offered by BusinessInsider, NYTimes, Seattle Times, Apple TV+, AmazonPrime, Max etc, I would pay for a hybrid pricing model:
* charge me a $1/month base, plus a per-item fee or a per-time-unit charge
* offer the existing all-you-can-eat pricing structure
* and some hybrid of the two - say $5/month including 10 hours or 10 pieces of content, after which the per-unit charge kicks in
* AND THEN the kicker: make the billing software smart enough to assess my usage each month, and automatically charge me the CHEAPEST of the tiers for that month (automatically moving me to the "all you can eat" plan if I consume 20 items that month, then the base $1 plan next month if I read/watch nothing)
I consider you a big fish - that's part of why I subscribe. But I also pay for WSJ, NYT, WaPo, Atlantic, Economist & others. I'm just not sure there are a lot of people who care enough about news and being informed. The people who read your posts are by definition interested people but maybe that 10% of the population? I wish more people wanted to learn but experience tells me otherwise.
With that said, I tell people your content is great and encourage people to join the team. I enjoy the fact that you give us news and also a peek at you as a live human vs talking head. Keep up the great work.
Americans have a very unhealthy relationship with money. The key is to figure out how to exploit this relationship. I know SO many people that will impulse spend $5 to buy more turns or credits or whatever nonsense on some iPhone game app so they can play for 15 more minutes. I know SO many people that will spend $10 on DoorDash to have a $10 McDonald's meal delivered to their desk at work during lunch. These same people would agonize and hedge for weeks - if not months - to spend $5 to read your blog all month. Smh.
I disagree that CNN needs to lean into their personalities. Objectively, nearly all of their personalities are partisan to the left. You only caught my attention at CNN because you had a few decent articles that were down the middle (those don't go over very well these days in this space though). Leaning into their personalities = leaning into their obvious bias (see Collins appearance on Colbert).
I think a re-brand to REAL objective breaking news is a good idea. You can find some really interesting articles on CNN, you just have to dig for them.
I agree and I love your explanation of what benefits YOU provide us (paying subs) 😎
At this point, IMO, there are other ways to get news for free and my money is going towards independent journalism, content creators, podcasters of my choosing. It’s not necessarily the actual dollars but there is only so much time I can put into reading/listening to news. If it’s breaking news, there will be tons of places to get the news and prefer to support people like Chris than the MSM.
I think pricing is the main issue more than the paywall itself. In some sense, the problem is similar with streaming services now vs cable in the past. Before you took a little bit from a huge number of people using cable packages of a bagillion stations and had access to everything including CNN. Now with streaming you can pay a "smaller" fee but with the proliferation of streaming services it adds up quickly so those of us that don't want to drop a huge chunk of money on streaming have to pick and choose carefully especially as services have raised their prices (although things are starting to consolidate back into bundles for multiple streaming services). All to say, if I use it a lot, I am willing to pay more but most streaming and subscriptions I only use every once and a while so dumping a hefty monthly or yearly fee to read a few articles a month isn't going to happen for me. Whether it's a substack or CNN, I feel like offering multiple price points for different (and especially more minimal) uses would go a long way to allowing more users to pay and amortize the costs better so it's generally lower for everyone while also being a viable business. The Economist does a bit of this with their unlimited and espresso subscriptions as an example (although I think the espresso could be structured much better to allow more user choice which content is accessible).
Along these lines, I appreciate your pricing Chris. I took advantage of when it was $50/year and since I follow most of what you publish and it's a reasonable enough price for me I'm happy to pay it. I've wanted to subscribe to a few other substack contributors you've recommend because I like their stuff but as it trends to $80-100/year it starts adding up to a place I just forgo having access because I'm close to the total budget I want to spend on content and they don't make the cut.
Totally agree, sir! ("sir" alert there). Please see my earlier post above in which I propose multiple pricing tiers AND billing software that's intelligent - and considerate - enough to automatically move you to the cheapest tier for you each month based on the prior month's usage
One thing the Reuters study gets wrong is the number of people paying for content in the UK. It is closer to 100% than 10%. Everyone who has a TV pays a license fee which supports the BBC. We Americans are freeloading on the government supported Beeb.
I totally get where you're coming from with this, but what's weird is that within living memory, this wasn't true, and content creators back then (before the Internet) thrived with content that was free to consumers: "The creation of content — reporting, analysis etc. — is not free. And, therefore, the consumption of it can’t be either."
Historically, broadcast television, including network news and local news, was literally free to consumers and supported itself with huge advertising revenues. Local TV news was a particular profit center, which is why there were so many different local TV newscasts (early in the morning, late in the morning, around noon, at 6, at 11, and so on, every single day). Yet consumers didn't pay a cent.
Very similarly, magazines (including news magazines) sold advertising based on their circulation, so magazines often went out of their way to provide multiple free issues to potential subscribers, or provided "trial subscriptions" of several months for a token payment in order to increase their subscriber base. The more subscribers (including those who paid little or nothing), the higher the ad rate, and their business was almost 100 percent based on ad sales based on their subscriptions.
I wish a genius could come up with a similar mechanism for online news content, but I'm beginning to feel that it's harder to do than with those past examples.
The problem is that we need more people who interact with news. The free/ad driven model worked when there were 3 major networks. Then there were 4. Then CNN was a 24 hour news network, but then .fox and MSNBC jumped in. Meanwhile, all other forms of entertainment exploded, and there were cable channels for everything. Network news shrank from a nightly hour to a half hour.
People stopped consuming news. They had other distractions on TV. They stopped reading newspapers — either local or national.
The problem I have with news going behind a paywall is that fewer and fewer people will access it at all. They disconnect and become unengaged citizens. If they rely on Twitter, who the hell knows what they will get or how accurate it is?
I don’t know the solution, and certainly analysis and personality could be a part of it. I also think it would be part of that equation if anchors stopped being afraid of their subjects across the board. Stop relying on access journalism. Don’t be afraid to upset the subject. Fact checking them when they lie is a good start, and those segments tend to go viral and yield the most hits anyway. Do that more. Note when they don’t answer a question or when they flat out engage in gaslighting.
I know one thing — 60 Minutes is still going pretty strong, and Trump just ran away from them because he was scared to do a tough interview from someone who was pretty unconcerned about access.