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I mostly disagree
It is clearly a fact that casual visitors, unwilling to take out subscriptions will no longer visit the site. That is exactly what I have done with NYT and WaPo.
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The effect of paywalls on traffic will vary widely across the various news outlets. Just poking around a little about the Boston Globe I see that total circulation (print+digital) has increased since 2016. Paid print circulation peaked in 2016 at 136,000, but paid digital circulation recently surpassed 200,000
None of which offers any real evidence that web views have not declined as a consequence. If they didn’t get casual visits from Facebook users or Google searches I would be surprised (and it would also be a relevant point in the discussion). And I hardly think that every one of those casual visitors would have taken out a paid subscription.
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I got the sense that you might think that news outlets invariably prefer the subscription model to ads, and if so then I disagree.
I think that it is quite clear that many do, and the fact that ads are not paying well - for them - is a big part of that. That is one of the underlying issues - ad spending online is heavily dominated by Google and Facebook, who receive a very large proportion of it.
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Whether or not it was "your point," it was still something you said that I disagreed with. If you think you were misinterpreted then maybe you were - people are misinterpreted billions of times a day with absolutely no nefarious intent or involvement of stupidity.
It is the continued insistence that I said it, despite repeated corrections which is the issue. An honest mistake I can accept, but we’ve gone a long way past the point where that is a possibility,
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Even if it was "completely irrelevant to your actual point" (and I don't believe it was), why does that matter? Discussions always tend to range around, and it was completely relevant to the point I was making when I opened this thread.
It is certain that it is irrelevant, since the point was only about the finances. I don’t even agree that subscriptions make the newspaper a destination site - at least no more of one than it already is (Does my regular reading of the BBC News site make it a destination site? Links to WaPo and NYT are common in my reading - why would subscriptions make them more of a destination site when they reduce the number of people following those links?)
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If you mean that it is a benefit to paywall websites for search engines to index them, I said this myself and so of course I agree.
What I mean, of course, is that it is a way around the issue of search, undercutting your objection.
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Poor search wasn't offered as the central deficiency of paywall news sites but as an example of how they're not putting enough effort into becoming destination sites (i.e., self-contained, not reliant on outside websites
Thank you for making it clear that your assertion has nothing to do with my point. My whole point is about financing. Casual visitors generally don’t provide sufficient income, hence newspapers prefer subscriptions. And if they can’t get subscriptions to work they will have to look for other ways, whether the site is self-contained or not doesn’t matter. (I also note that a destination site is generally expected to contain substantial links to other resources - which is a reliance on other sites).