Membership is the future of journalism
medium.com
medium.com
I think my parents have been sunscribed to the same newspaper since before I was born, and before there was any sign of computers in daily life.
People would subscribe to newspapers. They'd subscribe to magazines. They's subscribe to books, and even entire libraries. Knowledge was important, and people would pay for that.
Heck, even Microsoft believed that the future was subscribing to Encarta updates mailed on CDROMs, and the internet wasn't going to be a big thing for regular people.
It's only with the advent of electronic communication (radio, then television, then internet) that the concept of getting one's daily knowledge for "free" became widespread. Before that, if you wanted free knowledge you went to the finite resources of the public library.
SV these days wants everyone to subscribe to software, but get their journalism for free. An interesting double standard.
Firstly, as much as some people hate to hear it, journalism is a lot like the app store in that there are huge incentives to offer it for as low a price as possible, and huge risks to anyone who decides to charge a reasonable price afterwards. Indeed, for many average people, price basically is the only thing they care about in these markets, and the only reason they read any news sites or services is because they're free.
If a media outlet charges money, all that usually happens is a small percentage of readers pay, and the rest go to one of the many competitors offering it for nothing. And the more sources that do the former, the bigger the gains are for the ones who don't.
I think people also overstate how large the percentage of readers/viewers/listeners/whatever who pay for quality content is. It's enough to pay for some small publications to keep running, but likely not something that'll scale to the whole industry.
Additionally, if this does become the norm for more 'credible' publications, it may also disadvantage those who can't afford all these subscriptions or what not, driving them to the less credible sites running on ad dollars. What do you think is more likely to go for memberships? Something like the New York Times or Breitbart?
Probably the former. So it's the likes of the latter who would end up being the main source of news and articles for people who can't afford/don't want to pay for journalism. Is that a good thing? Probably not.
Still, maybe they'll prove me wrong there. I just personally doubt there'll ever be a world where a large percentage/all journalism is supported by memberships.