Your free internet is coming to an end and there’s nothing you can do about it
It’s a wonder that free internet has survived for so long. It’s been largely unfettered, free access to content for almost 30 years on everything from magazine articles and newspapers to videos and recipes. The steady decentralization of the online advertising industry turned free online content into an economic problem that no one could solve.
If you need further proof that your free internet is evaporating like snow in the sun on an early spring day, check out CNN.com. The popular online news platform, a branch of the still-popular cable news network, is putting up a paywall.
It doesn’t block you from seeing all messages on CNN.com, but it does limit the number you can see for free. It is unclear whether that will be a few per day or a dozen per month. However, once you reach the limit, CNN.com will ask you to subscribe for $3.99 per month or $29.99 per year. That’s not much, and for unlimited access, some might consider it a bargain. Still, it will be an adjustment, especially for those who have been visiting the site since launch “on the World Wide Web” in August 1995.
CNN.com is not alone in this. Ny Breaking competitor The Verge is reportedly considering a paywall and I can guarantee that similar discussions are going on on every “free website”. Good content, everything from short news stories and long product reviews to essays and videos, is expensive to create. If display ads (the ads surrounding this post) aren’t paying the bills, possibly because too many of you are using an ad blocker or because fewer people are viewing your content and the ads because Google is delivering AI-generated content synopsis to search results, you need a new way to finance that content.
Other sources
Even without those forces, traditional media outlets like CNN.com are struggling because a large portion of the online audience gets their news elsewhere: usually YouTube or TikTok. It’s unlikely that a two-minute TikTok is as profound as a CNN.com or Washington Post piece, but that doesn’t matter. Generation Z trusts those sources and will usually turn to them first.
Clearly, many of us still rely on these traditional OG websites for news and information and are not used to paying for the content. And honestly, we usually don’t like entering Paywall land.
There are strategies that have been honed on platforms like The New York Times, The Atlantic, Business Insider and others, where we find ways to see more than our share of free content. Usually this means opening another browser window in Private Browsing or Incognito mode, which means you won’t have the cookies that tell the website how many messages you’ve already viewed. This method usually only works for one post, but it’s satisfying to read that one extra story.
I know I’m the last person who should be doing this, and sometimes I wonder how I can be so cheap. The truth is, I already pay for a lot of content. I have subscriptions to The New York Times and The New Yorker. We also subscribe to our local newspaper.
And shouldn’t the internet be free?
Modeling subscriptions
Maybe not. The World Wide Web was launched for free almost by accident. When the Internet arrived, it had no interface. Then some enterprising programmers built early Web browsers that could translate Internet data via HTML into browsable and interconnected pages. (Yes, a huge oversimplification of what actually happened.)
The Internet grew so fast and spread so widely that no one even had time to come up with a decent economic model. We understood that the Internet offered content consumption and audience measurability in ways that were virtually impossible with traditional media. That was a godsend for traditional advertisers who desperately wanted access to all those eyeballs.
And they received them en masse. However, the effectiveness of these ads began to diminish almost as soon as they appeared. There were a lot of bad actors at the time who thought it was not only okay to show online ads, but also to turn them into pop-ups. Visiting some sites was like playing a game of whack-a-mole. Of course, if you visited an adult site, you probably got what you deserved.
We have known for almost twenty years that full-time free internet was unsustainable, but reality is only now catching up with our consumption. Free was a dream we all had and it was a wonderful dream while it lasted. Now we wake up on the wrong side of the bed, the expensive side of the paywall.