Dominic Young

Seduced by subscription

December 3, 2025

Why subscription isn’t the panacea for publishers who are finally turning away from free.

(This is the view of Stratford from Hackney Marshes this morning. Just a nice picture. But also, perhaps, something about mists clearing)

Let’s flip the cliché about the definition of madness: if something isn’t working, however many times you try it, stop.

So it’s great to see the Manchester Evening News and the Observer follow formerly stalwart free brands such as Mailonline and the Sun, by launching paywalls. More British news publishers are finally acknowledging the obvious: without income from their readers, they can’t get by.

Giving away publications for free hasn’t worked out brilliantly. Clicks haven’t, overall, turned into enough money. With AI causing a sudden downward lurch in traffic and ad revenue, the realisation that these relentlessly diminishing returns can’t lead to success – or, for some, even survival – has belatedly dawned. Publishers are increasingly looking elsewhere.

So subscription is on the rise, but let’s not pop the champagne corks quite yet. It’s not a panacea. Like previous bandwagons, this one still trundles towards an, albeit slightly more distant, cliff edge. Because the reality is that subscription is better than what went before, but still comes up against some pretty daunting limits.

For example, subscription models aren’t good at delivering network effects. In fact, they’re more anti-viral than the opposite – each new subscriber is slightly more reluctant and slightly less valuable than the one before them. Discovery and distribution remain the domain of the big tech platforms who are also the industry’s tormentors. Scalability, an essential component of success, is elusive.

Another limitation: today’s news subscribers are dominated by older, more affluent, individuals. They’re the same people, by and large, who used to buy print newspapers. Now they’re twenty years older. Most people who are willing to subscribe to something, are already subscribing to something else. They don’t have more hours in their day or pounds in their bank to dedicate to continuously paying for yet another occasionally-read publication. Many of them are supporters more than they are consumers. Very few are from the elusive GenZ demographic – a group who spend constantly online, through in-app purchases and the like, but resist ongoing recurring payments. So new subscribers become harder and harder to find.

Which means that subscription doesn’t lead to scalable, sustainable growth. Many publications have as many ex-subscribers, now locked out, as current paying customers. Does it really make sense to ban ex-customers and lock them out?

It all adds up to an opportunity which is far more limited than it needs to be. The actual experience of most subscription publishers is that only a single digit percentage of their audience actually subscribes. As subscriber growth slows, then plateaus, and threatens to fall, they commonly address this with discounts. Recurring revenue is paid, far too often, in tiny and diminishing amounts.

The reason is obvious: people don’t like subscribing. Especially not to products they don’t want or need all the time. We all know from our own experience that when we encounter a paywall, we’ll usually just go elsewhere. A tiny proportion sign up. A miniscule number of those will graduate to a full-price, long-term commitment.

Yet people WILL pay for things when they want them. We all do it, every day. As long as desire for whatever we’re buying exceeds the cost and hassle of getting it.

Shops are brilliant at smoothing this journey, tempting us to buy extra bits and bobs alongside whatever we planned, and they let us leave with the tap of a card, without filling in a single form or making any promises to pay for the same thing again, whether or not we want it.

Media consumption is largely driven by spontaneous, impulsive and often fleeting desire, sometimes developing into habit. The demand to subscribe is the polar opposite of that desire/cost ratio and at odds with peoples’ actual behaviour.

Now, though, is the time to challenge the orthodoxy which says that the only alternative to free is subscription. AI is up-ending the traditional business model of publishers’ big-platform tormentors, pushing the media industry together against a common enemy, and handing them the opportunity to snatch back the value which was always rightfully theirs.

So, well done to the Observer, Manchester Evening News, Mail Online, the Sun and increasing numbers of others for turning away from the miserable treadmill of diminishing returns to which an advertising-based model condemns them.

But a mass pivot to a simple subscription model risks leading down a parallel path: a niche market where discounts, bundles and a “more for less” race to increase subscribers leaves the bottom line, the long-term health of their business and the vast majority of would-be customers trailing behind.

Those left-behind customers are this industry’s gold mine, easily accessed by innovation which brings them all into the market as potential customers for every publisher and offers them respite from the increasingly AI-polluted internet.

If the industry can work out how to act together, to identify their common interests (as they are increasingly doing in relation to AI), and create a market which extends to the full gamut of their collective audience, they can do much better than simply surviving. They can take back what’s theirs, and give back far more to their audiences, and to their societies and their businesses than what AI continues to snatch away.

We need more ambition. We need aggressive pioneers, not just bandwagon-jumpers.

We need to believe in our own convictions. Stand up for quality and trust at a time when more than half of the “open” internet is, already, AI-generated garbage. We need to make products which more people want, and sell access to them on terms and at prices which people like.

We need accountability, legality and integrity to be the hallmark of our products, a sure sign of trustworthy news worth paying for.

Where there are barriers, we must remove them. Find ways to collaborate and take advantage of the collective scale of the sector. Stop acquiescing to the wholesale theft of content. Take advantage of the self-sabotaging folly of AI platforms destroying the “open” internet on which those fortunes depend.

We can do better. Much better. Now might be the best moment the news industry has had.
Google gets off… again.

October 7, 2025

Why creating a Schengen Zone for audiences might be the best response to Google’s let off.

Great news: Google have – finally – been judged to be a monopoly in a US lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice.

Less great: they have been punished with the mildest of slaps on the wrist.

A few weeks ago I wrote “… publishers and creators … can’t rely on the law, or the government, to protect their rights and businesses. Waiting for common sense or the rule of law to prevail would be folly.”

And so the Google outcome proves.

There are laws which are supposed to protect creators, notably copyright, as well as laws intended to prevent monopolies. But, where the internet is concerned, they don’t work.

They haven’t worked, in fact, for the entire internet era. Thirty years, more-or-less. Ignoring the law was a business strategy for internet platforms, and the law rewarded them by stepping out of their way.

Even when, decades late, called out in court, the bizarre punishment is to effectively extend their impunity.

We all hope this will finally, eventually, change. But that hope is longstanding, and it has been repeatedly dashed. There are other lawsuits, other governments, so let’s not abandon it completely. But hope isn’t a strategy. Pleading doesn’t change anything.

With AI further destabilising the rickety remaining foundations of the news business, we need more than hope. We need a plan, one which doesn’t depend on governments, courts or platforms doing the right thing.

Let’s take stock. What has been changing lately, and how can we respond to it?

First, AI. It has stretched platform impunity to the ultimate extent, not just helping itself to all the content on the internet and offering creators and publishers nothing in return, but also using the stolen content to build directly competing products of their own. Laughing in the face of the law and draining the remaining resources and revenues of publishers. Hoping that the law will finally step in is a waiting game we don’t have time for.

Publishers need to seize control of their work, protect their investments and call a halt to wholesale theft and exploitation.

Second, the “open” web. Thanks to AI it’s an increasingly unsafe and polluted place for creators and users alike.

Anything published openly is instantly stolen and reused by bots. They’re digital superhighwaymen, taking whatever they can find and then selling their spoils on the pavement outside. Where there used to be legal barriers preventing and punishing such wholesale digital looting, publishers now need to fit their own security. They can’t afford to remain part of an anarchic and chaotic “open” web. They need safer digital spaces, and so do their users.

We need to build those safe spaces.

Third, search. By which I mean Google. They have smashed the Faustian pact which kept publishers dependent on them. The implied promise of traffic, and revenue, in return for content has been broken. Their AI output comes first and publisher referrals have crashed. No publisher can depend on Google for anything anymore.

We need to build alternative ways for publishers and humans to discover each other, other ways of generating revenue. They need to lean-in to their need for independence, and strike out on their own.

Put it all together, though, and something positive emerges from those needs. A blueprint for the next, human-centric, phase of the internet.

Let’s start by separating the humans from the robots. Sniff out the non-humans – now more than half of online traffic – and block the rogues. This will offer some of the protection the law no longer provides, and will lead to a market for good bots to negotiate access on fair terms to suit the publishers.

“NATO for News”, called for by Jon Slade of the FT recently, is already being formed to lead the fight against the denizens of internet’s robot underworld, which hide and disguise themselves to evade detection. Policing them requires a shared posse of digital detectives, finding and blocking them as they try to shape-shift their way past publishers’ defences.

Which leaves the humans. How can publishers improve their online lives as the toxic digital swamp threatens to engulf the whole internet?

This is where the forced retreat from Google might be a blessing in disguise. The imperative to serve Google’s interests has historically put the human users of many publishers’ products in the back seat. We’ve all seen news websites so festooned with ads that the actual content is hard to find. Irritating clickbait. Annoying paywalls blocking access. No wonder most people devote more of their time to getting lost in social media rabbit warrens.

News products aren’t that way because they’re reflecting what their audiences want and need. It’s because the options for publishers are limited by limited, zero-sum, opportunities in advertising and subscription coupled to Google’s outsize role in discovery, distribution and monetisation.

Now that Google are withdrawing from their side of that bargain (and quite possibly chalking up the biggest own-goal in history if, as increasingly seems likely, the big bet on AI turns out to be a dud) publishers and humans alike need something else. Something which isn’t inherently limited, Something where the economics aren’t dominated and controlled by a gigantic, voracious and parasitic monopolist.

It starts with better economics, revenues which scale as users and their interactions grow. It ends with better products, chasing those users and interactions with journeys and content which they actually want and value, and are even willing to pay for.

All of which can be delivered with surprising simplicity because what I’m talking about is the creation of new networks. The internet is good at those. The building blocks are all in place, literally already in everyone’s pockets and on their desks.

We need to join publishers and humans together, so that all humans have access to all legitimate publications without endless mad barriers being put in their way. One login, instead of dozens. A Schengen zone for online humans with free movement throughout the network, but where bots without visas have to keep out – along with garbage content produced by unaccountable, anonymous or automated bad actors.

We also need better ways for humans to discover, research and just happen upon content and products from within the network, within other products, instead of solely outside in the open, but increasingly grey, web. Direct connections to content and publications

Payment, where it is sought, should not demand the hassle of endless sign-ups, logins and promises to pay continuously for something you only want once, and impulsively.

And the media’s networks will be where the failure of the law to protect content and businesses is mitigated by strict control over access by digital theft machines.

Which brings me back to collaboration. It’s almost absurdly easy for publishers to form this network, change their incentives and start building resilient independence from the digital platforms. The technical pieces are all in place, the user need is obvious and the products will respond and evolve rapidly in response to new incentives.

The combined reach of the media is population-scale and the “yes but” internal voices, arguing against the risk of change are being silenced by the withdrawal of the status quo as an option by big tech.

The slow decline of news media has been inexorable, and for many in the midst of it might feel inevitable, the backdrop of their whole careers. But with big tech blowing up the past (and perhaps themselves along with it) we no longer have anything to cling to.

This moment is most definitely existential for the media.

Whether that means its future existence is thriving, growing and returning to its cultural and economic pre-eminence is a choice for the media to make. Forming the network which will protect and nurture their future is almost as simple as flipping a switch.

It takes confidence to seize back the controls. But there has never been a better moment. Lets do this together.
Gotta start somewhere

September 17, 2025

This will be where I try to put everything I have written, regardless of where.

I’ve grabbed a load of stuff from other sites and it’s all below. I’ll be adding new things at the top. And I’ll be tidying up and making it all a bit nicer as I get settled in – apologies for any rough edges you find.

For now… hello world! Here’s a nice picture of my local park the other day in grim, semi-industrial East London. I’ll probably scatter some pictures randomly around.
Are you certain about that uncertainty?

February 7, 2025
The UK government’s consultation on AI and copyright is prefaced by an un-named minister. In it they say that copyright law related to AI is “uncertain”. Removing that uncertainty they hope, will attract AI investment to the UK.

I’ll pick this apart below, but to summarise:
- There’s no uncertainty. The consultation makes that clear (see above). What’s uncertain is what AI companies should do about the fact that they have infringed billions of copyrights. That’s their problem, not the government’s.
- The proposed exception to copyright, which would give AI companies the right to copy content for training except where they have been explicitly told not to, depends on every creator using as-yet non-existent technology to assert rights they currently have by law, every time they produce something or someone publishes it. Not very efficient vs the current regime where they don’t have to do anything at all. Also will take a while to get going because the technology to do this doesn’t exist.
- Anyone who can’t afford, doesn’t have the capability or doesn’t know about this will have their rights removed. Regressive — copyright is a form of property. Removing it from those least able to defend it is unfair and illiberal.
- AI companies will have to check these “rights reservations” every time they find something they want to copy (that’s everything on the entire internet). Where rights are reserved, and assuming they have decided they want to comply with the law, they’ll have to either not copy the work or seek permission — just as the law demands they do right now.
- This means that a licensing marketplace will need to develop whatever happens — assuming of course that AI companies don’t decide to just keep ignoring the law, as they have done to date. If they do that, courts will have to decide — the lawsuits are happening already and this law won’t stop them.
- The government hopes that making our copyright more permissive will attract more AI companies to the UK. But places like Singapore have already created a much more permissive regime so the UK has already lost that particular race-to-the-bottom.
- In any event, there’s no sign that copyright is the reason AI companies choose where to invest. Other factors matter too. For example, where they’re based. Or energy costs. Which are four times higher in the UK than the USA.
- Meanwhile, AI is moving at 100x the pace of legislative processes. What Deepseek has shown is that AI technology isn’t the most valuable component of an AI company. The content they use to train their systems is much more significant. A market in this content will be a huge economic opportunity, especially for the UK whose creative industries out-pace the rest of the world and already contribute £125bn to the economy every year.
- The proposed exception will get us nowhere. It will create huge amounts of cost and huge inefficiences, but won’t deliver any material benefit. Even if it succeeds in attracting AI companies to the UK to conduct training, it will do so at the cost of every creator who will either have to carry the cost of asserting their rights, or be forced to abandon them.
- In fact, creators will have to carry that cost anyway because the exception will apply to AI companies wherever they may be. We’ll have made UK content less valuable to the UK with no guarantee that the country will benefit in any way at all.
- It also won’t do anything to address the issue of the huge infringements already done. These matter, because they were largely done stealthily and they involved all the content on the internet. Applying new rules to future copying really does feel like shutting the stable door after the horses have not only bolted but stampeded back and trampled the stable to dust.
Here’s what the minister said:

“At present, the application of UK copyright law to the training of AI models is disputed. Rights holders are finding it difficult to control the use of their works in training AI models and seek to be remunerated for its use. AI developers are similarly finding it difficult to navigate copyright law in the UK, and this legal uncertainty is undermining investment in and adoption of AI technology.” (emphasis added)

Now… read on to clause 5 of the consultation itself:

“The copyright framework provides right holders with economic and moral rights which mean they can control how their works are used. This means that copying works to train AI models requires a licence from the relevant right holders unless an exception applies.”

Does that seem uncertain to you? In case you aren’t sure, carry on to clause 41:

“The use of automated techniques to analyse large amounts of information (for AI training or other purposes) is often referred to as “data mining”. … If this process involves a reproduction of the copyright work, under copyright law, permission is needed from a copyright owner, unless a relevant exception applies”

Still not quite sure? Seems pretty clear, to the government at least.

Copyright law is crystal clear, as they helpfully explain.

But what can AI companies do? They have ignored the law, and so they face consequences. If they had just copied one or two things, copyright owners might just turn a blind eye, or the AI companies might get their wrists slapped in court.

But they didn’t just copy a few things. They copied everything they could find on the entire internet. Billions and billions of works, none of which they were allowed to do by law. As well as ignoring the law, they ignored all the various ways copyright owners have of explicitly saying that this sort of copying is not allowed: they didn’t seek permission from anyone.

Which looks like a whole heap of trouble. In the USA, where most AI training has been happening, statutory damages for “wilful” copyright infringement can go as high as $150,000. Per work copied. Even to the biggest of Silicon Valley money machines, that’s a lot.

That might leave them with a dilemma but they don’t seem to be unsure of what to do about it. They’re not doing anything at all, in fact some AI companies are doubling down and developing technical tricks to evade attempts by publishers to stop them stealing stuff.

They seem to be betting that instead of them needing to change to comply with the law, the law will change to retrospectively wave a magic wand and make everything legal.

Step forward the UK government and their proposed exception. It will allow AI companies to do something — train their systems without asking permission — which the law has hitherto not allowed.

Kind-of.

It will only allow them to do it if the copyright owner hasn’t specifically asked them not to. Which, obviously, every copyright owner will do if they can.

But HOW will rights owners do this?

Nobody knows. The press release announcing the consultation says as much:

“Before these measures could come into effect, further work with both sectors would be needed to ensure any standards and requirements for rights reservation and transparency are effective, accessible, and widely adopted.”

So, everyone who wants to still have their current rights, or who wants to licence or restrict the use of their work by AI companies for any reason, will have to go through some as-yet unknown process, every time they create something.

When they have done so, they’ll be exactly where they are today: right now the law says “don’t copy this without permission” and in future everyone will have to attach some kind of digital sign to every single thing they produce saying the same thing. Doesn’t sound very efficient.

Not much more efficient for AI compnies either: every time they want to copy something they’ll need to check whether this digital no-entry sign exists. If it does, they’ll have to either not copy it or try to get permission to copy it — exactly what they are supposed to do today.

Assuming they decide to start trying to comply with the law, which they have not done so far, there will need to be some sort of system to help them get what they want on terms they can live with. It’s called a marketplace and what it will sell are licences. These marketplaces exist today for all sorts of rights, even AI training rights. If AI companies become willing buyers of rights, we can be sure it will quickly develop, become larger and more efficient.

Again, this is exactly the same as today. The market is small because most AI companies have decided to ignore it, not because it doesn’t exist or rights holders are unwilling to participate..

So let’s say we have this new exception, we have a system for “rights reservation” which is widely adopted, content owners have absorbed the cost of using it to say they don’t want their work copied without permission and AI companies have all decided to start complying with the law and start participating in a market for rights… what have we gained?

AI companies will have a new right to exploit the work and property of creators who are unable, unaware or can’t afford to reserve their rights — plus some who happy to give them up.

For everything else, which will include substantially everything produced by anyone for whom their creativity is their living and anyone who just would prefer not to have their work being fed into AI systems for unknown purposes, they’ll still need what they need today: permission.

All of which sounds like what Bono might call “running to stand still”. A huge amount of energy and effort being expended to go exactly nowhere.

The biggest irony, though, is that it’s completely irrelevant.

Very few AI companies, and none of the giants, are training their systems in the UK. The government has heard that training AI is very expensive, though, and fantasises that they might start doing that expensive thing here, if our copyright law isn permissive enough. Imagine the growth!

Thing is, they won’t.

If they’re looking for the most permissive copyright regime, other countries have beaten us to the punch and gone even further, so far without the giant of AI relocating there to take advantage.

But AI companies seem content to play chicken with copyright for the time being, those battles are going to be fought, primarily in the US, over the next few years.

Other factors might weigh more heavily against the UK. For example, a large part of the cost of training AI is the energy needed by data centres. Energy in the UK is among the most expensive in the world.

If AI companies start to invest in the UK, which we should all hope they do, it won’t be because of our newly permissive but very clunky copyright regime.

Turns out that for the moment, AI companies prefer to stay close to home and close to cheap energy. UK electricity costing four times what it does in the States might be an issue, for example.

Also, Deepseek have just up-ended the while hypothesis by training their AI for, they claim, about 5% of what it cost OpenAI to do the same thing. Fair to expect that the investment needed to train AIs will come down, quite dramatically. Perhaps the opportunity isn’t quite as big as it was thought to be when this consultation kicked off, long long ago (it’s a 10 week process, which is a long time in AI-land).

All of which means that this exception is a kind of giant Rube Goldberg machine, proposing to create immense complexity and cost which will achieve, even in the best cases, virtually nothing. Other than giving away the property of people who can’t afford to defend it, to any AI company anywhere in the world which wishes to use it with impunity.

Hopefully the consultation will highlight that the path they’re considering if a huge waste of time and will only harm the creative industries with no benefit guaranteed, and that we can do better by defending our IP and looking to establish a leading position in the licensing market will will inevitably develop.

Otherwise, creators, you’d better start thinking about how to get your work off the “open” internet. It’s not safe there.
Waking up, I think I smell coffee…

February 5, 2025

It has been a while. Hello again. I’m back talking about copyright. Can’t shake my geeky obsession. But why now?

The specific thing which has got my goat is a proposal from the UK government to take a wrecking ball to what is left of copyright law by largely exempting AI companies from it.

It looks crazy at a glance, and only gets crazier if you dig into the detail. Unsurprisingly, the UK creative industries, which depend on copyright and which are worth £125bn to the UK economy every year, are implacably opposed. In fact, it’s quite hard to find anyone at all, outside the government, who thinks it’s a good idea.

Ministers are finding this out for themselves, because they have started a consultation about their plans. It suggests a range of options, but it also says that the government has already decided which one they’re going to implement. So while the consultation responses might highlight just how much people dislike the proposal, it seems the government has pre-emptively decided to ignore them. The allure of imagined AI riches is just too strong.

I’ll highlight some of the choicest morsels over some future posts, to help explain my own views about it and maybe inspire a few people to submit their own views before the deadline of 25th February 2025.

For now, a quick summary:

AI companies “train” their systems by copying everything they can find on the internet and feeding it into their computers. This is how those AI systems “learn”.

Copyright is, literally, the right to make copies. It’s a kind of property — intellectual property — and, like other kinds of property, it belongs to someone. Not AI companies and not the government. Someone who doesn’t own copyright doesn’t have the right to make copies unless the owner – or the law – has given it to them.

Rather than ask permission, though, AI companies have simply ignored copyright and copied everything anyway. Without all that content, their systems wouldn’t work. In fact, the content they have used, far more than the computer chips or the power sources and arguably the underlying technology, is the most valuable component of what they do. They want it, they need it, it’s right there on the internet for anyone to see. So they have simply helped themselves.

To add injury to insult, they are using their systems to obviate the need for people to seek out the source of the “knowledge” they’re imparting to their users. They’re competing against their unwilling and unrewarded suppliers and damaging them commercially.

This isn’t a popular move with the people whose content they have illegally used. However, it has got the UK government very excited. AI has been hyperbolically projected to generate gigantic riches. The new-ish government, desperate for anything which might help them create growth in the UK economy, wants some of those AI riches to come the UK’s way.

So they’re proposing to wave a magic wand and make the illegal copying that AI companies do legal, by creating a special exception in copyright law for them.

This won’t end well. I’ve re-started blogging about this to explain why, and to suggest better ways. Stay tuned…
Why FT may be wrong to license its content for AI training

April 29, 2024

The Financial Times has joined a growing group of newsbrands to have licensed its content for use by artificial intelligence pioneer OpenAI. It joins companies like Axel Springer, Le Monde and Associated Press in doing so.

John Ridding, the FT’s CEO, points to a tension inherent in their deal. On the one hand, it positions the FT as a beneficiary, keeping it “at the forefront of developments in how people access and use information”. But he also acknowledges an underlying ethical concern. It’s right, he says, “that AI platforms pay publishers for the use of their material”. There are few media companies around right now who don’t welcome a bit of extra income.

Mathias Dopfner, CEO of Axel Springer, has also recognised the tension in the relationship between AI and media. At last week’s INMA congress in London, while expressing optimism that AI can help media companies innovate and work better, he called for a new legal framework to protect intellectual property, with one conference delegate telling him his deal was a “pact with the devil”. His comments point to the most important strategic issue which this technology poses for the news media.

Every Press Gazette reader will have played with AI by now. It’s pretty impressive. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and others can generate convincingly human-like responses, in the form of words, pictures, movies, code, music and even imitation voices, to prompts that you give them.

Breathless hyperbole and a reckless pace of development is lining AI up as an inevitable part of the future of humanity. Buoyed by that belief, and the allure of a new tech sector emerging, perhaps worth trillions of dollars, vast amounts of money have been poured into accelerating the breakneck pace of development.

All of that value, though, is actually being created by you and me, and professional creators and publishers. AI systems “learn” from words, music, films and photos created by humans. Based on this, they produce their own output which appears similar.

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They have done this by simply copying everything they can find from the internet and “mining” it to create fuel for the AI rocket ship. If you have ever published anything on the internet, the chances are your work is now integrated into the “intelligence” of numerous AI systems.

Tech platforms, of course, have form for this, and they have had help. Over two decades ago, copyright and other laws were relaxed specifically for the benefit of tech platforms. This led to the previous generation of trillion-dollar search and social platforms, which could be built without the inconvenience those laws would otherwise have created. Without the same legal accountability for what they publish, or its underlying intellectual property, scale and profitability were easy to achieve. Their rise has coincided with the ongoing decline of revenue and profitability in the news and other creative sectors.

AI platforms have followed the same playbook. They have had to; without all the content they feed on, much of AI is useless and therefore worthless. Yet, of the billions of dollars which have been spent on recruiting engineering talent, computer chips and cloud computing capacity, none has been reserved for, or paid to, the individuals and companies whose content has underwritten the entire value of AI systems.

This state of affairs has led, unsurprisingly, to squabbles and conflicts. Lots of them.

On social media, conference platforms, in closed-door negotiations, in legislatures and courts, in Europe and the US and most of the rest of the world too, the legal and ethical arguments are being played out. Consensus is very far from emerging. The stakes are high.

The future of AI, and the future of the commercial viability of human creativity, comes down to a simple question: is it OK to use someone else’s work, without their permission, to train an AI?

Copyright law says that you can’t copy someone else’s work without their permission. In the case of AI, it would seem pretty clear cut — AI training databases are made up of literally billions of copies of things.

But, on the other side, the law also has exceptions. There are certain conditions under which it’s legally acceptable to make and use copies without first getting permission. These exceptions vary, a bit, from one country to another. Usually, they’re pretty clear cut, but in the United States they’re wrapped up in the “Fair Use” doctrine, which is vague enough to need frequent interpretation by courts.

Entire legal careers have been devoted to arguing about Fair Use. As a non-American non-lawyer my best attempt to summarise is to highlight the key concept: is a certain use of someone else’s work fair or not? For example, a book review which includes quotes from the book in question. The use doesn’t damage the commercial opportunity for the book publisher; in fact, probably the opposite if it encourages more people to read the book. Given that AI companies intend their output to be a substitute for the original human-created work which trained them, I think they face a tough time making their case.

The AI companies seem to think so too. As the lawsuits which will decide this formally wend their way through the US and other courts, AI companies are out doing deals.

This is a small start, and probably sensible. If all their copying to date is judged not to have been legitimate, AI companies are going to have a hard time staying in business. If their future use of other peoples’ content needs to be negotiated, they’d better get a head start. Otherwise they’re making a big all-or-nothing bet that they will win in court, not just in the US but all around the world, where exceptions to copyright are much more clearly defined.

Why content publishers like the FT should ‘exercise caution’ in AI deals

In any event, as more and more of the content they scrape from the internet is, itself, generated by AI, the risk of “ model collapse” means dependable sources will become ever more important, including to validate (“ground” in AI jargon) results and reduce the prevalence of fictitious, made-up information being presented as factual. This happens a lot — AI people refer to the phenomenon as “hallucinations”.

All this sounds a lot like good news on the horizon for content owners such as the beleaguered news industry. New sources of revenue have been elusive over the last couple of decades, and the old ones have been drying up. If AI is inevitable, at least getting some cash out of it can’t be a bad thing. No doubt that’s part of the reasoning behind some of the deals we have seen announced.

But most companies who control enough content to be interesting to AI companies are, or should be, exercising caution. Key players, such as newspapers, are wary of allowing AI to use their own content to make products which aim to displace them in the eyes of consumers. That would be a self-sabotaging act however much money they are offered.

They are no doubt also conscious that, despite the rather ill-defined future benefits of AI which we’re all promised, so far the risks have been much more visible. Students have used AI to cheat on tests. Other students have been falsely accused after AI tools designed to detect AI-generated content have made mistakes. Lawyers have shown up in court citing entirely fictitious, AI-generated, legal precedents. AI has been used to create faked pornographic images of children as well as celebrities, convincing fake voices are being used to scam people by phone.

The list of “unforeseen” consequences grows longer every day, alongside known issues like AI’s tendency to invent entirely fictitious “facts”. Yet the AI bandwagon rampages on.

Which means that now is probably a pretty bad time for anyone to license their content for AI training. Nobody knows where this is going to go, what value is being exchanged (and therefore what a good deal looks like), or the real nature or extent of the risks. These risks are certainly reputational and commercial as well as the societal risks we are all aware of.

Nobody owes AI companies a right to exist, certainly not the owners of the content they have appropriated and mined for their own benefit. The current legal, legislative and lobbying frenzy will need to play out a little bit longer and we can all hope that the lines will be re-drawn more fairly as a result, protecting the rights of everyone who wants a say in how their work is used by others.

In the meantime, the best option might be to just wait. Playing chicken can be an unnerving game but it’s the AI companies who will have to swerve in the end.

Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our “Letters Page” blog

Originally published at https://pressgazette.co.uk on April 29, 2024.
News media versus AI: What if we win?

February 15, 2024

Like all good foundations, the ones on which the media industry relies are usually invisible. We only see what is built on top — a flourishing, plural creative sector. Until, that is, it starts to collapse.

The media’s foundation is copyright. As dry and dull as concrete. But if you take the concrete away, a lot of buildings fall down. It’s the same with copyright and journalism.

We know this because we have been living it. The internet has undermined our foundations, messing up our relationship with our audience and crippling our business models.

Diminished and enfeebled over the last decades, things are only getting worse for the news industry. When copyright was undermined, we didn’t feel the effects immediately. By the time we did, it was already too late.

Generative AI is widely predicted to accelerate the destruction, and it certainly has the potential to do so. The remains of the media could easily dissolve and drown in the AI-generated flood of garbage which is already flooding the internet and threatens to wash away what’s left of our businesses.

But, unexpectedly, the opposite could also happen. AI might be about to give us back a solid base on which to rebuild our industry and spark a new creative renaissance. One of our key foundations might be shored up and made solid again.

Copyright is a gloriously simple thing. Anyone who wants to copy work you created must have your permission. That’s basically it. There are few, and mostly quite specific, exceptions to this general rule.

The problem is that when the internet was too new for the consequences to be obvious, we made the big internet platforms one of those exceptions.

Laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the notorious section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the USA, the e-commerce directive in the EU and others around the world created special legal immunities and exceptions which shielded internet businesses from many legal risks.

As a result, any content created by our industry, the result of our expertise and hard work, became fair game for their use. Everyone’s work was made theirs for the taking.

And they took it. This cost-free, risk-free, access to a nearly unlimited source of raw material, unhindered by copyright and other laws, stole the foundation of the media industry and handed platforms like Google and Facebook an extremely profitable one of their own.

They were able to build trillion-dollar businesses on the back of other peoples’ efforts. The plain fact of it is that they wouldn’t be worth anything without free use of “content” created by others.

I think, perhaps unfashionably, that generative AI might be about to change all that.

AI companies regard everything on the open web as fair game for them to use. Of course they do. If it’s OK for search engines, they say, it’s OK for them.

They have been using everything they can find, in private at first, and now very openly, to “train” their AI systems. They take full advantage of everyone’s work being available to them for free.

But what if it wasn’t?

Marc Andreessen, the quintessential Silicon Valley investor, knows the answer: “Imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development.”

Worry less about over-hyped AI start-ups and more about world’s creators

It would cost him a lot of money, in other words. But, I would argue, it would produce much better outcomes for everyone else. Sam Altman says that OpenAI couldn’t exist if it had to get consent from creators. The news industry also can’t exist if AI continues to use its work to create a competitor.

The risk that the current generation of AIs might not be viable is muttered darkly, as if it’s a dire threat to the world. It should not be heard as such. If an early version of a new technology turns out not to be viable, innovators can return to their labs and try to improve it. The next version will be better.

If copyright poses a threat, it is not to AI per se, but to over-hyped, over-valued and over-funded AI companies. The world should worry less about them than the wider interests of creators, societies and the creative economy.

The argument is being played out right now. AI companies assert everything they do is allowed under the US defence of “fair use”. Others disagree, and the law elsewhere in the world also stands in their way.

The arguments are wending their way through courts and legislatures all over the world. AI companies will need to win all of them to get away scot-free. That’s a tall order, in my view.

If AI companies somehow win on this, we’ll remain in the online world we inhabit right now, managing our ongoing decline and watching as the internet fills with AI-generated grey goo.

But if they lose — and I think and hope that copyright will win — the internet will become a very different place. A better place.

It will seem quite small, at first. AI companies (and many others) will have to ask permission before they copy and use content they find online, just as copyright law demands. If they use stuff without permission, they’ll be running a gigantic legal risk.

The AI sector, and the activities of anyone else who is taking and using without asking, will need a reboot. Deals will need to be done, and maybe some AIs will have to go back to the drawing board.

The foundations of our industry, of the whole creative sector, will be re-solidified. The scope of fair use and legal exemptions will be narrowed. Not asking permission will be a bigger risk for tech innovators. The real role of creators and creative businesses, as the apex creators of value on the internet, will be recognised at last.

But are we ready? Not really.

This process of seeking and giving permission, simple as it sounds, has been left behind by technology. While everything else, not least copying itself, has been scaled up and turbocharged online, the mechanisms of copyright have remained stubbornly unsophisticated. Hardly surprising, given that the law made it irrelevant to the big platforms, and they are the ones who have largely turbocharged everything else. We have some catching up to do.

Fixing that is something which has to be done by those who stand to benefit. The media industry needs to take the lead in finding and funding a shared solution. They don’t have to start from scratch: a project I led for a while, The Copyright Hub, did a lot of the groundwork. There’s a simple explanation of what it was doing here. Now is the time to revive and accelerate it.

That, though, is just one piece of the jigsaw. The future of the media doesn’t lie in getting cheques from AI companies, or search engines, however large they might be. Being a mere content supplier to someone else’s company isn’t what we’re all about.

The bigger challenge will be to wake up and get used to the new reality. Content really will be king again. Creators will have the ability to capture more of the value their work creates for themselves, finally reversing a decline which has lasted for decades.

That’s quite a profound change to contemplate. For an industry accustomed to trying, and mostly failing, to operate within the constraints and rules created by others, regaining greater control will be a shock. Working out what to do, how products and business models can evolve, will need innovation and leadership. It won’t just be a question of turning on the money tap and watching bank accounts fill up.

This will be the defining challenge of the immediate future. The media, the news media especially, has become accustomed to failure. We have become used to adapting to environments created by others. Success is an outlier, sustained success even more so.

That’s one of the reasons we still operate in pre-internet silos, some specialising in video, others in words or music or radio-style audio programmes. Unlike before, it’s all delivered through the same devices, but we behave as if we are still constrained by the fundamental differences between paper, TVs and CD players.

And with so many of us pursuing limited revenue sources, we fail to collaborate, to share knowledge, to create standards or to focus on the needs of our collective audience. In the zero-sum internet where innovation is punished and profits are elusive, it’s every media company for themselves.

So media companies have all been following the same strategy: jump on the same bandwagon as everyone else and hope not to fall off.

Success in the next era will need us to snap out of our torpor. We’ll need to rediscover our entrepreneurial instincts and willingness to take risks. We’ll need to understand that we can take a lead in terraforming the new landscape online. Having learned our lesson after allowing the big platforms to swamp and control our fortunes, we’ll have to work out what would be better — for us, and our customers alike.

We should start by talking, and working out what we need to work on together to build our new foundations.

Our biggest risk is not being ready to win. Let’s get ready.

Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our “Letters Page” blog

Originally published at https://pressgazette.co.uk on February 15, 2024.
News publishers must get serious about rebooting news business models — INMA

January 29, 2024
INMA CEO/Executive Director Earl Wilkinson’s recent blog about the future of community media added an essential voice to a growing cacophony. We’ve all heard the bad news about cuts from the LA Times, Sports Illustrated, Pitchfork, and Reach in the UK. Many news media organisations seem to have entered their final phase.

It’s time to offer some hard truths about how we got to this point — and reasons for optimism.

Facing the truth

Truths first: News media cannot thrive, or even survive, on advertising revenue. Just look at the numbers; ad-dependent media are starving to death.

That leaves consumer revenue as the best hope. However, the slow dawning of this realisation has not been met with energetic innovation and growth. Success has been elusive, and growth, for most, has stalled.

Here’s where optimism comes in: Consumer revenue can and will create scalable and broad-based revenues. The problem is we have been doing it wrong. When we fix that, we will unlock huge opportunities.

News is a mass-market category by nature. Most readers have many interests, and few limit their media consumption to a single product.

Why subscriptions fail

That makes it odd that publishers chose subscription, near-universally, as a consumer monetisation model, locking most people out of the things they want.

We didn’t do this because we analysed and understood user needs, then designed a solution that best fit. We did it because that’s what everyone else had done. The idea that we could design a business model to suit our products and customers seemingly did not occur to anyone. That’s why it hasn’t worked very well.

On the plus side, subscribers represent a recurring revenue stream — until they cancel.

People don’t like subscribing to news products. Conversion rates of 2% of the audience are considered good. Ignoring 98% of what used to be a mass market doesn’t feel optimal.

The fact that some subscribers will always cancel doesn’t make it any easier. When they do, their recurring revenue drops to zero, and we lock them out. We ban them from a product they once liked enough to subscribe to. It’s a wasted opportunity.

Adding to our woes, new subscribers get progressively more expensive to acquire and are worth much less, thanks to discounts. Eventually, subscriber numbers start shrinking, and ARPUs shrink faster as lower-value new ones replace high-value early subscribers.

Even worse, we can’t take advantage of the network opportunities the Internet now provides and retail outlets used to give us. We’re all selling our lonely, singular products in our sparsely stocked Internet shops. Persuading people to enter, let alone subscribe, is challenging. Even mega-brands struggle with this. What chance does a community newspaper serving a few hundred thousand people stand?

It’s no surprise titles are collapsing, especially those serving smaller audiences.

Subscription isn’t a panacea. But that doesn’t mean people won’t pay. We know there is substantial unmet demand for subscription products — look at those conversion rates.

Looking for new opportunities

The news industry needs to try new things. All breakthroughs are impossible until they’re not; think about the Wright brothers next time you find yourselves at 40,000 feet.

Subscriptions got us off the ground. Now, we need to gain altitude. The news industry has enormous untapped potential crowded right outside their paywalls.

They’re a huge opportunity — how could they not be? What other businesses lockout 95% of would-be customers?

If there was ever a time to start converting them to customers, it’s now. We need to determine how to give them what they want at a price that works for them and us.

The new model needs to be built around readers. You want them to pay, but they don’t want to subscribe, so give them other options.

How can you get more would-be readers to become customers? Here are a few suggestions:
- Anyone should be able to get your product whenever they want.
- Eliminate the idea of “churn.”
- Everyone should pay.
- Get rid of walls as much as possible (sign-up, registration, subscription). Minimise the barriers between someone’s desire for your product and their spontaneous ability to access and pay for it.
- Continuously improve your products to attract more customers (and money).
- Stop locking users away. Accept that users want to move around and don’t want to be “owned.” Refusing to “share” them with other businesses, even competitors, diminishes the market for everyone and hands them back to the trillion-dollar platforms at the heart of our demise.
Pursuing new solutions

I started a company called Axate to address these points and more because publishers need a solution beyond the no-win subscription/advertising dichotomy. This is not a sales pitch for that company; it’s a call to action for an industry that is struggling but doesn’t need to be.

If the industry can make consumer payment work the way consumers want, removing barriers and making paying for news spontaneous and frictionless, we can reboot the entire economics of news.

Although we’ll have given up the certainty of recurring revenue from every customer, we’ll have removed the limits of our number of customers. We’ll also have removed the limit on how much they can be worth to us. The more often they spend, the more they’ll end up spending. We’ll get good at getting them to do it more and more frequently.

Rather than a fixed and limited opportunity, there will be an expanding one in front of every publisher. Collaboration and user-sharing will be a form of marketing, not a risk to the business.

We can develop a solution that suits our unique sector and its enormous, engaged network of users.

Our history of trying again and again with both advertising and subscription, to little avail, has robbed us of optimism. But our plight isn’t hopeless or impossible to solve. We must stop doing what we know doesn’t work and start doing something that does.

Far too many news publishers are in their terminal phase. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s not inevitable. Now is the time for radical efforts. Please don’t do nothing.

Originally published at https://www.inma.org on January 29, 2024.
News media business models: It’s time to get serious about a re-boot.

January 25, 2024

Earl Wilkinson’s blog about the future of community media adds an important voice to a growing cacophony. We have heard the bad news about cuts from the LA Times, Sports Illustrated, Pitchfork, and Reach in the UK — just the latest in a long and gloomy line. Many news media organisations seem to have entered their final, terminal, phase.

It’s time to offer some hard truths about how we got to this point, but also some reasons for optimism.

Truths first. News media cannot thrive, or even survive, if they depend on advertising revenue. We don’t even need to go into the reasons; just look at the numbers. Ad-dependent media are starving to death.

That leaves consumer revenue as the best hope. The slow dawning of this realisation, though, has not been met with energetic innovation and growth. The way the news industry has gone about trying to make it work is, to be blunt, insane.

We are, by nature, a mass-market category. News thrives on universal availability, as commonplace and easy to buy as candy and soda. Most users have many interests, especially online, and few of them limit their media consumption to single products.

Which makes it odd is that we chose subscription, near-universally, as our consumer monetization model.

We didn’t do this because we had analysed and understood user needs, and designed a solution which was the best fit. We did it because that’s what everyone else had done. The idea that we could design a business model to suit our products and our customers, seemingly, did not occur to anyone.

That’s why it hasn’t worked very well. On the plus side, subscribers represent a recurring revenue stream — until they cancel.

Less positively, people really don’t like subscribing to news products. Conversion rates of 2% of audience are considered good. Ignoring 98% of what used to be a mass market doesn’t feel optimal.

The fact that some subscribers will always cancel doesn’t make it any easier. When they do, their recurring revenue drops to zero, and we lock them out. They are now banned from a product they once liked enough to subscribe to. It’s a wasted opportunity.

Adding to our woes, new subscribers get progressively more expensive to acquire and are worth much less, thanks to discounts. Eventually, subscriber numbers start to shrink, and ARPUs shrink faster as high value early subscribers are replaced by lower value new ones.

Even worse, we can’t take advantage of the network opportunities that the internet now provides, and retail outlets used to give us. We’re all selling our lonely, singular, products in our own sparsely stocked internet shops. Persuading people to enter, far less subscribe, is tough. Even mega-brands struggle with this. What chance does a community newspaper serving a few hundred thousand people stand?

It’s no surprise that titles are collapsing, especially the smaller ones serving smaller audiences.

One thing the industry is stubbornly resistant to is trying new things. “If something hasn’t already been done, it won’t work”, seems to be the prevailing industry attitude. It’s worth noting that this was also the prevailing attitude to heavier-than-air flight for a long time.

Media companies regard the 95%+ non-paying audience with seeming indifference. They’re not worth anything, so they are looked on with sad resignation.

I see them as an opportunity. A huge opportunity. How could they not be? What other businesses lock out 95% of their would-be customers? Salvation is right here, crowded outside paywalls, within easy reach.

If there was ever a time to start converting them to customers, it’s now. Just copying what everyone else was doing, or following the Google and Facebook Pied Pipers, is what got us into this mess. It’s not going to get us out of it.

Start with your users and what they want. Then think about what you would like them to do that doesn’t conflict with that. Not everyone wants to be a subscriber. You need to offer other options too.

Work out how you can get more people to become customers. Here are a few suggestions:

– Anyone who wants to, should be able to get your product whenever they want to.

– Everyone should pay.

– Get rid of walls, as much as you can. Sign-up, registration, subscription. Absolutely minimise the barriers between someone’s desire for your product and their spontaneous ability to access and pay for it — and make it a better product to attract more customers (and money).

– Stop locking users away. Accept that users want to move around and don’t want to be “owned”. Refusing to “share” them with other businesses, even competitors, just diminishes the market for everyone and hands them back to the trillion-dollar platforms which have been at the heart of our demise.

I started a company to address these points, because publishers need a solution which goes beyond the no-win subscription/advertising dichotomy. This is not a sales pitch for that company; it’s a call to action for an industry that is struggling but doesn’t need to be. As well as talking and writing about the issues we face as an industry, I started my company to help solve them.

If the industry can make consumer payment work the way consumers want — by removing the barriers and making paying for news a spontaneous, frictionless process — we will not just save a few publishers from their otherwise inevitable demise. We’ll reboot the entire economics of news.

That’s because, although we’ll have given up the certainty of recurring revenue from our new customers, we’ll also have removed the limits on how many customers we can have and much they can be worth to us. The more often they transact, the more they’ll end up spending. Rather than a fixed and limited opportunity, there will be an expanding one in front of every publisher. Collaboration and user-sharing will be a form of marketing, not a risk to the business.

The startling thing so far has been the reluctance of some publishers, even in the face of imminent cutbacks and death, to deviate from their own repeated failures.

Now that so many are in their terminal phase, though, it is the time for radical efforts.

I can help. Please come to me and I’ll be more than happy to do a proper sales pitch. But please, please, don’t do nothing.
How Coca-Cola thinking could fix the news industry

December 11, 2023

Dominic Young, founder & CEO of Axate, wants the news business to learn from the best brands and make products customers want to pay for. Can Coca-Cola’s thinking reverse the decline?

I was recently asked if I could offer some examples of businesses that have pivoted from a pure subscription business model to one driven by casual sales.

Even outside the context of the news, I was stumped. I was frustrated that I couldn’t think of many until I realized there was a glaring — and fundamental — reason why.

News is commercializing backward.

I can’t think of any other sector that has pivoted from a successful, mass-market, casually-purchased approach to an exclusively closed-off subscription one… let alone one that had then tried to pivot back the other way.

Can you imagine Coca-Cola, which sells 1.9bn servings daily, deciding that instead of being available in every drink-selling outlet in the world, they would only sell through their own shops? And only to people willing to pay a fixed monthly amount, regardless of how much or how little Coke they drink?

It’s just a mad idea. But it’s what the newspaper industry, inadvertently, has done. No wonder it didn’t go well.

Obviously, the news industry’s partial pivot to subscription didn’t happen in one jump. It started its internet adventure by removing pricing altogether and offering its products free to all, relying on advertising revenue to pay the bills. Consumers were rapidly programmed that news had no value — by the very organizations providing it.

The story since then has, to sum it up brutally, been one of retrenchment and chaotic retreat from digital products and financial disasters. Detached from its previously successful retail models, floating free online and trying to plug leaks constantly, news organizations haven’t so much steered their own course online as been blown around at the mercy of constant storms.

The few titles that can have re-introduced consumer payment in the form of subscription. Those who can’t are trying their best to survive in the rapacious and hostile advertising maelstrom — the resulting product experiences devaluing news even further in the eyes of consumers.

A flourishing news publisher is a critically endangered species: spend any time at news industry conferences, and most of the success stories would be better framed as “less failure” stories.

This double-digital pivot to free and then — for some at least — back to charging customers has not gone brilliantly. There’s a pretty small cadre of subscription-based news publishers looking to the future with confidence, and few of those are truly mass-market.

Casual newsstand sales previously drove significant volumes for newspapers, as much as 100% of sales in some markets. Restricting your customer base to those willing to subscribe — typically less than 2–3% of your audience — means cutting yourself off from the vast majority of those who would otherwise be your customers.

It’s Coca-Cola saying, “Sorry, no. If you won’t sign up to buy 100 bottles a month, you can’t buy any.”

The numbers point to an industry that has now reached its inevitable and predicted tipping point: the pool of potential subscribers has been exhausted. Just look at the low-ball subscription offers you’ll now see everywhere, illustrating how far most will go to prop up that headline subscriber number.

25p per week for a whole year? Another offers me four months for £1. Don’t mind if I do! That’s under 1p per day! But then it jumps to £26 per month. That’s a 104x price increase… hmmm. Suddenly, I don’t mind if I don’t. It’s worse, in fact, because even at subscription prices as low as zero, most visitors will still refuse to sign up. The market has reached and passed its peak.

So, if price reductions don’t work, what’s left?

Are we stuck?

Of course, we’re not.

We still have hundreds of millions of users trying to access our stuff, even if many of them go away disappointed either by our paywalls or our ads. The vast majority are not yet customers, a significant minority are ex-subscribers, and an even smaller tranche currently pays monthly fees in return for their — often quite infrequent — access.

Any market with huge amounts of unmet demand ought to be a tempting and vibrant one. Yet the news industry regards it with something close to despair. It’s as if the internet, having thwarted us at every turn, has robbed us of self-belief along with our ability to thrive.

Nothing we have tried on our own has worked, so we’ve spent the last decade or two following the monopolistic mega-platforms into their world. For the news industry, as it is finally learning, that world might be better named The Void.

But we all know what most users want, not least because we’re readers ourselves.

We want to be able to read whatever we want, whenever we want. If we’re going to pay for something, we want it to be worth it, and we don’t want it to be a massive hassle, or a massive cost. We don’t want to subscribe and then have to remember to cancel, and we don’t want to have to sign up separately for multiple titles we might only occasionally want to dip into.

Even if we habitually return to the same titles again and again, we want the right to change our minds every now and then. We want to be able to try new things, and we don’t want to pay for things we’re not reading.

Today, I fancy a Pepsi. So shoot me.

All publishers know that the huge majority of their would-be customers are like this. But the platforms don’t want any part of it because it doesn’t align with their own business models — or ways of thinking.

So, the news industry has had to make do. They picked from the tech sector menu of options, dominated by the needs of those platforms, shaped by SaaS business thinking. They are hemmed in by the limitations of a self-serving banking system, making small digital transactions more expensive and hassle than handing over a coin in a shop. Add a near-religious reverence for the need to generate and ‘own’ data and users, and you find only one option in the middle of the Venn diagram: subscription.

Publishers had to try to make the best of it, and customers had to put up with it.

Very few, it turns out, are willing to do so.

A whole ecosystem has sprung up around trying to make all this make sense. Accepting as axiomatic that subscription is the right and only model, the publishers, numerous service providers, and consultants have devoted a huge amount of time, energy and cost to trying to prove it. This keeps them very busy, and busy feels good.

Implementing clever tech, for example, which promises to analyze data and find the irresistible offer for each individual visitor, sounds exciting. The excitement palls as that irresistible offer drifts towards 25p per week or less. But there’s always an external factor to blame and another project to focus on.

Much of the news industry has become so used to rationalizing their failures as to have become almost addicted to the reassuring observation that they’re not alone. They are suspicious of ambition or innovation because they have stopped believing it is achievable and everybody is in the same boat.

It means they’re willing to ignore the most obvious explanation for their failures: people don’t want to buy what they’re selling. They have taken their mass-market product, wrapped it in a luxury goods business model, and found out that there aren’t enough customers out there who want that.

Now is the time to turn back to basics. Think like marketers. Think like Coca-Cola.

How can we ensure that when customers find us, they find our product and our price to their liking? How can we ensure they want to return and become regular customers? How can we make sure more people find us and can try what we have to offer? How can we make sure our customers and the products they buy aren’t limited to affluent elites?

Those four questions can be answered with a very small tweak to the business model: bringing back casual sales. Engineering the foundation for that is the project I have spent the last few years on, and now any publisher can do it.

Having built that foundation, one more question arises. Is the product good enough? Most online news publications have evolved little from being an on-screen version of what used to be printed on paper every day. But if there’s an audience out there, ready, willing and able to pay, we can be sure that some brilliant entrepreneurs and creators will find ever-better ways of addressing them.

The internet is changing. The platforms’ power and dominance are on the wane. It’s no time for a wait-and-see approach.

Now is the moment for the news industry to be innovators again, to be those entrepreneurs. We need bold, visionary, restless leaders to show the way; leaders who are not content to settle for being the slowest failer while waiting for a passing bandwagon they can jump on. Leaders who are brave and confident enough to say and believe they can do better.

Originally published at https://www.thedrum.com.