Moved from the Summa Defence discussions to the coffee room.
Now, I don’t know if you’re blaming Summa’s CEO for only responding to one media outlet’s interview request, or Kauppalehti for publishing the story behind a paywall. But you managed to draw me—someone who makes paywall decisions for a living in the media—into the conversation.
Paywalls are now an essential and often even the primary way for media to generate revenue. There was a somewhat awkward phase lasting years where media outlets produced a lot of free content for the internet, while print newspaper circulations declined. For understandable reasons, the outcome wasn’t profitable for media companies as their income dropped, but on the other hand, the workload might have even grown as the web had to be managed and maintained alongside print.
Now, over the last ten years or so, media outlets have successfully brought the subscriptions familiar from print newspapers into the digital age. You take out a subscription and pay for it, and then you get to read. That’s how it worked in the old days with print newspapers too. If you pay, you get to read. If you don’t pay, then you either ask your friends or rely on information summarized by others. Simple.
This logic is somehow funny—that people expect to receive information that has ideally been specifically sought out, analyzed, and perhaps even questioned, and then presented to the reader in an easily understandable way. And then all of this should be shared with readers for free. Why on earth?
I’m not just picking on you; this kind of strange attitude is still relatively common today. It hasn’t been many days since I saw an interesting article on Facebook. The sharer was some smaller local media outlet, I don’t even remember which one. However, in the Facebook comments, it caught my eye that several people were complaining about the paywall. “Why on earth does even a small local media outlet have to use a paywall? Don’t you understand that you would get more readers without a paywall?”
Media doesn’t earn anything from readers alone, just as it doesn’t earn from reach or any mystical reputation. In fact, a high number of readers can even just increase media costs, as traffic spikes require more bandwidth from online media, which in turn often costs more money.
It’s somehow curious that this perspective is constantly emphasized in online articles. It’s hard to imagine people at the door of a movie theater or a concert venue being outraged that seeing a new movie or a favorite band costs money. Hardly anyone in that situation would start explaining that you would get a bigger audience if these performances were shared for free.
When we look at the world of investing, even the smallest investments are hundreds, and more likely thousands of euros. In the long run and across an entire portfolio, we’re often talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of euros. That Kauppalehti article, which discussed Summa Defence’s complicated current situation behind a paywall, can be accessed for as little as 2.9 euros (an offer, likely for a new customer) and at a standard price of 35.90 euros. In my opinion, that’s not an impossible price, especially if an investment of hundreds or thousands of euros in the company is on the other side of the scale.
Because of that, I don’t quite fully understand what is so completely incomprehensible about this equation.