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The experience is universal: You’re researching with a specific topic in mind and find the perfect article, you go to open it and… paywall. Paywalls are the restrictions put on news or academic journals that can be bypassed with a purchase. These purchases are often in the form of subscription plans, which will sound familiar to users of websites like The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

But why do they exist? Why pay to read the news? Something that The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal all have in common is that they are established, trusted sources, that have been in the public eye for at least 100 years. These websites have roots in traditional media that have carried over to digital media. Because of this, they have a loyal reader base that is willing to pay.

While it is becoming increasingly common for media outlets to shift into this business model of digital paywalls, many consumers are not willing to or do not have the means to pay for online news. 

Issues with paywalls are not exclusive to the media sphere. In academia, paywalls are a separate challenge. Scientific articles are already associated with a level of exclusivity due to their technical writing and jargon, and an added paywall can make them entirely inaccessible. Realistically speaking, the production of scientific journals is expensive even if the raw material is free and peer reviewers are volunteers. When a scientific journal has no paywall, the cost of production is shifted to the researchers paying money up front to publish. But even then, staff must be paid to create the print and digital journals themselves.

Sarah Zielinski, award-winning writer and editor, and author of “Scientific Publishing Can’t be Free,” explains: “‘Information wants to be free’ has become a slogan of our Internet Age, but we’re forgetting the second half of the quotation: ‘Information also wants to be expensive.’ We’ve gotten so used to having instant, free access to information that we’ve forgotten that high-quality information comes with a price. If we want that quality, we have to pay for it.” 

But what about full-access news and academic journals? Should these publications be considered less credible? In a way, yes: Paywalls perpetuate the divide between fact-based journalism and free propaganda. Free content is easy to produce because it lacks time and effort and is not held to the same standards as professional journalism. 

To put it simply, paywalls are a way for organizations to generate revenue without relying on digital advertising. While this market has never been more prominent, mostly taken up by giants like Google and Facebook, publications do not see a lot of their ad revenue. When digital advertisements do not bring in enough money, paywalls are the next step. 

When students can’t afford to bypass paywalls, they get their news from another source: Social media. 

“People rely on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to get their news, and that news can be very biased and misleading or lacking in evidence. Especially on Facebook, where their algorithm is curated to the specific person who will only see the news that they want to see, instead of a well-rounded unbiased source of news,” said UW Madison sophomore, Bre Medina. “I would definitely say that the majority of my peers get their news from social media.”

A study conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute surveyed people ages 16-40 and found that 71% get their news daily from social media, citing platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Twitter. As well as this, the study found that about a quarter of young people are regularly paying to access at least one news source. About 9/10 young people claim misinformation in media is a problem and 6/10 claim misinformation in media is a “major” problem. 

“I remember when Roe V. Wade was overturned, it was hard to access a lot of credible information because a lot of the big and credible news sites have paywalls,” said Medina. “If I’m clicking on an article, it’s because it has information that I want to read or analyze and learn from, so when there’s a paywall it’s really disheartening.”

It is not a surprise that consumers looking for information turn to social media when they cannot bypass paywalls. But behind this is a multitude of problems outside of potential misinformation. For one, social media is tailored. It is easy for consumers to filter the information they are taking in from social media and create an echo chamber. There may even be financial incentives behind sites turning a blind eye to misinformation. After all, eye-catching content that gets more clicks generates more revenue. 

“In the Constitution, in the first amendment, we talk about freedom of the press and speech and how everyone is entitled to information,” said Medina. “Paywalls are limiting people’s access to information.” 

Unfortunately, paywalls are a necessary evil that exists for the sole reason of funding. There are, however, other ways this funding can be achieved. Grand View University librarian, Katelyn Handler outlines two separate but parallel solutions in academic publishing and journalism. 

“With academic publishing, it could be a revamp of the system in general. There would be a lot more power among academic institutions if they were to collectively organize and decide to say ‘this is how we think academic publishing should work,’ and work together to establish that framework instead of letting big academic publishers do it,” said Handler. “When it comes to journalism, it’s recognizing that journalism is a public good that serves our communities. Having civic organizations, or some government funding would be helpful.”

Handler says it would also be helpful for some publications to develop micro-transaction models.

“You see a lot of people saying ‘I can’t afford to subscribe to a newspaper every month or pay an annual subscription, but I do want to pay something to read this one article’ and they are willing to spend 50 cents, or a dollar, to read it,” said Handler. 

While this solution would cause revenue streams to be inconsistent, Handler says that it would be better than nothing and potentially become more sustainable long term. 

It is hard to get consumers to pay for their news. It is even harder to get consumers to pay for digital, or licensed, news. 

In the digital age, there is no ownership of content. While one can pay a subscription fee to access content, they are not paying for the content individually. If that content is removed or excluded- it is no longer usable. As well as this, there is no clear uniformity amongst the rise of paywalls. The Columbia Journalism Review analyzed the country’s top 25 most-visited daily newspaper websites in 2017 and cited 15 of the 25 to have a paywall of some description. Main aspects like cost, amount of content provided, and ease of workaround all varied. 

With the rise of paywalls, comes a rise of ways to bypass them. 

“If I had to guess, when a student comes across a paywall, they’re closing the site, just because I do that myself,” said Handler. “If it’s a topic that I’m really invested in, or I know it’s a publication that I’m interested in reading, I will investigate other ways to get access.”

There are two types of paywalls: Hard paywalls, which require upfront fees to access any and all content, and soft paywalls, which allow readers to access some content before paying for further access. Metered paywalls are a type of soft paywall that allows access to a specific number of articles before requiring a subscription. Metered models are considered less disruptive and the most effective push to convert non-subscribers to subscribers. Generally speaking: the harder the paywall, the harder it is to bypass.

As well as this, the type of content blocker matters too. User-side paywalls block content (with CSS or Javascript) that pre-exists on a page whereas server-side paywalls only send content to a page after the fee is paid. User-side paywalls are easier to bypass and have little search engine optimization (SEO) risk whereas server-side paywalls are harder to bypass and have a larger SEO risk.

From the publisher’s perspective, users choosing to bypass paywalls are only damaging if they negatively affect SEO performance and the user has a likelihood to convert into a subscriber. Consider The New York Times, for example, which is considered the most successful paywall worldwide in terms of its number of subscribers but has an easy-to-bypass paywall. 

“There are websites out there that you can use to get around a paywall, like 12ft Ladder, where you just plug in the web address and it will see if it can get around the paywall for you, and sometimes that works. For some stuff, it is as simple as opening the article in an incognito tab,” said Handler. “Sometimes you can’t get around paywalls using these tricks, or people don’t know the tricks, and it creates a tiered system of those who have access to information versus those who don’t.”