I am fairly critical of paywalls. I personally think that anything that is asking for people to pay for content that they could easily find elsewhere on the internet (like news) is not worth investing in and anyone that says that it is the future of news is silly. For example, why pay just shy of £9 a month on The Times’ website when I can get information on what they’re reporting elsewhere?
However, if what you’re offering for a monthly payment is extra content that you may not necessarily need – extra community features and other worthwhile things – then I might be interested. Recently, Giant Bomb, a website about computer games, tried to launch just that. For either $50 a year or $5 a month you could get access to bonus features that won’t be available to those who don’t have a membership. They had the chance to show how a paywall should be done.
And yet they managed to screw it up. Thanks a bunch.
One of the controversial parts of this subscription was splitting up their podcast, the Giant Bombcast, in half so that the first hour would be for everyone and then the second hour would be for subscribers (but released a week later for free users). Considering that everyone used to be able to download the whole podcast, which I’d argue is the feature that gives the website its unique identity, it unsurprisingly got criticised from nearly everyone. In the end, this decision has been reversed, which leaves a gaping hole in terms of what is actually going to be provided for subscription users in the way of a replacement feature.
Here’s what’s being offered for your bucks:
Free:
Access our suite of premium Web Sites
Limited profile abilities
Monthly ($4.95):
HD Video
Premium profile features and content
HTML 5 based mobile site
Exclusive Friday live show
Yearly ($49.95)
Everything in the monthly
No Ads
A custom T-shirt
10$ in savings
Everything that remained free before will remain free but then there’s the issue of what they’re going to invent to persuade people to pay up. Is it going to be more community features? Is it going to be something really cool that will enhance my browsing experience? The fact that they’ve been very vague about it detracts me from wanting to part with my money.
Giant Bomb have no one to blame but themselves really. Despite the phenomenal growth of their website, since it is now a very strong resource for video gaming information and it also has a very unique community, they have put ideas first and making money second. This seems like a very odd statement since I applaud good ideas but there has to be some business sense that goes with it; it seems like no thought has been put into how some of their features would make the website money to sustain itself.
There’s also the fact that, in truth, it doesn’t feel like a subscription and more like charity, which is another put off altogether. I watched about 15-20 minutes of their massive live show on Thursday night, which went on for hours and saw presenters thanking everyone for their money in their best ‘sincere’ voices. It felt like a telethon for nerds with copious amounts of filler material (I have good authority from my brother about that). It was awful.
Will things get better? For the sake of Giant Bomb, they have to. A lot of trust has been lost over the way that the paywall has been organised and who knows how long it will take to win it back? For me, it just ends up being frustrating. They had an amazing chance to show the world how a subscription-based service should be done as opposed to asking people to pay for information you can get elsewhere and they completely cocked it up.
