Subscriptions best hope for UK newspapers not digital levy: op-ed
The dwindling market for UK newspapers will not be resolved by a 1% levy on digital intermediaries such as Google and Facebook, says an op-ed by Glyn Moody in Ars Technica UK. In a letter to The Guardian, representatives of UK newspapers called for the levy to be included in the forthcoming Digital Economy Bill. However, Moody suggests moving to a subscription-based model and away from data collection would be best, so readers pay for what they value, allowing companies to continue offering their products without compromising or battling digital intermediaries for business.

Last Friday, many of the good and the great in the world of UK journalism published a joint letter in the Guardian. It rightly pointed out that newspaper publishing in the UK and elsewhere is in crisis. As advertising drops, editorial budgets are being cut and staff-levels are being reduced. As a result, traditional journalism is under threat. The signatories of the letter have a plan for saving it, and want it enshrined in the Digital Economy Bill currently going through parliament:

Public interest journalism in particular has been hit the hardest as newspapers are lured into a clickbait culture which favours the sensational and the trivial. In the light of this, we propose a one percent levy on the operations of the largest digital intermediaries with the resulting funds redistributed to non-profit ventures with a mandate to produce original local or investigative news reporting.

This is not the only attempt to re-direct money from the Internet giants towards newspapers and magazines. As Ars has reported, the European Commission wishes to introduce a new ancillary copyright for publishers that will last for 20 years. The idea once again is to force big online companies like Google to pay money to traditional publishers.

Leaving aside the fact that the ancillary copyright idea will cause huge collateral damage to the Internet, it's the wrong approach for the same reason that the digital levy is wrong. Both seek to punish Google and Facebook for being too successful at gaining online advertising.

The rancour towards them is made plain in last week's letter, where "digital intermediaries such as Google and Facebook" are described as "amassing eye-watering profits and paying minimal tax in the UK." Most people would agree that they should be paying their fair share of taxes, but trying to demonise them for their "eye-watering profits" reveals the underlying envy.

Similarly, both the EU and UK proposals fail to address the real problem: that traditional publishers are unable to compete with Internet companies when it comes to advertising. As the letter in The Guardian rightly notes, when newspapers try to beat online media at their own game, they descend into clickbait.

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The continuing failure of newspapers to hold their own online is not the only indication that the old model of publishing—content that is either free or highly subsidised thanks to advertising—is broken. Another strong hint is the massive popularity of ad blockers. That suggests that even if newspapers were successful in attracting more online ads, they wouldn't be seen by visitors because adblockers would filter them out.

A digital levy allocated to non-profits producing high-quality journalism doesn't address the core problem. The decline of most traditional newspapers would continue, and that's not healthy for either them or us. What is needed is a more general solution that will ensure that newspapers and other media sites can flourish independently of what the "digital intermediaries" are doing.

Given the failure of advertising to provide the necessary funding, there is only one realistic alternative: we must pay for what we value.

It's something I've started to do. As someone who has used the Internet for a quarter of a century, and always believed that free access to its riches was an important aspect of its achievement, starting to pay for things has been painful for me—not financially, but philosophically.

The gradual shift in my thinking is in part attributable to Edward Snowden's revelations of the scale of surveillance being carried out by the NSA and GCHQ. One of the many troubling programmes he revealed was PRISM, whereby the NSA accesses the user data held by all the major Internet companies.

PRISM means the routine and comprehensive tracking carried out for the benefit of advertisers is at the same time government surveillance, albeit indirectly and sporadically. That's not only the best justification for using an ad blocker, it's a key reason why we need to move away from forcing companies to depend on ads for online revenue.

Neither the ancillary copyright nor digital levy approaches address this issue, since both merely try to compensate for lack of advertising, rather than offering a substitute for it. Subscriptions, or other forms of reader funding, would allow media companies to move away from selling services based on the visitor data they collect.

Starting to pay for both the sites and services you care about—Twitter, for example, which badly needs a new business model—is not just a good way to preserve them. It also helps cut back on the tracking we are routinely subject to at a time when government surveillance is likely to increase on both sides of the Atlantic.

Listing image by Lucy Toner