Despite relaxing paywalls, publishers like Bloomberg, WSJ and The Atlantic see subscription spikes

Media on the incumbent web is in crisis. It turns out that paying publishers for clicks, endless loops of “content” and ads, all served on platforms far beyond their maximum-viable scale is ideal for misinformation, disinformation and the decay of trust.

This increase in revenue comes at the cost of long-term customer satisfaction, but nobody knows how to really measure that, so investors don’t care.

The ongoing collapse of advertising revenue within the creative media landscape certainly exacerbates the issue, with publications forced to rely on reader subscriptions, sponsored content, or pay-for-play coverage to fund their platforms – two out of three of which limit any negative feedback almost entirely.

Smaller papers have been especially hard hit, but the crisis is hurting big outlets as well. The New York Times and News Corp., the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, have both lost advertisers -- even if readers are more engaged. And the Los Angeles Times, serving the second-largest media market, is furloughing employees on the paper’s business... See more

In recent months, two macro trends have rocked the media industry: publications have pivoted hard to a subscription-first model, and thousands of journalists have been laid off.