RE: Are Paywalls Worth It? - Here's What You Need to Know

HackerNoon Reporter: Please state the link of the article you are reviewing:

https://hackernoon.com/are-paywalls-worth-it-heres-what-you-need-to-know

What is your opinion regarding this piece?

I think that Evan did a good job overall.

Authors need to be motivated to write, but the content must be available for those who can’t afford to pay.

For mature programmers, it can be laughable to avoid paying $5, but I used to live in a condition where I couldn’t afford even that, and a huge amount of people cannot.

What are some of the varying perspectives on this subject that you’re aware of? [Example: if some people are pro, why are they pro? If some people are against, why are they against?]

There are a couple of extremes.

One group of people wants the content to be free for everyone. Another group wants to have compensation for every bit of information that other people have used.

What are some of the nuances people frequently miss when discussing this subject matter?

Nowadays, we have a trendy movement called “Web 3.0”. This is the concept that will putatively allow people to take ownership of their data thanks to blockchain. I’m not an expert in this field, but people keep saying that it will help to an extent with royalties for content creators.

Developers are trying to tackle this problem already. For example, there is a Brave browser. In this browser, you are acquiring currency for viewing ads and you can automatically pay your favorite content creators with this currency based on the amount of time you spend consuming their products.

What is your favourite quote or paragraph from this article? Why?

Jenn Leach is very successful, and I absolutely want to give her credit for her accomplishments and for giving me a source to work with. Her blog post that received 200,000 views was called, "This is How Much Medium Paid Me for 100,000 views."

I laughed at it. It speaks volumes that people are so curious about making money by writing. And it proves the point that money is the decisive motivation for most people. So we need to find a way to motivate these people without a paywall.

Was there a part of the article that you didn’t necessarily think about before, what was it?

I didn’t know that you can make a relatively big amount of money just by writing. It is fair compensation, though.

This article will definitely instigate me to look into an alternative way of monetization and probably use them by myself.

Is there anything else about this you’d like us to know? [Trends, future, concerns, hopes… etc.]

This article also mentioned that AI-generated blog posts are on a decent level already. The trend will definitely continue. Will there be a space for humans?