What Everyone Is Missing About Media Business Models

Oh, how the winds have changed for ad-supported media. Over the past year, it’s become decidedly trendy to praise non-advertising business models. This week Ev Williams, a longtime advertising adherent, called online ads a “broken system.” Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist who has argued vociferously that news and opinion should be free, this week proposed a complicated micropayment model for Medium inspired by bitcoin. 

I’ve watched this rhetoric change with hope. There has never been a more important time to fix the broken business model of news. With the election and its aftermath, the news has become the news, and readers everywhere are rooting for quality.

But everywhere I look, I see publishers paying lip service to more direct payment models without taking real action. And publishers—unwilling to embrace and prioritize subscriptions—are still serving advertisers over readers.