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Ben Brooks gets close to the heart of the problem with pay walls when he writes Subscription Hell. It's hard to make money from pay walls.

The only online sites that do well are those like New Zealand's National Business Review or The Economist. Both serve well-heeled audiences with unique, quality content readers can't get elsewhere.

Brooks makes two interesting points.

First, differentiation. Brooks is thinking about podcasting, but it applies to all online media. In essence he says there are thousands of undifferentiated podcasts chasing the same audience.

...but will they pay?

The implication that no-one will pay to listen to one of the podcasts when there are dozens of free alternatives. You could say the same about most online media. This, in part, does not apply to pay wall successes like the NBR and The Economist. Their audiences don't have obvious alternatives.

The other point is subtle. Brooks makes the connection between people paying for apps and buying pay wall subscriptions.

On the surface these are two quite distinct markets. And yet, recently I was thinking about exactly this concept from the opposite point of view. I have a number of subscriptions to pay each month. Some are for apps or online services. Others are for, it's not the best word to use, but let's go with it: content.

Pay wall, subscription software: two aspects of the same thing

In my budgeting, I see the two as aspects of the same thing. I allow myself so many dollars a month for subscriptions. It's a single pool of money to cover things like cloud storage, online music, movie downloads, pay walls, apps and services. What isn't spent on  apps is available for media. What isn't spent on online media can be spent on apps.

A decade ago the budget was zero. It's not zero today. While it isn't a huge amount of money, it's about the same as I spend on coffee. It may grow larger in the future.

The issue is, consciously or not, people only budget so much money for subscriptions. I have a limited pool of funds. So does everyone else. The world has a limited pool of funds for subscriptions. On a world scale it is huge and still growing. Even so, there is not enough to go around for everyone who would like to earn money selling pay wall subscriptions or apps. Too many sellers, too few buyers.

And there's the problem. It's not hopeless. Services like Press Patron (see the red button at the foot of this page) offer a way out. People can choose to set their own amount to pay. If you go back to my budget approach, if I don't buy software one month, I can flip a few bucks into someone's Press Patron.

But it's difficult. The market for content pay walls or subscription software is not infinite.

Dealing with the pay wall economywas first posted at billbennett.co.nz.

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