Photo by Elijah O'Donell on Unsplash

The print media industry has, for years, been slowly strangled by the vagarities of surviving on dwindling advertising revenue. As the internet has grown, most major print circulars — newspapers, periodicals and the like — have created an online presence in order to stay ahead of a changing media delivery dynamic, and to attempt to remain relevant (and solvent) in a tumultuous and difficult media universe. As consumers have taken more and more of their media diet from online sources, most successful outlets have made the leap from strictly pulp to a platform that combines a mixture of both paper and online access. Advertising revenues have evaporated as product sellers move to mass social media sites like Facebook and Google. The paywall was instituted to augment declining advertising revenue.

The Wall Street Journal’s paywall allows the reader to see a few lines of text before requiring payment

You can walk into a market and buy a paper, still. The fifty cents or one dollar you pay for today’s paper, or the five or six dollars you pay for this month’s edition of Time or Rolling Stone does not cover the cost of production for these major print periodicals, of course, but it does help defray the costs. The Wall Street Journal, Der Spiegel, Washington Post, USA Today, Time Magazine, The Guardian, Fortune… all are still available in their pulp paper forms.

But more and more, readership of these marquee publications has switched from paper copies (analogue) to online (digital). Many outlets have created individual apps, and many have also joined Apple’s “Newsstand” in order to keep their media in front of readers and viewers. The iPad (Apple), the Nook (bookseller Barnes and Noble) and the Kindle (Amazon) are all media devices designed specifically for reading and viewing media. The “paywall” represents the direct monetization attempt of media provider platforms, and its very real battle to remain solvent.

And in most cases, it is a battle the media outlets are losing.

In 2015, Time Magazine appealed to readers to stick with them when they instituted their paywall… while continuing to place ads.

The Paywall is the most common method used today to place media in front of readers’ eyes, and consequently, as advertising revenues diminish, is also becoming the largest method for platform monetization. Intended to allow readers to pay for access to information, in reality the paywall acts mostly to turn readers away from the pages they seek to read. The simple truth is that the majority of readers will not pay for a subscription in order to read a single article, unless they have an interest in the entire publication. There is generally no way to pay for a single article. In short, while paywalls are intended to drive eyes to the platform and to thereby derive income; in reality, they have the opposite effect.

Clicking on an interesting article from a social media outlet leads the reader to that article. After a few sentences, or a few seconds, the paywall appears. Subscribe and give a form of payment, and continue. Or don’t, and be denied access to the article. Research shows that most readers refuse to pay and are denied access to the article, and both the outlet and the reader suffer for it.

Kin is designed for exactly this application, and is in a strong position to disrupt the media advertiser/paywall barrier that exists between the media outlet and the reader. Today, most paywalls require the reader to purchase access to the entire publication in order to read a single article. This is not only distasteful to most readers, it is expensive and wasteful of the reader’s attention and finances. Indeed, the reality is that most readers are not going to subscribe for a month or a year in order to read a single article, which means that the platform loses out on both readership, which has value and can be monetized in multiple ways, and more importantly, in earning any direct compensation.

What’s more, a media outlet participating in the Kin Ecosystem can easily track it’s most prolific and popular writers, and can compensate them more appropriately according to the value they drive to the outlet. Advertisers benefit as well, by more accurately targeting the ads readers choose to view and what surveys they complete in their Kin earning opportunities. By offering Kin earn and spend opportunities, the media outlet also participates with the Kin Rewards Engine, in which it earns money and drives significant transactional value for itself and the entire ecosystem.

Once the Kin Ecosystem comes online and begins producing results for participants, a strong use case exists for periodical outlets to monetize themselves and to stop driving away readership with fiat paywalls. By killing off the paywall in it’s current form, Kin may spark a renaissance for print media, and reverse the decline of the entire print news industry. In this way, Kin not only brings value to readers and outlets alike, it may act to provide for a free and unfettered press, and could provide an opportunity for outlets to turn away from corporate sponsorship and its inevitable bias.

In this way, Kin can also provide a tangible public service in the furtherance of media freedom and independence. By embracing Kin and the monetization opportunity it represents, media outlets can monetize themselves without being forced to seek corporate or biased support. Monetizing via the Kin Ecosystem will provide sustainable financial health for the outlet, and will provide significant transactional growth for all Kin users, including their media consumers.