Laura Hazard Owen of Nieman Lab writes about why tech news site 404 Media requires reader emails before accessing articles.
Owen writes, “On January 26, 2024, 404 published a 2,800-word reported piece, ‘We need your email address,’ about what was happening to its stories. From then on, the founders explained, readers would need to enter their email addresses before reading stories. They also started putting older stories behind paywalls.
“‘It completely changed our business almost literally overnight,’ Koebler said. 404 had around 3,000 paid subscribers by the end of March 2024 and today has more than 11,000. The work that went into the big explainer piece paid off. Koebler had expected a backlash: ‘I hate paywalls, I don’t like logging into things. But by explaining why we’re doing it, we’ve had people evangelize for us.’ When social media users complain about the email or paywall, 404 readers will ‘share the explanation of why we did it.'”
Read more here.
