Techdirt Doesn’t Annoy You Into Paying, And That’s Worth Paying For

from the support-techdirt-and-feel-good-about-it dept

We’re a few weeks into our end of year crowdfunding campaign—donate $100 or more (check out that $230 option!) and we’ll send you our first commemorative challenge coin celebrating 30 years of Section 230. I’ve already laid out why our coverage matters, why we’re not selling out (because we’re not like Bari Weiss), and why we’re one of the only sites getting Section 230 right.

But here’s the real reason to support Techdirt: we’re one of the rare remaining websites on the internet that doesn’t believe in annoying people as a business model.

You know the drill. You open a news article. There’s a banner ad at the top that won’t scroll away. Another at the bottom, also stuck. A skyscraper ad bisecting the text. You try to scroll past it and accidentally click, launching some garbage in a new tab. Or worse: the article itself is freely readable, but only after you’ve dismissed three different popups begging you to subscribe, register, or turn off your ad blocker.

Or you get six paragraphs in—just enough to get invested—and hit this:

Bait and switch. Every time.

Techdirt does none of that. You can read the site for free. You can also get the full text of all our posts via RSS or in your email with our newsletter. You don’t need to pay or register. Hell, you don’t even need to register to comment. We don’t cover the page in ads. We don’t pop up annoying reminders. You can share our content freely, safe from anyone saying “paywall, can’t read” in response.

When sites do that, it feels like the first stage of Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” curve, where a site starts to figure out ways to annoy users to extract value from them by making them pay to avoid the annoyance. It’s deliberately decreasing the value in the hopes you’ll pay to get rid of the annoyance.

And while the “paid newsletter” Substack-style setup is a fascinating business model, when I’ve asked supporters of Techdirt how they would feel if we offered something similar, the response was almost unanimous: people love reading Techdirt in part to share what’s here, and they’d get annoyed if they felt they couldn’t share our stories any more.

I’d rather people pay here not because we’ve annoyed them into supporting us, but because they feel they get genuine value from what we do here and would like to enable much more of that.

And, in order to keep providing value we do need your support.

But this is about more than just keeping Techdirt running. It’s about proving that a different model can work—that you can run a news site by treating readers like people you respect, not resources to be mined. Here’s our work, we think it’s valuable, and if you agree, support it.

Every other model on the internet right now assumes you need to annoy people into paying. Frustrate them with paywalls. Interrupt them with popups. Make the experience just bad enough that they’ll hand over money to make it stop. That’s not a relationship. That’s a hostage negotiation.

We’re betting that if you get value from what we do, you’ll support it because you want more of it—not because we’ve made it impossible to read otherwise.

If you think that model deserves to exist, back it. Because if this works, it proves something: that you can build a sustainable news site by trusting your audience, not by annoying them into submission.

Filed Under: business models, coin, fundraiser, journalism