Platforms as templates: Emerging datafication dynamics in digital news outlets’ datawalls

Abstract

News outlets have responded to platforms disrupting audience engagement and revenue models by pursuing more stable revenue through paywall subscriptions and membership programs. However, many outlets continue to struggle, and scholars have suggested that outlets experiment with data monetization strategies by asking readers to “pay” with their data – in other words, by implementing a “datawall.” We conducted an exploratory landscape analysis of digital news websites and interviewed digital news professionals to evaluate the extent to which datawalls actually exist in the field and to investigate the roles of platformization and datafication. We found that datawalls exist on a spectrum with a complicated relationship to paywalls and that platforms play an important role in the emergence of datawalls that calls for extending the existing conceptual model of platformization. We argue that datawalls represent attempts to adopt platform logics by accumulating audience data; thus, platforms serve as templates for digital news outlets. We discuss the implications of these findings for conceptualizing platformization and datafication.

Keywords:

• Datafication
• datawall
• digital news
• paywall
• platformization

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Dr. Mike Ananny, members of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP), and the anonymous reviewers for their generative feedback that greatly improved this article.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Funding

This work was supported by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the USC Graduate School, and the Annenberg Doctoral Student Summer Research Fellowship.

Notes

1 See Nerone and Barnhurst (2003) for a more detailed discussion of how access, attention, and revenue have been recurring problems in the historical contexts wherein some news is paid and some is free.

2 The outlets included in the rank are based on SimilarWeb’s classification of news and media publishers, refined by Press Gazette. The list encompasses outlets such as Breitbart and Daily Mail, whose lack of news values is highly contested (see Heft et al. 2020; Roberts and Wahl-Jorgensen 2022). We clarify that the goal of our study is not to uphold the legitimacy of all included outlets as news organizations; rather we decided to include them in our analysis in order to map how such diverse media outlets that are frequented by US readers as an il(legitimate) source of information are responding to and adopting the logics of platformization.

3 HuffPost has multiple country-specific editions around the world. We examined the United States edition (huffpost.com) since this study was focused on digital news outlets frequented by US audiences.

4 The funnel is a marketing metaphor to visualize a pipeline of activities to attract, engage, and convert an audience into consumers. The “top of the funnel” refers to activities intended to create brand awareness and attract new leads, while the “bottom of the funnel” refers to activities intended to convert leads into consumers through engagement, purchases, and brand loyalty.

5 The value of first-party cookies was echoed by interviewees from other outlets as well. For example, a Reuters employee suggested that journalism will “need[s] to own the relationship with readers or customers” and be a “trustworthy” actor as third-party cookies go away.