New and improving

You spoke, I listened, and now I'm going to try a few things. And, for the first time ever: "Also worth your time..." (Instead of "7 other things worth a click.")

Craig Newmark was once asked why Craigslist (which he founded) didn’t just fill up the white space on its pages with programmatic ads. Given their traffic, it’s like leaving millions of dollars on the table.

His answer was basically: We don’t do that because users don’t seem to want it.

I was thinking about that quote this weekend after I asked readers how you feel about me linking to sources behind paywalls. It’s the number-1 complaint that I get, but I wanted to be sure this wasn’t selection bias at work.

Muscle memory

No ambiguity here: It seems you don’t like it. One reader put it very succinctly: “Paywalls suck.”

I don’t want Understandably to suck of course, so I started to think about how we got here and what to do about it.

I’ve been in digital media for about a decade now, and most digital media is supported by ads. So, I spent years teaching myself to get people to click on articles, without crossing the line into “clickbait.”

Millions and millions and millions and millions of cl…