Source: Daring Fireball
The collapse of Business Insider’s subscription base signals that scale-dependent digital media models built on traffic arbitrage and ad-adjacent content can’t simply rebrand their way into sustainable paywalls—consumers won’t pay for what they never valued as premium. This represents a broader reckoning: the era of “free content funded by ads, now with a paywall tax” is over, and publishers that didn’t build genuine differentiation before erecting paywalls face a death spiral they can’t reverse.