Why would anyone ever pay for water? Water is free.

Years ago I came across a cartoon that has always stuck with me.

Two guys are standing at a spring. One takes a sip and says, “Man, this water is delicious. We should bottle it and sell it.”  The other replies, “That’s ridiculous. Why would anyone ever pay for water? Water is free.”

Funny to think that in our lifetimes (well, my lifetime at least), the idea of paying for a bottle of water was absurd.  I feel like that cartoon is a good metaphor for what I see happening in the world of digital media.

One of the most common pushbacks I hear around the notion of paying for content is some version of this question: why would anyone ever pay for media when there is so much of it available for free?

On the surface, it sounds reasonable (even though I strenuously object to the notion that anything regarding media is ever actually free). In practice, it misses the point entirely.

Consumers do not mind paying for things. They mind paying for things that do not offer value.

Water did not become valuable because it stopped being free. It became valuable because bottled water offered something different. It was portable. Filtered. Reliable. Clean. You knew what you were getting, when you needed it.

The problem is not that there’s too much free content. The problem is that much of it is noisy, repetitive, shallow, or shaped by incentives that have nothing to do with quality or truth.

That is why the media companies that are still alive and thriving today all made the same difficult decision.  When faced with the choice of whether to offer everything for free and hope they could make a living purely as an advertising product or ask consumers to pay for the value they provide, they went the latter route and put up paywalls.

Not because they wanted to restrict access, but because they recognized a reality that advertising alone could not solve. Attention based business models reward speed, volume, outrage, and sameness. They do not reward depth, patience, or credibility.

Local newspapers that took the risk and said, this work has value and consumers want to support the work they value, are the ones that survived. Advertising did not disappear, but it stopped being the only thing holding the entire operation together.

They were not competing against free. They were offering an alternative to the noise.  They focused on giving readers more of what they value and asking those readers to support their work.  

We have seen the same dynamic play out across the creator economy over the last decade.

Independent writers are making a real living through direct support from their readers, not because they invented new forms of content, but because they offered a clear value exchange. They told readers, if you value this work, here is a way to support it directly. Readers responded in large numbers.

Hell, look at OnlyFans which generated roughly $2.6 billion dollars in revenue last year.  Clearly their success isn’t coming because there’s no free alternative to what they offer on their platform. They succeeded because they created a premium context and a direct relationship between creator and audience.

When you step back, the claim that people will only consume free content starts to look intellectually lazy. History, especially recent history, says otherwise.

There is another piece of this that people are starting to feel more acutely.  When content is ‘free’ the content is optimized for something other than the differentiated viewpoints or  unique insights it offers the audience.  It’s optimized to be an attention machine.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with professional athletes lately. Elite athletes, who have earned credibility by being the best in the world at what they do.  They don’t want to, nor do they have the time to become full time creators chasing algorithmic incentives. Their value comes from excellence, not posting cadence.

They train. They compete. They document parts of that journey. Fans follow them because of what they have accomplished.

And yet, even with large followings, many athletes know that half or more of their audience may never see what they post unless they pay to boost it.  They know that their social media audience will never sniff the yoked dude with a bunch of tats that posts 5x a day.  Algorithms decide what gets surfaced. And most of the time the athletes have no idea why one piece of content reaches people and another disappears.

The audience is already there. The credibility is already there. The system simply does not respect it.

The same is true for the documentary filmmaker who spends a year telling a story that matters. Or the writer trying to uncover something uncomfortable but important. Or the investigative journalist that works for months on a story that he or she knows needs to be told.

That’s the work that we started our platform to support and that I increasingly see audiences rewarding.  Work that is shaped by expertise, lived experience, patience, and honesty. Work that is not designed primarily to perform well in an advertising auction.

People will pay for that. Not because they are forced to, but because they want to support it. Because it respects their time. Because it feels human.

The idea that everything must be free to survive is quietly breaking down. What is emerging instead is a model built around value, trust, and direct relationships.  It’s a wonderfully hopeful shift against the bleak backdrop that has dominated the discussion over the last few years.