CNN is adding a $3.99-per-month paywall to its website. Democrats will be hardest hit as CNN and other legacy media sites trade fewer eyeballs for more cash, limiting their capacity to drive narratives. But that’s also why their audiences are smaller now anyway.

Politics aside, this is yet another acknowledgment by the online media industry that giving the product away for free is not profitable. The problem goes back to the 1990s, when cable-news networks, newspapers, and magazines saw their websites as small loss leaders attached to their money-making brick-and-mortar businesses. Today, those businesses have seen their audiences crater, so giving the website content away for free has come to seem daft — but asking people to pay now relies on appealing more to their sense of charity than to their sense of themselves as paying for a product:

Smaller news organizations have run up against subscription fatigue and other sources of resistance – a reflection of the fact that virtually all news coverage was published for free when the World Wide Web was popularized in the 1990s. Media companies large and small have spent the past decade or so trying to change the norms around access to news.

Still, many readers and viewers don’t connect the dots between personally paying for news and helping to sustain the industry as a whole. [Greg Piechota, a researcher-in-residence at the International News Media Association] said “unfortunately, based on surveys, most consumers across the world are not aware of the financial challenges faced by the commercial news media.” “But when they hear about the industry’s critical financial situation,” he said, “their willingness to pay for journalism is the highest, studies showed.”

In retrospect, the Wall Street Journal was right all along. Nearly alone, the Journal held from the outset to the idea that it was a product people should pay for, regardless of whether its content was on paper or on the Web. Many others have followed suit.

Selfishly, I hate paywalls because I don’t like to be stopped from reading things and I like even less when other people are stopped from reading my writing. But any business whose model isn’t selling to the customer is going to either go broke or have some really bad incentives. As they say, if you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

In totally unrelated news, you can gift a digital subscription to NRPLUS for just $4 a month!