Do You Like Paywalls? Neither Do We. But Here’s an Amazing Statistic

You likely don’t belong to the richest One Per Cent, and neither do the two of us (at least not yet. Watch your back, Murdoch!)

But there is another One Per Cent Club you might want to consider helping to form. Far fewer than one out of 100 people who visit The Tyee are monthly members of our Tyee Builders club — people who pledge a financial amount that fits their budget to support our independent journalism.

Because of them, we don’t charge everyone at the door — er, paywall. Like the Guardian newspaper, for example, we make our journalism available to everyone, counting on the goodwill and generosity of some of our readers to keep us going.

Right now, around 4,400 people have stepped up to support The Tyee on a monthly basis. The up-to-a-million people who read The Tyee every month have those Builders to thank — and of course, so do we at The Tyee, because our Builders allow us to do the work we love.

We dare to think — what if just one out of 100 Tyee visitors DID join our Builders? You would be amazed at what a difference that would make to our resources. We could do so much more.

So why not just go the route of others and erect a paywall, blocking people from reading our stories if they don’t pony up right away?

Good question. Part of the reason is we feel your paywall pain.

You know the experience. You see a headline on a social media platform, or Google News advertising a really interesting article that you want to read, you click through and might get to read one paragraph, and then boom: to continue reading this article, sign up for a paid subscription. Or maybe a counter pops up showing you how many more free articles you have this month before you need to start paying.

Now, there is a very good reason for digital news organizations to have a paywall. Having experienced reporters on staff, not to mention editors, web designers, everyone on board that works hard to publish accurate, thorough reporting on a daily basis is not cheap. News organizations must generate revenue to fund operations, and the old way of doing things (selling boatloads of advertising) just isn’t working so well anymore (but that’s a longer story).

So how are we getting away with this? How come, in all of our 17 years of publishing, have our readers never encountered a paywall when reading on our site?

It really does come down to the Tyee Builders program.

The Tyee is a reader-funded publication, meaning it exists because of readers who choose to support our work with regular monthly contributions, even though we don’t have a paywall. This amazing group of 4,400+ people, who we call Tyee Builders, allows us to pay our writers fairly and focus on going deep on stories that truly matter to our readers.

In the next three weeks, we’re aiming to add 500 new monthly Tyee Builders to our ranks to help us keep up the pace. Click here to join now.

And no, we aren’t threatening to put up a paywall if we don’t reach our goal. Here’s why:

1. Many of our supporters don’t want us to put up a paywall. They want our reporting to get in front of as many people as possible and make as big an impact as possible. We agree, because we are in this for the sweet, sweet impact (click here to read our Impact Report for 2020). Tyee Builders are about supporting access for everyone, not gaining exclusive access.


2. We earnestly believe that news and information should be accessible for all, not just those who can afford to pay for it. Living through a public health crisis has made this abundantly clear.

Still, consider what our team of independent journalists has managed to accomplish with far fewer than one per cent support from readers. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve watchdogged the local health response and have been way out in front in bringing news of the latest scientific findings and how other countries were handling the pandemic better, offering alternative routes for B.C. and Canada. Some of these stories have been read by hundreds of thousands of people.

And last year, we received further proof our coverage is highly influential. The Tyee’s Andrew Nikiforuk was awarded Commentator of the Year at the Webster Awards, B.C.’s top journalism prize. In the past couple of weeks, our team has racked up a stack of award nominations from the Canadian Journalism Foundation, the Digital Publishing Awards, the National Magazine Awards and the Alberta Magazine Awards.

We’ve expanded our team in the past year, and we’re not done yet. But in order to keep up with demand and execute all that we want to do, we need our Tyee Builders program to keep apace.

Our goal is to add 500 more monthly supporters by June 7. Will you join us? Click here to sign up now.

The truth is, we actually don’t need every single person who reads The Tyee to pay. But we do need some people to pay.

Currently, about 0.6 per cent of our average monthly visitors are signed up to contribute on a monthly basis.

We’ve run the numbers and we estimate that if just one per cent of the people who visit The Tyee each month sign up to be a monthly Tyee Builder, that would increase our vital reader funding by 67 per cent, placing us on a firm footing to grow.

That’s it. Just one per cent of readers pitching in to the publication means we can pay our people fairly and continue to expand our team of fiercely independent journalists, who publish their stories on a site that invites everyone to read them without any restrictions on access.

Gaining 500 new monthly supporters this month won’t get us to our one-per-cent goal, but it will help us nudge that much closer. And it will tell us we are right to believe we can get there.

If you want to help The Tyee grow our independent newsroom and do even more impactful journalism, please join Tyee Builders today and help us reach our target of 500 new monthly supporters by June 7. (Oh, and you’ll be surprised at how easy we’ve made it.)