Last week, I and many others online came across a post complaining about advertisements, registration walls, and paywalls for news. The post equated such to allowing the spread of disinformation and accelerating the leap to fascism because news isn’t being freely disseminated everywhere.

I was deliberating with myself whether to call this week’s Tech Thoughts something more negatively inclined, like “Nothing online is free,” but I think the title “Everything online has a cost” is the more liberal application of such a title, as it has additional literal and figurative connotations baked into it.

Let’s dive into what those are.

Everything online costs money to operate

The most literal interpretation of the above in today’s day and age is that everything online — from personal websites, blogs, news websites, ecommerce sites, video-streaming and video-sharing sites, and all the apps on phones, tablets, and laptops — costs money to put up, set up, and operate.

These include paying for the domain name, the hosting of servers and any cloud services, any security, email, and tech support services you need, as well as designing and building the site and its features and, if you’re doing any significant venture online, search engine optimization and marketing. This is also known as “How you stumble upon a site online 101.”

Most hosting websites will say that a personal website or blog with a modest audience can have a monthly upkeep of anywhere from $5 to $25. Meanwhile, ecommerce sites can have monthly upkeep costs into the low thousands of dollars, depending on traffic.

According to one web development company, a news website can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 just to build. The price of a website is dependent on the complexity of features desired, with monthly upkeep costs scaling depending on how many visitors you have.

Now, I do not have the figures of the Rappler website’s development and upkeep costs, but just imagine how that snowballs when you add app development costs and time spent hiring developers to build the platforms people participate in, like the Rappler Communities app, or even things like Facebook, Mastodon, X, or BlueSky.

If you aren’t paying for it, you’re still…

As you can imagine, posting on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, X, or elsewhere is not inherently free.

Thus, the adage I created would go, “If you aren’t paying for it, you’re still paying for it.”

To offset the costs of an individual posting on social media, for example, you allow websites and apps to handle your data. This data, usually anonymized, is put into a portfolio of your habits and predilections, and is turned into something that can be sold to advertisers for money, so that companies and ad agencies can cater to your wants and needs. This, in turn, prompts you to spend money on stuff being advertised to you.

In other words, you are the product being sold by social media companies to pay for the costs of posting on social media. (READ: What you need to know about surveillance capitalism)

A rant on Facebook will grant engagement money to Mark Zuckerberg, who has stamped out fact-checking initiatives in the United States. A post on X will, in some indirect way, fund Elon Musk’s already grand, sweeping empire of absurdity if it’s not news related to fact-checking his claims.

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Why news organizations need support

“Why don’t news sites make their content free for everyone to read, like the various social media platforms out there?” you might ask.

The answer is simple. The ubiquity with which seemingly free services and websites — whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, X, or YouTube or TikTok or even a dating app like Bumble — provide you with content is predicated on your downloading and registering to use the site or service.

That’s already your payment for the toll for your posts, and they will make money off you for as long as you post on their services and keep engagement going.

Even though news companies such as Rappler post on social media, social media platforms themselves are not news platforms, and do not treat the news with higher priority than any other type of speech online. In fact, platforms have deprioritized the news from visibility, allowing less substantial posts — such as authoritarian political speech, rage-baiting headlines from engagement grifters, and posts from scammers and profiteers — to become more visible online.

While governments, authoritarian or otherwise, may use some taxpayer money to post about their initiatives online or boost their posts for visibility, news organizations do not reliably do the same because it’s an added expense to shoulder.

Rappler asks for registrations to offset the costs of running a news website. This is in part so we know how to contact you about news, and also so we don’t have to go through social media to direct you to important things happening where you live.

The so-called death of third-party cookies — which power the targeted advertising that helps advertisers serve you ads — is good for privacy reasons and for a healthier online ecosystem, but it also means we need just a little bit of data to keep for ourselves so we know you’re you, and so we can better understand how you use Rappler as a news website.

Aside from that, it’s also partly to show you that we’re an organization worth subscribing to using Rappler Plus if you can afford a subscription.

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For those who need news, but cannot afford the subscription, it’s okay! A name and email address to reach you directly — the so-called registration wall — is the least commitment we ask of prospective readers as part of trying to prove our worth.

For those who don’t wish to register to the site, you can still read a news article for free once, but repeat visits to a page will need a registration.

Aside from that, the advertisements are there to help pay for the costs of keeping a news website up and running and to support us, the journalists, editors, writers, and production staff doing their work to bring you the things you need to know.

Everything online has a cost

As I’ve now established (hopefully), everything online has a cost.

That cost may not be visible to you, but it will be, eventually, if you allow it. Social media incentivizes you to talk there about the things that matter to you for its benefit.

What we’re asking is for you to listen to us as well when it comes to those same issues, whether it’s keeping the facts straight or reporting on points of governance, corruption-busting, or education issues for your benefit… and our survival.

All Rappler is asking is for you to read and learn from the news, and to spend some time to register or some money to subscribe to us.

It’s a small ask, but it has long-term implications for the future, everywhere. The choice is yours. – Rappler.com