Platforms as templates: Emerging datafication dynamics in digital news outlets’ datawalls

Abstract

News outlets have responded to platforms disrupting audience engagement and revenue models by pursuing more stable revenue through paywall subscriptions and membership programs. However, many outlets continue to struggle, and scholars have suggested that outlets experiment with data monetization strategies by asking readers to “pay” with their data – in other words, by implementing a “datawall.” We conducted an exploratory landscape analysis of digital news websites and interviewed digital news professionals to evaluate the extent to which datawalls actually exist in the field and to investigate the roles of platformization and datafication. We found that datawalls exist on a spectrum with a complicated relationship to paywalls and that platforms play an important role in the emergence of datawalls that calls for extending the existing conceptual model of platformization. We argue that datawalls represent attempts to adopt platform logics by accumulating audience data; thus, platforms serve as templates for digital news outlets. We discuss the implications of these findings for conceptualizing platformization and datafication.