Chelsea’s 2019 Men of the Year: Kings of the Paywalls and Patreons

2019 was the year the sharpest minds stood athwart the Chelsea blog- and Twitter-osphere and shouted “Pay!” These heroes of the paywall are Chelsea’s Men of the Year.

For as long as there’s been journalism, there’s been three main ways to make money from it: advertisements, subscriptions and per-issue newsstand purchases. All journalistic endeavors – from the august to the puerile – rely on some combination of those three to cover costs, not least of which are their writers and other content creators. But in the last few years, something happened: ads became icky. Even though The New York Times, The Economist and nearly every other newspaper, magazine or journal of thought, opinion and analysis have ads in their pages, graduates of The New School’s Master’s in Creative Writing program saw them as a stain on the uplifting social content they wrote for virality.

This led to one of the great turning points in sports media. Sensing that people enjoyed reading thinly-sourced transfer rumours, hot takes and bland summaries of press conferences for free, a few enterprising media executives decided to poach the writers of thinly-sourced transfer rumours, hot takes and bland summaries of press conferences away from those icky partially ad-supported media companies, and would now force people to pay directly for their content, with the added stricture that this new outlet would not actually carry the content from those writers that readers were consuming but not paying for in the first place.

Chelsea fans now have the opportunity to pay for articles from writers for whom they never had a desire to pay before. Those same writers who might put a out a decent interview every now and again, or who might be a smidgen more reliable on transfer and sack rumours than the next guy, have now taken their talents behind a paywall.

Don’t want to pay for what you used to get for free? Too bad.

Actually, no problem at all. Just wait about 20 minutes after the paywalled exclusive is published, and the very same outlets that those writers left will publish quote-heavy summaries of the protected article.

So just as before, you can skim the gist of whatever it was that guy you kinda trust more than those other guys wrote.

Want to know what Rob Green said about Maurizio Sarri? It’s all on Reddit. Hoping to hear from Christian Pulisic? Oh, wait, that’s on the podcast that American guy now does in conjunction with Chelsea FC. Or just listen to Pulisic’s dad’s podcast. Interested in watching a once-prominent local journalist settle some old scores? It might still be playing out on Twitter.

They say innovation is all about zigging when the other guys are zagging. As sports media zags to become more open and direct, whether through the step-by-step gumshoe journalism of someone like Fabrizio Romano, player-centric platforms like The Players Tribune or player and coach social media, and, on the business, side more creative and diversified in their revenue opportunities, some of Chelsea’s most blandly recognizable media personalities are zigging themselves behind a unitary toll barrier separating them from the paying masses of mass media.

But hey, at least there’s none of those crass digital ads. Just the writers using their tweets to hawk subscriptions like the guy selling faux Rolexes on Canal Street. Because integrity.

For all that, though, in truth they are mere amateurs compared to the next wave of paid sports media.

Open and democratic, meet the paywalled hobbyists.

2019 was the year Chelsea’s most influential social media #influencers learned about Patreon. Those awesome video compilations that violate intellectual property laws on every continent? Subscribe to my Patreon. Enjoy those post-game analyses where people talk into and sometimes yell at the camera? Subscribe to my Patreon.

Looking for someone to tell you what you already think, confident that you’ll never be challenged in those opinions? My Patreon, subscribe to it you must.

So desperate for digital social standing that you desperately want an #influencer to follow you back, so you can bask in the reflected glory of their belligerently anodyne Twitter presence? Subscribe! To! My Patreon! (limited time only for follow-backs – 50% off retweets with promo code SANCHO).

For expecting people to pay directly for that which they had previously enjoyed for free simply because you don’t like the other methods of payment, for remaining blissfully unaware of terms like “burn rate,” for searching for an exchange rate between Twitter clicks and currency and for never giving up hope that a fool and his money are soon parting…

…these Kings of the Paywalls and Patreons are Chelsea FC’s Men of the Year for 2019.

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