Beacon Finds Partnerships and Matching Donations Work Better than Subscriptions and Paywalls

When Beacon launched in 2013, its founders saw a lot of promise in subscriptions and paywalls. Readers would pay $5 a month for access to about a dozen stories each week, with about 60 percent of that amount going to one “favorite” writer and the rest split among a network of 28 writers.   Surprise: Most people weren’t willing to pay for access. “We have almost completely done away with the notion of subscriptions and the paywall,” cofounder Dan Fletcher(a former managing editor at Facebook) told me this week.