Why EUobserver is now asking for your email address

Some of you regular visitors might have noticed a change since we moved to the new website; to read articles, you must now register with your email address. 

Some of you might find this annoying. Or inconvenient. Or even an invasion of privacy.

I’d like to explain why we made this choice, and why we think it’s necessary. It’s not because we want your data. And it’s not because we’re intent on bombarding you with endless emails to sign up for a paid membership.

AI, scrapers, copycats, billionaires

I’m writing this post inspired by an article written by my ex-colleagues at VICE’s Motherboard, who last year launched their own worker-owned news publication called 404 Media.

Just like us, they had to make the choice to implement either a ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ paywall on their new website – soft meaning it’s possible to read anything with a bit of effort, hard that unless you’re subscribed, you can’t.

They opted for the hard one, just like we did. 

The reason why is simple, but multi-faceted. 

First, the journalism on their website was being wholesale ripped off and published on some website banking on stolen content to sell ads – often ending up higher in search results than the original work. This has happened to us many times as well. 

Second, and more nefarious, the reporting they put time, money and effort in was not only stolen and republished, it was being ‘re-written’ by an AI, specifically built to take content published elsewhere, paraphrase it just enough to avoid copyright infringement and publish it. Sometimes even automatically. We have not seen this with our content (yet), but then we have not spent time reporting on the phenomenon like Jason Koebler, editor of 404 Media, did. Building in a ‘hard’ paywall prevents some of this.

Third, and connected to the previous point, optimising a website to be found high-up in search results on, for example, Google is a dark art. A dark art often applied by websites that churn out endless amounts of highly search-optimised garbage (often stolen from other websites) to trick people into clicking on it and making money from advertising impressions. 

It takes a lot of effort – and quite honestly, totally unproductive effort – to optimise a site for search engines, and we would rather spend our hours producing journalism that matters than adding ‘anchor pages’, keywords bound by very specific rules, internal links to other content we’ve published and other wastes of human time only intended for machines that crawl the internet.

And finally, it’s to ensure that people who care about the reporting we produce to see the articles we publish, without being dependent on the commercial internet behemoths that control distribution of information for their own profit. 

We don’t want to be beholden to the latest strategy designed to force makers of online content into some new straightjacket that will make the middle-man more money. I’ve been through that before in other companies I worked for, and it sucks – not only because often the result is that more value is extracted from publishers and transferred to Meta, Google or X. Like when every publisher ‘pivoted to video’, because Facebook preferred video content, and subsequently were fleeced and forced to lay off thousands of journalists. 

Unfortunately, this is the position publishers have been put in, and even though I really don’t want to be feeding the machine that makes Musk, Pichar, Zuckerberg, Nadella, Bezos or any of the other masters of the internet even richer.

We’ve also planned some other ways to personalise the way our members can choose to receive the essential journalism we produce, but those will be unveiled in due course. 

Just know we’re not planning on sending endless emails with pleas to sign up for a paid membership –those emails are really annoying. We might reach out a few times a year to show some of the results our reporting has achieved, and ask for your support. But I promise we will respect your email as we’d like our own to be. 

This also means we will never sell or share your email addresses or any other personal information. 

We’re a small, independent (meaning we’re not owned by another entity), non-profit publisher that primarily relies on our members to pay for salaries, office space and to keep the website up.

So if you do happen to value our work, memberships start at €1/month. Or sign up for the free newsletter membership and get access to three articles per month. Perhaps that will convince you, but if not, that’s also fine.