Does polarization really pay off for the media?
No. Postjournalism was a last resort, not a profitable strategy.
Greg Piechota of the International News Media Association (INMA) posted a summary of research showing that “Subscriptions don’t incentivise polarisation. They punish it.” The research is said to challenge the thesis that audience funding incentivizes polarization in the media.
This thesis is linked to my book Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers: The Media after Trump, Manufacturing Anger and Polarization. Published in 2020, the book introduced the concept of postjournalism, now widely used, and traced the media-ecological and political-economic forces that transformed 20th-century journalism into 21st-century postjournalism.
The claim that audience funding does not fuel polarization sounds intriguing, and since my work was mentioned, I feel it’s right to set the record straight and offer my view. First comes Greg Piechota’s piece (which is fairly short), and then I’ll give my response.
New research: Polarising news is a trap for reader-funded media
Readers First Initiative Blog, 25 January 2026
By Greg Piechota, Researcher-in-Residence, INMA, Oxford, United Kingdom
Content that maximises engagement might actually destroy your subscription business.
Academics, commentators, and many others believe the shift from ad-funded to audience-funded media contributed to increased political polarisation.
For example, media scholar Andrey Mir wrote in his book Postjournalism: “The ad‑driven media manufactured consent. The reader‑driven media manufacture anger. The former served consumerism. The latter serve polarisation.”
Now we learn that actually the opposite might be true. A new research based on novel methodologies and using real publisher data tackles this big question of our time: Does polarising news content really pay and how? <…>
They found that polarising, and especially emotionally charged, “us-vs-them” content, increased time spent but reduced the likelihood of subscribing, particularly during politically charged moments like elections.
They concluded: “For publishers with a subscription-focused business model, a strategy of leveraging high-arousal, effectively polarising content is value-destroying. While such content may capture fleeting attention, it appears to erode the very foundation of trust and perceived value necessary to convert a reader into a paying subscriber.”
Quantifying the impact on revenue: I took the academics’ findings and applied them to a simple model using subscription and advertising benchmarks from 289 news brands worldwide, which we track at INMA.
For every 1 million online users active in a month, a median national news brand sees:
~500 new digital-only subscription starts.
~$75k in total subscription lifetime value created.
~$69k in total digital ad revenue generated.
Now introduce polarising content:
A modest 5%-10% drop in subscription conversion destroys US$4-US8k in subscription LTV.
A generous 5%-0% uplift in non-subscriber engagement adds only US$2-US$5k in ad revenue.
Even before we talk about churn or brand effects, the economics already breaks. Tiny damage to subscription conversion wipes out large engagement gains.
For news businesses, this research by Professors Yan and Miller suggests a hard truth: Not all engagement is worth it, and some of it is actively value-destroying.
Subscriptions don’t incentivise polarisation. They punish it.
So the idea is that even significant gains in engagement driven by overly polarizing content are not worth the loss in subscription conversion. Sounds fair: rage may drive attention, but it also drives away loyalty.
First and foremost, as far as I remember, I have never suggested that the demise of the ad-funded business model and the desperate search for funding from audiences (subscriptions and membership) would end up in business success. No, it has never happened and could not have happened.
The switch from advertising was not so much a deliberate “switch.” Advertising simply fled from media to online platforms. By 2013–2014, around the world, ad revenue in newspapers had plummeted below the level of revenue from copy sales (including subscriptions). But that does not mean that subscriptions offset the lost ad revenue or succeeded overall.
A chart from Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers.
After a short period of funny searching for auxiliary businesses (see: Journalism in search of a cute little monkey), the media began chasing digital subscriptions. In the early 2010s, the media started targeting digital audiences, the first adopters of social media, who at the time represented very specific demographics: tech savvy, young, urban, educated, and progressive. I call this historic phenomenon the Digital Rush.
This led to the “progressive capture”: wooing digital progressives, the media eventually aligned with their values, sidelining the rest of the population. Even the language in the media drastically changed, promoting a lexicon representing progressive values, known in their radical form as wokism.
But all of this never paid off. Digital progressives were truly progressive and did not consume news from old media. Literally all paywalls emerging in the early 2010s stalled or failed.
Until… Trump.
Since the news media went all in on progressive values, the conservative majority, cast out and unrepresented in news coverage, struck back as soon as it adopted social media—about five years after their younger predecessors, the progressives. This was the first global polarizing effect of the media’s switch from plentiful ad revenue to a desperate search for digital subscriptions: driven by the need for digital subscriptions, the media divided society into an overrepresented progressive minority and the rest, who were polarized into right-wing conservative ressentiment. The backlash followed, unfolding globally around 2016, starting with Brexit, then Trump, AfD, Marine Le Pen, Bolsonaro, and others. (The simultaneity of social media adoption synchronized cultural and political developments worldwide.)
When the conservative backlash broke out, some of the largest mainstream media could finally profit from polarization. Paywalls started working. The so-called Trump bump happened. At long last, the subscription model, or rather soliciting donations to the cause disguised as subscriptions, paid off, but only for a few giants.
This is where journalism of the 20th century completed its mutation into postjournalism. People learned the news elsewhere, but they wanted the most troubling news to be validated by an authoritative source. The media got the hint and switched from news supply to news validation. Since the validation of triggering news (mostly about Trump and other outrageous right-wingers) was possible only within value systems, the media openly shifted from pursuing the cause of journalism to a political cause.
That did not save the industry. Validating news about Trump in local newspapers did not work—readers wanted to swarm around the largest validators. Even though local media joined the race (did they have other options?), the Trump bump worked out only for a few national media outlets, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. But even for this cohort it was short-lived. Postjournalism cannot produce a sustainable market-driven business model, as it undermines trust, the foundation of sustainable business relationships (exactly as in the findings of the aforementioned study about polarization).
The Trump bump in the leading American newspapers (NYT and WP), charts from Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers.
So yes, having lost ad revenue and desperately chasing digital subscriptions, the news media heavily contributed to political polarization. It was not someone’s conspiracy. These were the media-ecological (the internet) and political-economic (the loss of advertising) conditions. Polarization was an effect of changes in media consumption and in the news media’s business model, but polarization has never been, and could never have been, a recipe for subscription success. Quite the opposite—polarization eroded the reputational and market value of the media and journalism in general. After all, the title of the book was Postjournalism and the DEATH of Newspapers (the subtitle The Media after Trump: Manufacturing Anger and Polarization makes sense, too, sorry for shameless self-quoting).
How would I read the findings of this study? I guess there is a core newspaper audience, an older generation, who still subscribe to newspapers. They support ideological stances but are likely repelled by excessive rage that old media might try to exercise to compete for engagement with social media. So, unlike the core demographics of social media, more traditional audiences of old media do not like excessive rage. And that’s a good thing.
But their subscriptions are donscriptions—donation-subscriptions. Essentially, it’s not transactional. They do not buy news, they support newsrooms representing a certain worldview—and that is postjournalism (a similar pattern works for cable through package subscriptions and viewership). Journalism sought to portray the world-as-it-is, postjournalism depicts the world-as-it-should-be. With subscriptions or not, these media contribute to polarization anyway, as they produce politically charged narratives disguised as journalism and incite rage, although their role is fading, along with their authority.
The Trump bump: political cause became the main driver of subscription pitches in major media.
Sometimes, outstanding polarizing boosts in news coverage happen, especially during critical political events. These boosts surely drive engagement (traffic or viewership), but far fewer subscriptions. They simply cannot drive subscriptions because the number of people ready to support a political cause through news media subscriptions is limited and fading. In the contemporary news ecosystem, if people want to choose news suppliers, news notaries, or political megaphones to represent and promote their views, they have plenty of options—through podcasts (which now outperform major media), Substack, or social media influencers.
Just as the news media have lost their monopoly over advertising and news, they are also losing their monopoly over postjournalism—over depicting the world-as-it-should-be.
So yes, reader-driven media manufacture anger and fuel polarization. Any “audience capture” does. And no, polarizing content does not guarantee subscriptions. It cannot provide a return on the desperate moral, professional, and reputational investments made in postjournalism. (Except for a very short period, the Trump bump of 2016–2020, and for very few of the biggest media brands.)
The industry is passing through a period of convulsions in its afterlife… I know, such dramatization works well for describing a picture of historical scale; but on the ground, thousands of people still work in the media. Many of them still pursue the values of classical journalism, developed under the advertising model in the 20th century. Many, however, are also confused, watching how the foremen of postjournalism, both in the field and in J-schools, call for a revision of professional standards, despite the fact that it was precisely the revision of standards of objectivity that finished off public trust in the media.
Anyway, when asked to share my ideas with young or practicing journalists and feeling obliged to offer something positive, I usually conclude that the industry is largely gone, but professional skills in content management are in higher demand than ever. Others are still learning how to be media; we, journalists and editors, already know. That is something positive to work with and a way to look into one’s professional future with inspiration. So, despite disagreement, I appreciate the efforts of colleagues in INMA and other media organizations, who are looking for solutions, personal and institutional (and exit strategies? personally, I moved on 15 years ago). As long as the last newspaper generation lives (10–15 more years), the memory of the once-glorious institution of journalism, a pillar of modernity, industrial capitalism, and representative democracy, still needs its last (gate)keepers.
In conclusion, the study findings, quoted by Greg Piechota, do sound interesting:
We document a “polarization trap”: exogenous increases in exposure to polarizing content raise engagement (time on site) but reduce the probability of subscribing. The negative subscription effect is driven more by the affective than the ideological dimension of polarization and is strongest during high-salience political periods. These results imply a strategic trade-off for publishers: content that maximizes short-run attention can undermine the formation of a loyal, paying subscriber base.
Yan, Shunyao and Miller, Klaus, “Engagement vs. Commitment: The Economic Trade-Offs of Polarizing News Content” (September 23, 2025). HEC Paris Research Paper No. MKG-2025-1585.
After 2020, the erosion of trust in the media led to historically high levels of news avoidance, and now the broader erosion of trust in everything and growing anxiety over polarization is leading to engagement avoidance. It seems people are increasingly fed up with online rage and are trying to fence themselves off from it. How successful this is, and how it really changes the online behavior of the masses, is hard to say: outrageous events still drive—and likely will always drive—traffic. But some immunity to online rage may be forming.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
