Free-riding has lowered the quality of news

The rise of the internet has made news and information a largely non-excludable good. People can be excluded from accessing individual publications like the Wall Street Journal through paywalls, but cannot be excluded from the seemingly infinite amount of information and news across the internet. People can also get around being excluded from certain sites by using different browsers to get more 'free articles' or using softwares to circumnavigate the paywall. This has led to an increased unwillingness to pay for online subscriptions.

In turn, news sources are increasingly making their product completely non-excludable, in exchange for copious of amounts of advertising on their sites. Now instead of trying to gain long term, paying subscribers by providing quality news, publications are incentivized to post articles with incendiary, shocking, and even misleading headlines in order to increase their number of page views to garner more advertisers. Those free-riding off of actual subscribers, trusting that sites like The Atlantic will continue to provide all their news for free regardless of whether they pay into it, are creating a market failure in the sense that there is less quality news than the allocatively efficient amount. Thus this free-riding behavior has forced news outlets to adjust their revenue models accordingly and lowered the quality of news in exchange for click-bait articles.