How to kill boring websites: start charging people to be bored

I can’t somehow imagine the Worksop Guardian, the Ripley & Heanor News, the Whitby Gazette and the Northumberland Gazette getting much site traffic now they’ve started charging for access to content. The Johnston Press websites will either ask users to pay £5 for a three-month subscription to read the full articles or direct them to buy the newspapers.

For those who don’t know from outside the UK, the most obvious difference between our national and local press is that the latter tend to think ‘girl wins trophy for skipping’ and ‘cat rescued from tree’ are hot news topics, while the former, um, don’t. You can purchase almost any local paper if you’re desperate to find out who won darts at the local Labour Club last Tuesday, or if you’ve heard that the hooded chav at number 37 has been done for growing a cannabis plant in his dad’s greenhouse. Exciting, edge of your seat stuff, with every page offering up reminder after reminder of just why everyday suburban living in Little Bumfuck-On-Sea beats climbing the world’s highest mountain in ballet pumps or sailing down the Amazon on a plank of MDF.

That’s all on the few pages in the middle that aren’t festooned with ads for sofas, vacancies for piss-pot changers at the local care home, and double-page LIDL spreads notifying us of 3 for 1 offers on real Zimbabwean butter that risk dangerous stampedes when the stores next open. And then we have the bi-annual Smiley Faced Baby Brat competitions, that often take up three or four pages, where we are treated to a rogues gallery of squishy-faced infants photographed by strange men in tweed suits wearing owl glasses who spend two weeks camped outside the aforementioned LIDL and the slightly more upmarket (okay, that’s a lie) ALDI tempting single mothers with prams with the promise of maybe winning £15 in shopping vouchers for the pound-per-item discount store and a trip to Skegness to see Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown’s progressive comedy routines.

Then there’s my own wonderful old dad’s favourite occupation over breakfast as well—flicking through the obituaries to find out who’s dead, and whether you knew them. The cowboy directories are pretty useful also, where you can quickly find any number of unemployed people using false names and pay-as-you-go mobiles offering garden clearance services whereby they’ll take your shit away strapped on top of an old Mini, sell what they can, and dump the rest on the M6.

Yep, you’ll get plenty of bang for your fiver. And they wonder why girls get pregnant at 16. If life is this boring, of course you’re going to start playing with your own bits and quickly move on to playing with other people’s. Ending up blind, hairy-palmed and with a baby your mother looks after before you can vote, that’s mildly interesting. But pay to be bored? I don’t think so.

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