Meet Prometheus, a Gift Link Search Engine
Sometime in the past few years, media sites like Bloomberg, The Economist, The Atlantic, Defector, Talking Points Memo, and the NY Times started offering a way for subscribers to share paywalled articles with friends and followers. These are commonly referred to as gift links.
Thousands of gift links are shared on websites and social media daily. Some helpful aggregated feeds and hashtags are available, but finding specific information can be difficult. Whenever possible here on KDO, I link to paywalled articles with gift links. To help in that endeavor, I’ve built a gift link discovery tool called Prometheus.
Prometheus collects gift links to paywalled news articles shared by subscribers — from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and more. Links are gathered from Bluesky, Mastodon, and the web throughout the day, and you can search by keyword & URL and filter by publication.
Right now, Prometheus is only available to active kottke.org members while I’m testing and refining it — it’s definitely a beta tool rn. If you’re a member, check it out and let me know if you’ve got any feedback or notice any rough edges.
An informed public is the foundation of a healthy society — and while paywalls aren’t the only challenge here, they also aren’t helping. Big thanks to everyone sharing their gift links online and to these media companies for enabling their subscribers to share their journalism with others.
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This is great, and much appreciated. I would love to see you add an RSS feed for this, so these articles can surface in my newsfeed.
It’s make me all warm and fuzzy to be reminded that in this day and age we can still have nice things.
Thank you!
Great idea, Jason. Love it. Suggestion for a future new feature: Have a way to access a list of gift links that someone has searched for, but are not in the database. I’d love to contribute a link someone needs or wants.
This is great. The ability for a site to have gift links is like the great filter for the quality of website, which usually correlates with good journalism.
This is superhero stuff. I’m so pumped.
Bonus points for
The list alone would be magnificent, but it's the usability details that I'll appreciate for how they make a helpful feature an enjoyable one to use. Thank you, Jason.
Jason this is incredible! Thank you! RSS would be dope indeed 🙏
I am sorry if this seems negative, but tools like this really make you think about what the future of journalism is, and if it has one. One good reason that paywalls exist is so that the journalists whose content is behind them can get paid for their work by people who read it. If a tool like this works too well, then they will get paid less. There are, obviously, alternative funding models for journalism. Some of them may not lead to the information dystopia we live in now, but many (at least ad funding and plutocrat mouthpieces) certainly do, because that's one of the reasons we got here. The BBC's model is, I think, interesting: it's funded by what is really a kind of tax, but is not an arm of the state. Unfortunately the basis on which the tax (the license fee) is collected is broken, and people object to a real tax, so it is dying.
There is no reason, of course, that journalism must have a future at all.
As a practical matter, if I was running a site that had a paywall & gift links, I would maintain a database of which subscriber generated which link, and then remove their ability to create them for a period if they appeared too often in search engine results. I'd also enforce limits on how many times a link can be used.
This is an important counterpoint — journalists should get paid and our business models don’t work anymore. BUT, I’d argue models like The Guardian (UK) are a more reasonable in between: subscribers fund access for everyone not just members. No paywalls. The danger of making good evidence and reporting only available to those with means is cutting off our nose to spite our collective face. So this is for sure a Robin Hood stop gap, but necessarily pushes and contributes to that (evolving) shift
I subscribe to over a dozen news sources, and make donations to others. But I cannot personally financially support every one that deserves it. Something like this helps me discover sites doing good work that I would otherwise never see. This is sadly most true of the sites that block visitors immediately at the front door.
Gift links exist to perform exactly this function of discovery – a loss leader, the old adage for an addictive product: "the first one is free". That function only works if the freebie is widely shared; and the wider the better. That's the whole point of them.
Agree with this critique of the critique, the heavy news consumer that subscribes to a few sites already, but wants to read stories from other pubs, is probably a very small amount of lost revenue. That person probably seeds their network of friends/coworkers with links, who may get most of their news from Facebook, which reminds them that actual journalism exists.
I agree with this, mostly: I am a Guardian subscriber, in fact. However my view of people is darker than yours: I tend to think that people will avoid paying if they do not have to. It's also worth saying that 'making good evidence and reporting available only to those [who can afford it]' is how all journalism worked until quite recently. Is the current situation an improvement? I don't know.
I totally agree there will always be grifters. But historically news and periodicals of all types were shared — left on the bus, given to a neighbor, read by the whole household, available at the library. I think one bought copy has never meant one reader and shifting to digital has highlighted that, the sharing economy broke when IPs entered the mix!
Appreciate this gesture a great deal. A point to add is that some gift links carry a perceived disingenuousness, and that's on the part of the platform. Give us your email [for our sales funnel so we can try and convert you]. It's self-defeating, as I typically abandon. I don't mind paying for good journalism but if a subscriber shares a gift, let it be that. Is it just me?
This is why I love that proton mail lets me generate email addresses. They're also sent to an email I don't check.
Yes, totally agree – the "gift" isn't really a gift if you have to give the publisher your contact information to access it. This stuff drives me crazy because the Times / Post / etc. are making it sound like a supporter perk, but they're really just enlisting you in their marketing and audience-capture plans. Grr.
I hadn't thought about using a fake email address to sign in, but I will try that!
perhaps there needs to be an icon for "gift-wall," if the gift link also requires email to read (as WaPo does)
I have the same with hey.com but it's just avoidable friction and I end up negatively disposed to the publication.
You can bypass them through other means as well and I have mixed feelings about doing that - they're just trying to survive like the rest of us. I feel if they offered a free t-shirt to people, the shirt would be free but the postage would be $50!
Reminds me of the classic Shag artwork "Prometheus bring fire". Great concept!
The first thing I thought about when I opened the link is that it seems like a high quality stream of content. It seems like links worth clicking on. Fantastic idea and I'm all for seeing a marketplace of links where there could be supply and demand.
This is so well done. Thank you.
nthing the support for RSS. I also want to mention Dave Winer's concept of EZ-Pass for news. Like him, I am not opposed to paying for news to support journalism, but I do not want to subscribe to each and every news organization to read 10% (or less) of their articles. Let me have a tool (plugin or otherwise) that purchases articles using my "EZ-Pass" account, with the news organization setting the price and my tool giving me the chance to set max price (per site?) or the option to skip payment (and of course, skip the article). I'm not a web developer, but I know this has to start with a handler for the HTTP 402 status - Payment Required.
As a regular user of paywall defeaters, I love this. As a person who is evangelistic to folks about subscribing to journalism (I subscribe to NYT, New Yorker, Atlantic, WSJ, WaPo, my hometown paper, my state papers), this makes me nervous. If it were to go viral, I could see it impacting journalism's bottom line to an unknowable degree.
I have thought that something exactly like this should exist. Thank you for putting this together.
I've keep it open in a tab for the last few days, occasionally checking and clicking on an article. Feel like tabs for categories ("news" "science" "cooking") might be helpful.
Perhaps a sidebar link to Prometheus, or some other access from the main page? Or am I missing one that's there?
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