An NBC Instagram Reel and NYT Homepage test walk into a bowling alley ...

I watched a great NBC News reel this week. Investigative reporting, tight edit, real findings: private equity now controls something like 10% of the country's bowling alleys, and the roll-up does exactly what roll-ups do. Prices up, lanes fewer, people bowling less. Good journalism. GREAT social video.

(Full Reel here.)

The card comes up. Link in bio. I'm in. I tap through Instagram's browser, land on a bio page, tap again —

— and then hit a hard paywall.

Three taps and a login wall between "I want to know more" and actually knowing more.

NBC did the hard part! They made me care, with social-native video built to REACH me — and then used the linktree-to-website mechanism to try to ENGAGE me. But the strategies and tactics of publishers looking to build revenue models that work in a poly-platform world are quickly vaporizing.

It took two decades for media companies to confidently meter/price/flywheel a consumer revenue business through websites. And now in the late stages of that era, they're squeezing more from that model by trimming the free sample and confronting a harder truth: the platforms formerly known as social media are actually in the business of social broadcasting.

Drawbridges

I've been thinking about the idea of drawbridges since reading Anuj Ahooja's piece on 'drawbridges as moats' for the open social web, because he uses it to mean almost the opposite thing.

For Anuj, drawbridges are the feature — the whole appeal of protocol-based publishing is that nothing is a final decision. You cross over to Leaflet or pckt or Blacksky, and if it stops serving you, you cross back, and nobody "loses" you and nobody "took" you. The community is the moat; the drawbridge is just how people move freely in and out of it. To borrow another Anuj-ism, the bridging is the 'last network effect.'

Compare that to what happened to me and my potential relationship to NBC through the Instagram reel-to-link-back mechanism. Their drawbridge doesn't let me in — it's the thing standing between the free reel and the owned story. It's a moat wearing a drawbridge costume.

The Poly-Platform of It All

That's the poly-platform trap publishers are stuck in. You need the social-native storytelling to be found at all. You need the owned product to have a business.

And right now those two things are in active tension. The better the reel, the harder the paywall feels when you hit it.

Publishers and creators are pouring all this energy into growing reach on social. And when someone acts on the hook, the publisher pulls up the drawbridge on their own product. The platform gets the engagement, the watch time, the ad impressions, all for free. The publisher gets a bounce.

Meta doesn't need you to subscribe to anything. NBC does. And NBC just spent the entire reel training you to stop at the door.

Bowling Even MORE Alone

Bowling alleys are the textbook example of what Ray Oldenburg called a third place — not home, not work, just somewhere to be, alongside other people, for cheap or free. Robert Putnam used the same lanes to make a bigger argument in Bowling Alone: league membership was cratering not because people stopped bowling, but because they stopped showing up for anything communal. Churches, unions, bowling nights, all of it. Bowling was never really the point. It was the instrument he used to measure something disappearing underneath it.

Now private equity is finishing the job on the instrument itself. Fewer lanes, higher prices, less loitering, less bowling. The story is about the death of a commons — again.

That's the story NBC reported on Instagram. But trying to follow that reel to their website demonstrates the same loss playing out one level up -- the industry's answer to losing its own commons, the open platforms it doesn't own, has been to chase first-party data.

But look at what it actually produces: a story about the disappearance of shared space, distributed by closing off shared space. The paywall is a tiny third-place eviction of its own. You wanted in, you were willing to be there, and the door said no. First-party data capture and third-place enclosure are the same instinct wearing different clothes — both decide that access has to be owned to be worth anything.

Sampling, or the Ghost of Homepages Past

I ran into a live test on the NYT homepage last month, on a burner account — a wireframe box around the hero and top story table, one line inside it: These top stories are free to read.

When I was at the Times helping build Audience Development 1.0, the homepage had something like half a million unique visitors a day who never clicked a single story. They read the headline, got the lede, got what they needed, and left. We knew they were there. We built retargeting, email capture, cross-channel activation — a whole apparatus trying to catch people the homepage itself was letting go. Smart people, working hard, a full funnel upstream of a problem the product never actually solved.

That was 2015. The web looked nothing like this.

Ten years later, with agentic browsing rising and generative search eating referral traffic whole, "these stories are free to read" isn't a meter setting. It's a signal. It's the Times telling a human being, in plain language, there's no wall on the other side of this click — before they click. That's the opposite instinct from what NBC did to me on Instagram. NBC used the free sample to bait a wall. The Times is testing whether saying the sample is free, out loud, is worth more than hiding it.

Direct traffic used to be a health metric — proof someone sought you out. Now the homepage may be turning into something closer to a drawbridge with a sign on it: this one's actually down.

Protocol-based publishing doesn't solve monetization by itself. But it starts from the same instinct the Times test is groping toward: the relationship is portable, not captured. And with AI rapidly reshaping what audiences expect from digital products — around data, privacy, even what "visiting a website" means — now is a genuinely good time for publishers and creators to have that portable relationship already built, instead of scrambling for one once agentic browsers make the choice for them.

NBC's journalism on the bowling alley story was sharp on the merits: consolidation makes things worse for the people who show up.

I'd just gently point out that their operational approach to promoting it might help them see the ways they have to alter their approach to digital publishing so that a paywall doesn't show up dressed up as a drawbridge further chasing their audiences away.