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Damn straight I can. The marginal cost of providing content is now essentially 0, and there are few-to-no good models for how to handle capital costs when they

Damn straight I can. The marginal cost of providing content is now essentially 0, and there are few-to-no good models for how to handle capital costs when they can't be subtly rolled into marginal prices. That doesn't mean any of the existing solutions are acceptable. A paywall subscription to the Boston Globe will run me (long term) $7/week. That's $0.30/week less than they would charge me for a daily physical paper. Full access to Buzzfeed, meanwhile, is 100% free and still isn't worth what it costs. So yes, I'll complain. I'll complain that I have a choice between (malware-serving) advertisements, value-erasing sponsored content, and usurious paywalls that start at monthly subscriptions. I know this isn't an easy problem. Microtransactions (pay per article) are unappealing to consumers. Tipping (Patreon) isn't a stable revenue stream for large organizations. And no matter what you paywall, someone will put it up for free. Even academic journals haven't beaten that reality. But for all that, I still don't have to like the existing answers.

tremon 11y ago
A paywall subscription to the Boston Globe will run me (long term) $7/week. That's $0.30/week less than they would charge me for a daily physical paper. But in order to make that a strong argument, you are implicitly assuming that the marginal cost of the physical version is significant. It's probably easy to argue that it is significant compared to the marginal cost of online distribution, but is it significant compared to the capital costs? In the same vein, what are you including in your model of marginal cost? Are you including printing press and datacenter operations in your mental calculation, or only the cost of distribution itself? Because with those, the marginal costs are much closer to eachother than without -- although they're possibly still an order of magnitude apart, I really have no idea.

tremon 11y ago

A paywall subscription to the Boston Globe will run me (long term) $7/week. That's $0.30/week less than they would charge me for a daily physical paper. But in order to make that a strong argument, you are implicitly assuming that the marginal cost of the physical version is significant. It's probably easy to argue that it is significant compared to the marginal cost of online distribution, but is it significant compared to the capital costs? In the same vein, what are you including in your model of marginal cost? Are you including printing press and datacenter operations in your mental calculation, or only the cost of distribution itself? Because with those, the marginal costs are much closer to eachother than without -- although they're possibly still an order of magnitude apart, I really have no idea.