4 ms·

Ultimately I don't think a market exists for it anymore. Information like that is just assumed to be free on the internet, I don't particularly care whether it'

Ultimately I don't think a market exists for it anymore. Information like that is just assumed to be free on the internet, I don't particularly care whether it's AP, WSJ, BBC or CNN as long as it's reasonably informative I'd rather just read a few articles from different source on topics that interest me than pay a single penny for content. As long as free sources of reasonably good content exist, they'll continue to dominate the market.

wcummings 9y ago
The WSJ makes most of their money from subscribers, so you're not correct wrt their readers.
- problems 9y ago
  I'm sure they do, but their subscribers are still a minority of the news consuming market so that has absolutely no relevance to what I'm saying. Maybe the market is big enough to accommodate that business model, maybe they're unique enough to do so, but many others have tried and failed.
  - wcummings 9y ago
    I think it is relevant, the WSJ has a lot of digital subscribers and they're profitable I think in large part due to their paywall. FT is also profitable and employs aggressive paywalling. I've noticed smaller local publications tightening up their paywalls, as well. I'd expect to see more paywalls going forward, not fewer. I think there's increasing recognition that the economics are better.
  - Analemma_ 9y ago
    If people are willing to pay you a premium, you don't need to capture "a majority of the news consuming market", you just need enough of those people to be profitable. Ben Thompson at Stratechery says he has a little over 2,000 paying subscribers- a tiny fraction of paying WSJ subscribers, never mind the people reading free content- and he's doing fine. In fact, that's a known winning strategy in a lot of industries, not just journalism: let the suckers rip each other to pieces in the race to the bottom, while you deliver enough value to have fat margins. That's what Apple does, for example.
  - bradleyjg 9y ago
    The market is properly weighted by dollars, not by number of people. A 100,000 people each willing to pay $200 a year for a subscription is a larger part of the market than 5 million people that will collectively click on 20 million ads in a year that generate an average of $0.001 for each click.

wcummings 9y ago

The WSJ makes most of their money from subscribers, so you're not correct wrt their readers.

problems 9y ago
I'm sure they do, but their subscribers are still a minority of the news consuming market so that has absolutely no relevance to what I'm saying. Maybe the market is big enough to accommodate that business model, maybe they're unique enough to do so, but many others have tried and failed.
- wcummings 9y ago
  I think it is relevant, the WSJ has a lot of digital subscribers and they're profitable I think in large part due to their paywall. FT is also profitable and employs aggressive paywalling. I've noticed smaller local publications tightening up their paywalls, as well. I'd expect to see more paywalls going forward, not fewer. I think there's increasing recognition that the economics are better.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  If people are willing to pay you a premium, you don't need to capture "a majority of the news consuming market", you just need enough of those people to be profitable. Ben Thompson at Stratechery says he has a little over 2,000 paying subscribers- a tiny fraction of paying WSJ subscribers, never mind the people reading free content- and he's doing fine. In fact, that's a known winning strategy in a lot of industries, not just journalism: let the suckers rip each other to pieces in the race to the bottom, while you deliver enough value to have fat margins. That's what Apple does, for example.
- bradleyjg 9y ago
  The market is properly weighted by dollars, not by number of people. A 100,000 people each willing to pay $200 a year for a subscription is a larger part of the market than 5 million people that will collectively click on 20 million ads in a year that generate an average of $0.001 for each click.