8 ms·

The subscription-pocalypse

92 points by dschuetz 8y ago

icebraining 8y ago
I agree there's a limit, but why 2019 specifically? How do we know it hasn't plateaued already, or that it won't only do so in 2025? Is there any data on it?
- dschuetz 8y ago
  I believe it has something to do with the layoffs at Gannett, HuffPost and BuzzFeed, although they don't get mentioned in that article. Further reference: https://twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1088503510184927233 https://twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1088503510184927233
jwildeboer 8y ago
I have online/digital subscriptions for the New York Times ($48/year) the Washington Post ($19/year) and The Guardian (€60/year). Totally worth it for me.
- huffmsa 8y ago
  Do you feel your money was well spent on the guardian's fabrication about Manafort visiting Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy?
  - jwildeboer 8y ago
    Or the NYT posting opeds full of unchecked lies? Journalists and editors will make mistakes. The question is not about that one story, it’s about the sum of what it delivers IMHO. And in that regard The Guardian still wins my support.
    - huffmsa 8y ago
      Just ribbing you btw. Serious question, would you prefer being able to support quality reporters / reporting at these publications and not pay for the lies and fabrications? If you could do that (versus having to pay an all encompassing subscription).
      - jwildeboer 8y ago
        No. I wouldn't want to directly support certain journalists. It creates the real problem of "writing to please your audience" and moving the focus from reporting to serving the patrons. The best journalists are not necessarily nice people, in my experience. They should focus on the story, not waste time on optimising their social reputation. They should be protected by their editors and the institution they work for from exactly this kind of influence. IMHO. Also it is hard to go undercover for an important story when you have to make sure you grow your audience at the same time.
        huffmsa 8y ago
        Fair. But you and I would pay for "not nice, but brutally honest journalism". I bet a lot of other would too. Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" is historical proof of that. There's no reason a the authors couldn't write under pseudonyms, or publish as a collective. You still buy the articles one by one as you see fit.
        pjc50 8y ago
        Very difficult to maintain a pseudonym and publish articles with quotes from named sources in, avoiding the Manafort fiasco. The Economist manages the collective byline thing fairly well, but it's almost unique.
kbos87 8y ago
The dynamic explained here isn’t some cliff we are collectively approaching as the article seems to say. Instead, it’s been a drag on people’s willingness to sign up for subscription services and likelihood to churn off of them all along.
BariumBlue 8y ago
I have wanted, for a while now, for news sites to get together and figure out some shared form of monetization - pay a single rate, and get access NYT, Huffpo, bloomberg, etc., maybe with an option to pay more depending how much or on which sites I read the article. Or a single site where I could access and manage subscriptions to multiple sites. I WANT to subscribe to newspapers/new sites, but I don't want to be subscribed to 5 different subscription schemes and juggling that.
- wsc981 8y ago
  In The Netherlands some start-up is trying that business model and they also recently became active in the USA [0]. --- [0]: https://launch.blendle.com https://launch.blendle.com
  - BariumBlue 8y ago
    Thanks, I just signed up for the beta - it looks genuinly intriguing
- Gys 8y ago
  Or alternatively pay per article - which is in the works: http://blendle.com/ http://blendle.com/
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- tjpnz 8y ago
  I like this but there's potential to end up in a similar situation to where we will be soon with video streaming services.
- poikl 8y ago
  This exists through your local library. Most in Canada subscribe to a service that lets you read 100s of newspapers (from a number of countries) for free online (or the nominal cost of a yearly library membership).
wodenokoto 8y ago
Does this guy know that before the internet most people paid money to subscribe to newspapers and magazines? "The growth of the subscription model has been one of the biggest developments in online journalism in the past few years ... The subscription model makes a lot of sense for publishers. The advertising-based model that supported the industry for 100 years doesn’t work in a digital world where ..." No, the subscription model has been the basis for the industry for the past 100 years. He goes on: "You can’t expect people to subscribe to their local paper (which is vital to democracy, we tell them) AND The New York Times and the Washington Post (because Democracy Dies in the Dark) AND Netflix AND Hulu AND HBO Go AND The Athletic AND ESPN Plus AND their favorite podcast on Patreon AND …" Yet people were subscribed to a daily paper, 1 or 2 monthly magazines and a cable package with added charges for sports channels.
- kobrad 8y ago
  I get what you are saying, but if used everything I would like to use I'd spend maybe a quarter of my paycheck every month. On random subscription things. Everything is subscription based and feels like I have to pay separate subscriptions for every bus I take, you know
  - entity345 8y ago
    Budgeting is "being an adult 101"... You cannot get "everything you would like", that's life.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      In the ad-funded internet, you really can get everything you like; you can even block ads if you don't want the inconvenience. What this discussion is really about is whether and how long this will dry up the supply of good content or replace it with bad.
  - lazyjones 8y ago
    That just means subscriptions might usually be too expensive, not that the model has some intrinsic issues.
ajuc 8y ago
Twitch/youtube/patreon subscription model is the future. Why subscribe to several newspapers (where you don't care for 90% of the content), if you could subscribe to the exact 13 authors that write about stuff you like, and never miss any of their articles, and never need to look through 30 pages of crap to find that? I'm seeing a lot of business models that would never work without twitch - a guy that's streaming pen&paper RPG sessions. He's not even streaming in English, but in Polish (much smaller audience). And he earns very good money (it helps he's awesome at storytelling :) ). Another guy earns a living by streaming his commentary on interesting starcraft matches. Another streams coding his game (but he's not doing it full-time). The best thing is - if the community is in the sweet spot (like 100-1000 people) - you can interact with the people in chat, and it's not fake interaction like on TV or in radio - when you write something you know the "celebrity" will read it and likely respond to it. It makes the audience much more engaged than with traditional media. Every niche hobby is now a marketable skill if you have a little charisma and a lot of time. There should be something like that, but for text.
- nottorp 8y ago
  However, this way you hit the ceiling for how much people can afford for subscriptions. You get the rabid fans but no one else. Too much fragmentation IMO. I'd like a service (perhaps Patreon can do it) that asks "how much do you want to pay monthly?" and "who do you want to support?" and then distributes your $10, or $100, or $1000, whatever you can afford, to everyone in your list. It will end up as pennies from each subscriber, but it will encourage more subscribers so hopefully it can even out or even produce more money.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  > Every niche hobby is now a marketable skill if you have a little charisma and can properly speak English. It's really hard to find a niche audience when you speak Dutch, but retaining one's charisma while speaking a non-native language is really difficult as well.
  - ajuc 8y ago
    That's what I thought too, but all my examples were doing it in Polish, which has only about 2 times more speakers than Dutch.
orbifold 8y ago
What seems like an obvious solution is to decentralize the ad market again. Especially news papers should be able to sell ads to buisenesses directly, as they have in the past.
- Shivetya 8y ago
  changing the ad market will not fix the problem, the problem is the papers existed quite well when they had a captive audience. that is no longer true so many publications are finding that they only were prosperous not because of their content but because they were the only game in town.
huffmsa 8y ago
I think the solution from a consumer perspective is per article 1-click micro-transactions. It needs to be easy, seamless and not require a new account for each site. "Click to pay 10¢ with NewsBuyer to read this article". Boom done.
- pjc50 8y ago
  My previous comment on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15592192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15592192 - "the problem with micropayments is microfraud"
  - huffmsa 8y ago
    But eventually the wheat will separate from the chafe. If example.com is always clickbait / shit, eventually people will stop going there. NYC locals don't shop the tourist shops, because they've learned not to.
- andai 8y ago
  I agree, but I also agreed ten years ago...
  - huffmsa 8y ago
    But 10 years ago the subscription services weren't feeling as much pressure to fix this issue. And since then we've had Patreon come into vogue, which almost all of the YouTube channels I encounter are using now. It gives support to "pay for content you enjoy". Only problem I see with it is that you have to leave the consumption platform to make the transaction happen.
- cheschire 8y ago
  There are transaction fees for most credit card purchases, and some of those fees have mandatory minimums (i.e. 2% plus 10 cents per transaction). This effectively prevents immediate charging, so you end up needing to provide one of two services: either a tab-based model where you effectively loan your consumer content and trust that they will pay you, or a top-up model where they have to pay into an account in advance and they can eat away at that balance slowly. The tab-based model obviously fails because you can't stop people from registering new accounts over and over and never paying you. The top-up balance model is the most likely scenario to work, but will require people paying a "large" amount of like $10 per transaction. Skype uses this model. So then you have your problem with the "new account for each site". Well, I guess there's some sort of linking you could do, where a payment provider company like Square would enter into an agreement with each content provider to take 10% per transaction or something. Then you would just use single-sign on from your payment provider to login to these content provider sites.
nicky0 8y ago
tl;dr "people have a lot of subscriptions so they might start unsubscribing"
bitwize 8y ago
I almost expected a little popup to appear mid-article that said "Whoa, slow down there fella. You've read four free articles this month. All you need to do to get subscribed is give us your email and payment info."
alanfranzoni 8y ago
I think that the point he'd like to make (a bit clumsily, IMHO) is that we should NOT rely on SUBSCRIPTIONS only. We need more micropayments for single-shot buys. When I was younger (but then, I'm from Europe), me and my parents subscribed to almost nothing, EXCEPT what we really and totally bought every single time - that was one (1) comic book magazine that I was buying every single week. Newspapers? Sometimes my parents would read it at the local bar, sometimes at a friend's, sometimes at work, sometimes we would buy it, I'd say 2-3 times a week. But then: WE COULD CHANGE the newspaper every time! And, we DID switch what we bought, cycling between 2-3 newspaper we liked, so we had a kind of 360-degree view on what was happening. Subscriptions prevent that kind of behaviour.
- imglorp 8y ago
  Big agree. Micropayments turn the model upside down: the newspaper subscribes to a micropayment service, and web browsers have a whitelist of sites and prices they're willing to pay, by pageview, by word, etc. Everyone gets paid, malware and ads are not necessary.
knolan 8y ago
If you think newspaper subs are bad try looking at some specialist software. Maintenance costs for software like Ansys and Matlab are insane and can run into the tens of thousands a year. The situation with Ansys has gotten so bad many research groups are moving to OpenFOAM and Python and I doubt they'll be back once they figure out how much more powerful their new tools are. We're seeing something similar with Adobe. Their Creative Cloud suite is now subscription based and ends up costing much more than buying the older software did for a perpetual licence (but a drop in the ocean compared to the above). Everyone seems to hate it. There aren't even enough new features to warrant updating from your old CS6 license other than the required 64-bit support (several components of their management software still aren't even 64 bit). The only good thing is that their team licence is pretty permissive if you're not a heavy user, we were able to share three license across a larger team, the sales guy even suggested it. Now we're seeing developers like Serif come out with apps like Affinity Photo and Designer to challenge Photoshop and Illustrator with exceptionally polished desktop and iPad apps with a once off purchase per OS. The apps are performant and can do 99% of what Adobe can. With a full version of Photoshop coming to iPad it'll be interesting how users respond. Adobe don't have a great track record on iOS not that their desktop backend is much better. In fact I'd say that the standard set by Photoshop and Illustrator in terms of primary features and UX over the years has become relatively easy to replicate on modern devices, even with web apps, that Adobe have painted themselves into a technical debt corner with their awful backend (compare raw performance of Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro X). Then there's the video streaming fragmentation. Now I need Netflix, Amazon and HBO subs to watch the shows I want to see, if they're even available in my country and I also need to pay for a VPN. There's no way I can afford that so if I'm selfish I'll just torrent the ones not on my preferred platform. Unless these services introduce some form of syndication where popular shows appear on competitors platforms after a period of exclusivity then they'll burn what ground they have taken from piracy.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  Adobe software was expensive before they introduced subscriptions. There were always cheaper alternatives available but Adobe had lock-in through their file formats and product familiarity. In many ways I can see the products are better because of subscriptions. It takes away the need to pile on new features in order to justify selling upgrades. Instead they can focus on retaining existing users by fixing bugs and annoyances and adding real improvements.
peteforde 8y ago
This post is light on new information. Why would I trust a sports writer to predict an imminent and dramatic behaviour change? I'm not trying to be shitty to sports writers, but there's nothing to suggest that this guy has done any research or has any background in consumer spending behaviour. That all said, I think that it's much more interesting than "consumers have a finite spending limit". The first mistake is in believing that there's such a thing as "consumers". In reality, you have a population and an infinite number of slices within it. Some of those slices will be able to afford a huge number of services while others can afford none. With the obvious stated, the next filter gets more interesting: at what point does an option become more convenient than alternatives? For example, people had no choice but to buy CDs until MP3s came along. Massive libraries of MP3s were common until streaming services offered a legal, frictionless option for a flat monthly fee. For a huge number of people, Spotify wins. And while you can keep clearing cookies, at some point you want to read Forbes, WP, NYT, etc stories enough that you decide paying is easier than circumventing paywalls, based on how much you value your time. Finally, there's also a long list of other dimensions that influence subscriptions today: I'm a Canadian with a NYT subscription because I hate paywalls but mostly because I genuinely want to vote with my dollars to support quality news. This isn't so different from backing a Kickstarter project or a Patreon. The blend of these services and likely other ones that don't exist yet give the population the opportunity to truly personalize their consumption if they wish to take it. What I wish is that there was a consolidated location where I could manage all of my subscriptions to everything, period. Right now, every subscription is managed in a silo. This sucks. A more generalized payment mechanism would allow me to subscribe to the NYT, pay a small fee to unblock a single article and share it with my friends or even pay to sponsor a single writer... all from the same interface. A guy can dream.
- shortformblog 8y ago
  That's because it's not intended as a post that aims to explain new things so much as predict their impact in the coming year. Harvard's Neiman Lab does an annual list of predictions. This is just one of the predictions.
gman83 8y ago
For streaming video this was for the most part not such an issue due to Netflix, but as we're seeing more streaming services launch, this is going to become a problem again. There's CBS All Access if you want to watch Star Trek. Disney & Apple are launching their own streaming services. Want to watch the Lord of the Rings TV show, I guess you'll need to get Amazon. Then there's still HBO and services like that. I predict we'll see pirating ticking back up after it fell in recent years.
garmaine 8y ago
> How many things are you subscribed to? Zero. Am I the only one?
alias_neo 8y ago
The subscription-everything model is something that has really bothered me for a while. As a person that doesn't do things "regularly" I don't want to be stuck paying per-month for certain things. More importantly, is that some of these things I will use so infrequently, and that you can't "keep" after you've paid your subscription, they become cost-ineffective. I have video streaming services (Netflix, Amazon, Now TV, Crunchyroll), email, back-up storage, software licenses, music, coffee, gym membership... the list goes on. When I got married, I subscribed to Photoshop CC to create something as a gift for my wife, I used it once, and was then stuck in a 1 year contract, I missed the renewal and got stuck in another year contract. I ended that as soon as I could, but having had no need to use it up until that point, I'd paid for 2 years worth of CC (~£200) to use it once, and now the subscription was done, I couldn't use it again. I have an IDE I use 3-4 times a year, but I have to pay monthly subscription with a minimum 1 year contract. After that year you fall back not to the version you're on, but the version before it. More and more services are moving to this model, with no alternative model for those like myself that don't need, nor want to use something every week, or every month, or even every year. There is a point where I have to draw the line at adding more monthly subscriptions to my outgoings. I don't mind this model for some things, consumables, such as coffee, fine, Netflix, which I use frequently, fine, but this only suits my usage, and others probably have other things in that list they use frequently. This model might be working for a lot of companies right now, but there must be people like myself that will happily pay X for some software/thing I get to keep and use indefinitely (within reason) and are simply not buying at all because the pricing model doesn't work for us.
- jcadam 8y ago
  It would seem that pay-per-use would be a better model for products used infrequently... for example, tax filing software.
  - dspillett 8y ago
    Each use would have to be quite expensive for that to be practical for most services, especially for things like tax filing software where most people will want to use it a couple of times at a specific time each year. While that expense might well be significantly less than paying for an annual subscription (often the minimum) it would be hard to market as you would have to combat the fact that it would feel expensive to those looking with the view to maybe buying (humans are not rational creatures, despite what we like to believe, and often fail to correctly compute the relative worth of things).
owaty 8y ago
> How many news organizations or writers or blogs or podcasts do you pay for every month? Honestly, zero. There's just too much great free content. If a podcast I like to listen to or a blog I follow dies because they don't earn enough from it, fine, that'll free up the time to follow something else. And I say it as someone who has their own blog and podcast and doesn't expect to be paid for it. The fact that someone spends their time listening to what I have to say is a sufficient reward for me.
Tepix 8y ago
What we need is a meta subscription service where you pay for a certain amount of articles available from dozens of participating magazines and news outlets. If you consume too many articles you need to pay a bit more. The content creators are missing out by refusing to license their content to a services like this.
kieckerjan 8y ago
It seems ridiculous to subscribe to, say, ten publications since you cannot realistically keep up with them all. However for me things changed when I started looking at this as a form of charity. I subscribe to a number of publications that I only read every now and then, but that I find important or sympathetic. A free and healthy press that stimulates debate is worth my money even if I am not part of the core audience. This is money that I would otherwise spend on other laudable things like disaster relief or coral reefs, i.e. altruistic money without any immediate personal ROI.
ykevinator 8y ago
I wish tv and news was pay as you go. Not $4.99 an episode or $1.00 / article but $.25 / episode and $.10 / article. Bitcoin is a perfect medium for this but whenever people try to do this they price it irrationally.
mozey 8y ago
Something like coil.com might be a viable alternative. At the moment I don't subscribe to news sites because of this issue. If I could pay upfront and then split it by usage I would definitely go for it
INGELRII 8y ago
Current news syndication model is outdated and will change in next 10-20 years. Current model: Newspapers & media platforms use syndication. They get most of their news syndicated from others journals and media. The editor chooses what to print or publish. Future model: Newspapers & media platforms use syndication. They get most of their news syndicated from others journals and media. It's the reader who decides what he reads from the syndicated news. In the future you have an account in your favorite content news syndication service/newspaper/platform and pay flat monthly subscription fee by default. You can surf in the internet and read anything you want. Every month the service you subscribed distributes payments from the syndicated media according to what you read. There are different levels of payments. Some content is more expensive than other. You can also sponsor, tip etc. Some pay more because they consume more expensive content or more content. ps. The same model will work for movies, games etc. You can watch HBO movies from Netflix and vice versa.
ceautery 8y ago
I expected this to be about box subscriptions.
JazCE 8y ago
This is a good thread to read that might give some more backstory: https://twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1088503510184927233 https://twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1088503510184927233
- gamesbrainiac 8y ago
  Thank you so much for bringing this into perspective. Especially the part where only 10-15% of revenue came from subscriptions. That really puts things into perspective in terms of free news articles!
walton_simons 8y ago
I've also become completely overwhelmed by the amount of "set and forget" auto-recurring subscriptions that exist now, and it's simply led to me opting out of almost all of them. It's not even the monetary amounts, which tend to be fairly small, but more the cognitive load of keeping track of payment dates, amounts, and (especially) cancellation terms. I just can't be bothered to deal with it all, so I don't. If I was to put a number on it, I'd say five monthly subscriptions is as many as I'd be prepared to have at any one time. That would have to cover everything—news, entertainment, charitable donations, and so on. For video streaming, for instance, I subscribe to Netflix only. If something isn't on Netflix, I just won't see it, and I can live with that. I already have access to more than I can watch anyway. Should I find something better, I'll stop my Netflix subscription before switching to the new thing. If the service is harder to cancel than it is to subscribe, I'll pass irrespective of how good it looks (no, I'm not prepared to call you on the phone to cancel when subscribing took three clicks). I won't subscribe to software at all. Let me buy it outright. If it's a monthly subscription or nothing, I'll pick nothing. Perhaps I'm showing my age by saying this, but I'd be more interested in subscribing to your magazine or service if you send me an annual invoice, which I'll happily pay in one explicitly non-recurring payment, like a bank transfer. Then after a year or whatever the subscription period is, I'll make a decision about whether it's still worth it to me. If I'm considering actually subscribing to something, it won't be on a whim, and I'll already know whether or not I like it enough to pay, so signing up for an extended period is fine. Same with charities. Let me send you money once a year, and don't pressure me into signing up to a monthly payment plan, and I'll be much more prepared to do so.
- gamesbrainiac 8y ago
  > It's not even the monetary amounts, which tend to be fairly small, but more the cognitive load of keeping track of payment dates, amounts, and (especially) cancellation terms. I just can't be bothered to deal with it all, so I don't. If I was to put a number on it, I'd say five monthly subscriptions is as many as I'd be prepared to have at any one time. That would have to cover everything—news, entertainment, charitable donations, and so on. I know what you mean. I create a calendar event every single time I subscribe to something that is recurring so that I can cancel if I want to, a few days from the end of the subscription.
JulianMorrison 8y ago
Subscription implies advantages for unbundling - you get more from a Patreon linked to a preferred author, than from the NYT.
zeroxfe 8y ago
Wow, this problem is exactly what my startup is trying to solve. (Not sure if I'm allowed link to it here.) A huge issue here is that there's no way to pay tiny amounts for one-off content. Like, it's impossible to charge 10¢ to your credit card. So publishers resort to ads or subscriptions or obnoxious bundling schemes to get over the fee thresholds for credit cards.
newscracker 8y ago
Subscriptions will see declines across platforms because of fatigue and people realizing that they’re not really using the subscriptions or deriving adequate value from those. I only bother about subscriptions if it’s for visual media (selectively) or for online backups. Everything else is what I use only occasionally, and don’t see the value in getting stuck paying for those. As the article hints at, services that aren’t niche or highly focused on one topic (it closely related set of topics) or voice will not find many takers. For software, I like having a free trial and then paying once and deciding when I want to upgrade, at what price/discount, etc. I believe it’s up to the developer to provide adequate value to tempt people to upgrade, and then leave it to them to decide. Most app subscriptions make sense for those who create a lot more monetary value with the use of the apps. That’s a small percentage of the population. Subscriptions to news sites don’t make much sense when what I read all the time is highly selective and through news aggregation sites (not Facebook!) or applications (like an RSS reader). I personally can’t wait for a bigger and wider backlash against subscriptions, since every producer or developer seems intent on pushing that as the only option to users.

92 points by dschuetz 8y ago

I agree there's a limit, but why 2019 specifically? How do we know it hasn't plateaued already, or that it won't only do so in 2025? Is there any data on it?

dschuetz 8y ago
I believe it has something to do with the layoffs at Gannett, HuffPost and BuzzFeed, although they don't get mentioned in that article. Further reference: https://twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1088503510184927233 https://twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1088503510184927233

jwildeboer 8y ago

I have online/digital subscriptions for the New York Times ($48/year) the Washington Post ($19/year) and The Guardian (€60/year). Totally worth it for me.

huffmsa 8y ago
Do you feel your money was well spent on the guardian's fabrication about Manafort visiting Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy?
- jwildeboer 8y ago
  Or the NYT posting opeds full of unchecked lies? Journalists and editors will make mistakes. The question is not about that one story, it’s about the sum of what it delivers IMHO. And in that regard The Guardian still wins my support.
  - huffmsa 8y ago
    Just ribbing you btw. Serious question, would you prefer being able to support quality reporters / reporting at these publications and not pay for the lies and fabrications? If you could do that (versus having to pay an all encompassing subscription).
    - jwildeboer 8y ago
      No. I wouldn't want to directly support certain journalists. It creates the real problem of "writing to please your audience" and moving the focus from reporting to serving the patrons. The best journalists are not necessarily nice people, in my experience. They should focus on the story, not waste time on optimising their social reputation. They should be protected by their editors and the institution they work for from exactly this kind of influence. IMHO. Also it is hard to go undercover for an important story when you have to make sure you grow your audience at the same time.
      - huffmsa 8y ago
        Fair. But you and I would pay for "not nice, but brutally honest journalism". I bet a lot of other would too. Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" is historical proof of that. There's no reason a the authors couldn't write under pseudonyms, or publish as a collective. You still buy the articles one by one as you see fit.
        pjc50 8y ago
        Very difficult to maintain a pseudonym and publish articles with quotes from named sources in, avoiding the Manafort fiasco. The Economist manages the collective byline thing fairly well, but it's almost unique.

kbos87 8y ago

The dynamic explained here isn’t some cliff we are collectively approaching as the article seems to say. Instead, it’s been a drag on people’s willingness to sign up for subscription services and likelihood to churn off of them all along.

BariumBlue 8y ago

I have wanted, for a while now, for news sites to get together and figure out some shared form of monetization - pay a single rate, and get access NYT, Huffpo, bloomberg, etc., maybe with an option to pay more depending how much or on which sites I read the article. Or a single site where I could access and manage subscriptions to multiple sites. I WANT to subscribe to newspapers/new sites, but I don't want to be subscribed to 5 different subscription schemes and juggling that.

wsc981 8y ago
In The Netherlands some start-up is trying that business model and they also recently became active in the USA [0]. --- [0]: https://launch.blendle.com https://launch.blendle.com
- BariumBlue 8y ago
  Thanks, I just signed up for the beta - it looks genuinly intriguing
Gys 8y ago
Or alternatively pay per article - which is in the works: http://blendle.com/ http://blendle.com/
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tjpnz 8y ago
I like this but there's potential to end up in a similar situation to where we will be soon with video streaming services.
poikl 8y ago
This exists through your local library. Most in Canada subscribe to a service that lets you read 100s of newspapers (from a number of countries) for free online (or the nominal cost of a yearly library membership).

wodenokoto 8y ago

Does this guy know that before the internet most people paid money to subscribe to newspapers and magazines? "The growth of the subscription model has been one of the biggest developments in online journalism in the past few years ... The subscription model makes a lot of sense for publishers. The advertising-based model that supported the industry for 100 years doesn’t work in a digital world where ..." No, the subscription model has been the basis for the industry for the past 100 years. He goes on: "You can’t expect people to subscribe to their local paper (which is vital to democracy, we tell them) AND The New York Times and the Washington Post (because Democracy Dies in the Dark) AND Netflix AND Hulu AND HBO Go AND The Athletic AND ESPN Plus AND their favorite podcast on Patreon AND …" Yet people were subscribed to a daily paper, 1 or 2 monthly magazines and a cable package with added charges for sports channels.

kobrad 8y ago
I get what you are saying, but if used everything I would like to use I'd spend maybe a quarter of my paycheck every month. On random subscription things. Everything is subscription based and feels like I have to pay separate subscriptions for every bus I take, you know
- entity345 8y ago
  Budgeting is "being an adult 101"... You cannot get "everything you would like", that's life.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    In the ad-funded internet, you really can get everything you like; you can even block ads if you don't want the inconvenience. What this discussion is really about is whether and how long this will dry up the supply of good content or replace it with bad.
- lazyjones 8y ago
  That just means subscriptions might usually be too expensive, not that the model has some intrinsic issues.

ajuc 8y ago

Twitch/youtube/patreon subscription model is the future. Why subscribe to several newspapers (where you don't care for 90% of the content), if you could subscribe to the exact 13 authors that write about stuff you like, and never miss any of their articles, and never need to look through 30 pages of crap to find that? I'm seeing a lot of business models that would never work without twitch - a guy that's streaming pen&paper RPG sessions. He's not even streaming in English, but in Polish (much smaller audience). And he earns very good money (it helps he's awesome at storytelling :) ). Another guy earns a living by streaming his commentary on interesting starcraft matches. Another streams coding his game (but he's not doing it full-time). The best thing is - if the community is in the sweet spot (like 100-1000 people) - you can interact with the people in chat, and it's not fake interaction like on TV or in radio - when you write something you know the "celebrity" will read it and likely respond to it. It makes the audience much more engaged than with traditional media. Every niche hobby is now a marketable skill if you have a little charisma and a lot of time. There should be something like that, but for text.

nottorp 8y ago
However, this way you hit the ceiling for how much people can afford for subscriptions. You get the rabid fans but no one else. Too much fragmentation IMO. I'd like a service (perhaps Patreon can do it) that asks "how much do you want to pay monthly?" and "who do you want to support?" and then distributes your $10, or $100, or $1000, whatever you can afford, to everyone in your list. It will end up as pennies from each subscriber, but it will encourage more subscribers so hopefully it can even out or even produce more money.
Vinnl 8y ago
> Every niche hobby is now a marketable skill if you have a little charisma and can properly speak English. It's really hard to find a niche audience when you speak Dutch, but retaining one's charisma while speaking a non-native language is really difficult as well.
- ajuc 8y ago
  That's what I thought too, but all my examples were doing it in Polish, which has only about 2 times more speakers than Dutch.

orbifold 8y ago

What seems like an obvious solution is to decentralize the ad market again. Especially news papers should be able to sell ads to buisenesses directly, as they have in the past.

Shivetya 8y ago
changing the ad market will not fix the problem, the problem is the papers existed quite well when they had a captive audience. that is no longer true so many publications are finding that they only were prosperous not because of their content but because they were the only game in town.

huffmsa 8y ago

I think the solution from a consumer perspective is per article 1-click micro-transactions. It needs to be easy, seamless and not require a new account for each site. "Click to pay 10¢ with NewsBuyer to read this article". Boom done.

pjc50 8y ago
My previous comment on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15592192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15592192 - "the problem with micropayments is microfraud"
- huffmsa 8y ago
  But eventually the wheat will separate from the chafe. If example.com is always clickbait / shit, eventually people will stop going there. NYC locals don't shop the tourist shops, because they've learned not to.
andai 8y ago
I agree, but I also agreed ten years ago...
- huffmsa 8y ago
  But 10 years ago the subscription services weren't feeling as much pressure to fix this issue. And since then we've had Patreon come into vogue, which almost all of the YouTube channels I encounter are using now. It gives support to "pay for content you enjoy". Only problem I see with it is that you have to leave the consumption platform to make the transaction happen.
cheschire 8y ago
There are transaction fees for most credit card purchases, and some of those fees have mandatory minimums (i.e. 2% plus 10 cents per transaction). This effectively prevents immediate charging, so you end up needing to provide one of two services: either a tab-based model where you effectively loan your consumer content and trust that they will pay you, or a top-up model where they have to pay into an account in advance and they can eat away at that balance slowly. The tab-based model obviously fails because you can't stop people from registering new accounts over and over and never paying you. The top-up balance model is the most likely scenario to work, but will require people paying a "large" amount of like $10 per transaction. Skype uses this model. So then you have your problem with the "new account for each site". Well, I guess there's some sort of linking you could do, where a payment provider company like Square would enter into an agreement with each content provider to take 10% per transaction or something. Then you would just use single-sign on from your payment provider to login to these content provider sites.

nicky0 8y ago

tl;dr "people have a lot of subscriptions so they might start unsubscribing"

bitwize 8y ago

I almost expected a little popup to appear mid-article that said "Whoa, slow down there fella. You've read four free articles this month. All you need to do to get subscribed is give us your email and payment info."

alanfranzoni 8y ago

I think that the point he'd like to make (a bit clumsily, IMHO) is that we should NOT rely on SUBSCRIPTIONS only. We need more micropayments for single-shot buys. When I was younger (but then, I'm from Europe), me and my parents subscribed to almost nothing, EXCEPT what we really and totally bought every single time - that was one (1) comic book magazine that I was buying every single week. Newspapers? Sometimes my parents would read it at the local bar, sometimes at a friend's, sometimes at work, sometimes we would buy it, I'd say 2-3 times a week. But then: WE COULD CHANGE the newspaper every time! And, we DID switch what we bought, cycling between 2-3 newspaper we liked, so we had a kind of 360-degree view on what was happening. Subscriptions prevent that kind of behaviour.

imglorp 8y ago
Big agree. Micropayments turn the model upside down: the newspaper subscribes to a micropayment service, and web browsers have a whitelist of sites and prices they're willing to pay, by pageview, by word, etc. Everyone gets paid, malware and ads are not necessary.

knolan 8y ago

If you think newspaper subs are bad try looking at some specialist software. Maintenance costs for software like Ansys and Matlab are insane and can run into the tens of thousands a year. The situation with Ansys has gotten so bad many research groups are moving to OpenFOAM and Python and I doubt they'll be back once they figure out how much more powerful their new tools are. We're seeing something similar with Adobe. Their Creative Cloud suite is now subscription based and ends up costing much more than buying the older software did for a perpetual licence (but a drop in the ocean compared to the above). Everyone seems to hate it. There aren't even enough new features to warrant updating from your old CS6 license other than the required 64-bit support (several components of their management software still aren't even 64 bit). The only good thing is that their team licence is pretty permissive if you're not a heavy user, we were able to share three license across a larger team, the sales guy even suggested it. Now we're seeing developers like Serif come out with apps like Affinity Photo and Designer to challenge Photoshop and Illustrator with exceptionally polished desktop and iPad apps with a once off purchase per OS. The apps are performant and can do 99% of what Adobe can. With a full version of Photoshop coming to iPad it'll be interesting how users respond. Adobe don't have a great track record on iOS not that their desktop backend is much better. In fact I'd say that the standard set by Photoshop and Illustrator in terms of primary features and UX over the years has become relatively easy to replicate on modern devices, even with web apps, that Adobe have painted themselves into a technical debt corner with their awful backend (compare raw performance of Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro X). Then there's the video streaming fragmentation. Now I need Netflix, Amazon and HBO subs to watch the shows I want to see, if they're even available in my country and I also need to pay for a VPN. There's no way I can afford that so if I'm selfish I'll just torrent the ones not on my preferred platform. Unless these services introduce some form of syndication where popular shows appear on competitors platforms after a period of exclusivity then they'll burn what ground they have taken from piracy.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
Adobe software was expensive before they introduced subscriptions. There were always cheaper alternatives available but Adobe had lock-in through their file formats and product familiarity. In many ways I can see the products are better because of subscriptions. It takes away the need to pile on new features in order to justify selling upgrades. Instead they can focus on retaining existing users by fixing bugs and annoyances and adding real improvements.

peteforde 8y ago

This post is light on new information. Why would I trust a sports writer to predict an imminent and dramatic behaviour change? I'm not trying to be shitty to sports writers, but there's nothing to suggest that this guy has done any research or has any background in consumer spending behaviour. That all said, I think that it's much more interesting than "consumers have a finite spending limit". The first mistake is in believing that there's such a thing as "consumers". In reality, you have a population and an infinite number of slices within it. Some of those slices will be able to afford a huge number of services while others can afford none. With the obvious stated, the next filter gets more interesting: at what point does an option become more convenient than alternatives? For example, people had no choice but to buy CDs until MP3s came along. Massive libraries of MP3s were common until streaming services offered a legal, frictionless option for a flat monthly fee. For a huge number of people, Spotify wins. And while you can keep clearing cookies, at some point you want to read Forbes, WP, NYT, etc stories enough that you decide paying is easier than circumventing paywalls, based on how much you value your time. Finally, there's also a long list of other dimensions that influence subscriptions today: I'm a Canadian with a NYT subscription because I hate paywalls but mostly because I genuinely want to vote with my dollars to support quality news. This isn't so different from backing a Kickstarter project or a Patreon. The blend of these services and likely other ones that don't exist yet give the population the opportunity to truly personalize their consumption if they wish to take it. What I wish is that there was a consolidated location where I could manage all of my subscriptions to everything, period. Right now, every subscription is managed in a silo. This sucks. A more generalized payment mechanism would allow me to subscribe to the NYT, pay a small fee to unblock a single article and share it with my friends or even pay to sponsor a single writer... all from the same interface. A guy can dream.

shortformblog 8y ago
That's because it's not intended as a post that aims to explain new things so much as predict their impact in the coming year. Harvard's Neiman Lab does an annual list of predictions. This is just one of the predictions.

gman83 8y ago

For streaming video this was for the most part not such an issue due to Netflix, but as we're seeing more streaming services launch, this is going to become a problem again. There's CBS All Access if you want to watch Star Trek. Disney & Apple are launching their own streaming services. Want to watch the Lord of the Rings TV show, I guess you'll need to get Amazon. Then there's still HBO and services like that. I predict we'll see pirating ticking back up after it fell in recent years.

garmaine 8y ago

> How many things are you subscribed to? Zero. Am I the only one?

alias_neo 8y ago

The subscription-everything model is something that has really bothered me for a while. As a person that doesn't do things "regularly" I don't want to be stuck paying per-month for certain things. More importantly, is that some of these things I will use so infrequently, and that you can't "keep" after you've paid your subscription, they become cost-ineffective. I have video streaming services (Netflix, Amazon, Now TV, Crunchyroll), email, back-up storage, software licenses, music, coffee, gym membership... the list goes on. When I got married, I subscribed to Photoshop CC to create something as a gift for my wife, I used it once, and was then stuck in a 1 year contract, I missed the renewal and got stuck in another year contract. I ended that as soon as I could, but having had no need to use it up until that point, I'd paid for 2 years worth of CC (~£200) to use it once, and now the subscription was done, I couldn't use it again. I have an IDE I use 3-4 times a year, but I have to pay monthly subscription with a minimum 1 year contract. After that year you fall back not to the version you're on, but the version before it. More and more services are moving to this model, with no alternative model for those like myself that don't need, nor want to use something every week, or every month, or even every year. There is a point where I have to draw the line at adding more monthly subscriptions to my outgoings. I don't mind this model for some things, consumables, such as coffee, fine, Netflix, which I use frequently, fine, but this only suits my usage, and others probably have other things in that list they use frequently. This model might be working for a lot of companies right now, but there must be people like myself that will happily pay X for some software/thing I get to keep and use indefinitely (within reason) and are simply not buying at all because the pricing model doesn't work for us.

jcadam 8y ago
It would seem that pay-per-use would be a better model for products used infrequently... for example, tax filing software.
- dspillett 8y ago
  Each use would have to be quite expensive for that to be practical for most services, especially for things like tax filing software where most people will want to use it a couple of times at a specific time each year. While that expense might well be significantly less than paying for an annual subscription (often the minimum) it would be hard to market as you would have to combat the fact that it would feel expensive to those looking with the view to maybe buying (humans are not rational creatures, despite what we like to believe, and often fail to correctly compute the relative worth of things).

owaty 8y ago

> How many news organizations or writers or blogs or podcasts do you pay for every month? Honestly, zero. There's just too much great free content. If a podcast I like to listen to or a blog I follow dies because they don't earn enough from it, fine, that'll free up the time to follow something else. And I say it as someone who has their own blog and podcast and doesn't expect to be paid for it. The fact that someone spends their time listening to what I have to say is a sufficient reward for me.

Tepix 8y ago

What we need is a meta subscription service where you pay for a certain amount of articles available from dozens of participating magazines and news outlets. If you consume too many articles you need to pay a bit more. The content creators are missing out by refusing to license their content to a services like this.

kieckerjan 8y ago

It seems ridiculous to subscribe to, say, ten publications since you cannot realistically keep up with them all. However for me things changed when I started looking at this as a form of charity. I subscribe to a number of publications that I only read every now and then, but that I find important or sympathetic. A free and healthy press that stimulates debate is worth my money even if I am not part of the core audience. This is money that I would otherwise spend on other laudable things like disaster relief or coral reefs, i.e. altruistic money without any immediate personal ROI.

ykevinator 8y ago

I wish tv and news was pay as you go. Not $4.99 an episode or $1.00 / article but $.25 / episode and $.10 / article. Bitcoin is a perfect medium for this but whenever people try to do this they price it irrationally.

mozey 8y ago

Something like coil.com might be a viable alternative. At the moment I don't subscribe to news sites because of this issue. If I could pay upfront and then split it by usage I would definitely go for it

INGELRII 8y ago

Current news syndication model is outdated and will change in next 10-20 years. Current model: Newspapers & media platforms use syndication. They get most of their news syndicated from others journals and media. The editor chooses what to print or publish. Future model: Newspapers & media platforms use syndication. They get most of their news syndicated from others journals and media. It's the reader who decides what he reads from the syndicated news. In the future you have an account in your favorite content news syndication service/newspaper/platform and pay flat monthly subscription fee by default. You can surf in the internet and read anything you want. Every month the service you subscribed distributes payments from the syndicated media according to what you read. There are different levels of payments. Some content is more expensive than other. You can also sponsor, tip etc. Some pay more because they consume more expensive content or more content. ps. The same model will work for movies, games etc. You can watch HBO movies from Netflix and vice versa.

ceautery 8y ago

I expected this to be about box subscriptions.

JazCE 8y ago

This is a good thread to read that might give some more backstory: https://twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1088503510184927233 https://twitter.com/JeremyLittau/status/1088503510184927233

gamesbrainiac 8y ago
Thank you so much for bringing this into perspective. Especially the part where only 10-15% of revenue came from subscriptions. That really puts things into perspective in terms of free news articles!

walton_simons 8y ago

I've also become completely overwhelmed by the amount of "set and forget" auto-recurring subscriptions that exist now, and it's simply led to me opting out of almost all of them. It's not even the monetary amounts, which tend to be fairly small, but more the cognitive load of keeping track of payment dates, amounts, and (especially) cancellation terms. I just can't be bothered to deal with it all, so I don't. If I was to put a number on it, I'd say five monthly subscriptions is as many as I'd be prepared to have at any one time. That would have to cover everything—news, entertainment, charitable donations, and so on. For video streaming, for instance, I subscribe to Netflix only. If something isn't on Netflix, I just won't see it, and I can live with that. I already have access to more than I can watch anyway. Should I find something better, I'll stop my Netflix subscription before switching to the new thing. If the service is harder to cancel than it is to subscribe, I'll pass irrespective of how good it looks (no, I'm not prepared to call you on the phone to cancel when subscribing took three clicks). I won't subscribe to software at all. Let me buy it outright. If it's a monthly subscription or nothing, I'll pick nothing. Perhaps I'm showing my age by saying this, but I'd be more interested in subscribing to your magazine or service if you send me an annual invoice, which I'll happily pay in one explicitly non-recurring payment, like a bank transfer. Then after a year or whatever the subscription period is, I'll make a decision about whether it's still worth it to me. If I'm considering actually subscribing to something, it won't be on a whim, and I'll already know whether or not I like it enough to pay, so signing up for an extended period is fine. Same with charities. Let me send you money once a year, and don't pressure me into signing up to a monthly payment plan, and I'll be much more prepared to do so.

gamesbrainiac 8y ago
> It's not even the monetary amounts, which tend to be fairly small, but more the cognitive load of keeping track of payment dates, amounts, and (especially) cancellation terms. I just can't be bothered to deal with it all, so I don't. If I was to put a number on it, I'd say five monthly subscriptions is as many as I'd be prepared to have at any one time. That would have to cover everything—news, entertainment, charitable donations, and so on. I know what you mean. I create a calendar event every single time I subscribe to something that is recurring so that I can cancel if I want to, a few days from the end of the subscription.

JulianMorrison 8y ago

Subscription implies advantages for unbundling - you get more from a Patreon linked to a preferred author, than from the NYT.

zeroxfe 8y ago

Wow, this problem is exactly what my startup is trying to solve. (Not sure if I'm allowed link to it here.) A huge issue here is that there's no way to pay tiny amounts for one-off content. Like, it's impossible to charge 10¢ to your credit card. So publishers resort to ads or subscriptions or obnoxious bundling schemes to get over the fee thresholds for credit cards.

newscracker 8y ago

Subscriptions will see declines across platforms because of fatigue and people realizing that they’re not really using the subscriptions or deriving adequate value from those. I only bother about subscriptions if it’s for visual media (selectively) or for online backups. Everything else is what I use only occasionally, and don’t see the value in getting stuck paying for those. As the article hints at, services that aren’t niche or highly focused on one topic (it closely related set of topics) or voice will not find many takers. For software, I like having a free trial and then paying once and deciding when I want to upgrade, at what price/discount, etc. I believe it’s up to the developer to provide adequate value to tempt people to upgrade, and then leave it to them to decide. Most app subscriptions make sense for those who create a lot more monetary value with the use of the apps. That’s a small percentage of the population. Subscriptions to news sites don’t make much sense when what I read all the time is highly selective and through news aggregation sites (not Facebook!) or applications (like an RSS reader). I personally can’t wait for a bigger and wider backlash against subscriptions, since every producer or developer seems intent on pushing that as the only option to users.