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 sp

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.