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This is the fallacy that led to the current broken model. Suppose that instead of paying $17 a month to get the NYT, I pay $20 a month to get that and five oth

This is the fallacy that led to the current broken model. Suppose that instead of paying $17 a month to get the NYT, I pay $20 a month to get that and five other similarly high quality news sources. Does this make it harder to fund journalism? Not at all. The NYT now has (for argument's sake) six times as many subscribers, all paying slightly more than six times as much. So do the five other organizations. And, since the consumer has a much better proposition, people who previously weren't paying will sign up and the total pot will be even bigger. Since all the costs are fixed costs, it doesn't matter if everyone reads six times as many articles. But they won't. They will read slightly more, but benefit much more by having a bigger choice. This is what we saw with Spotify. You pay about the price of buying one album a month. But you get to listen to much, much, more. Even if you only listen to a few songs a day, the utility of being able to choose from anything is huge. Of course, some people used to spend a lot more each month on physical music. But lots of other people used to spend nothing, since if you only had $15 a month, you could't get much for it. One problem is that the NYT, the the FT, the New Yorker, etc, each assume that they are uniquely trusted and loved by their audience. But that's only true because of selection bias. No one who values their output to the tune of $3 a month is part of their readership. In the music industry, the huge monopolists could force adoption of the new model. But they're also the reason musicians don't make much money, since they are now supporting two sets of middlemen - the tech companies and the 'record labels'.

dragandj 6y ago
Let's not forget that these music services are possible because the authors are paid peanuts, i.e, almost nothing for their work (other than a handful of the most popular chart topping acts). The thing with journalism is that you can't rely that much on back catalogs and artistic enthusiasm. An indie band might share all their music on Spotify for $1.37 a month revenue for the love of music, but that $1.37 will not buy you much of quality reporting...
summerlight 6y ago
> The NYT now has (for argument's sake) six times as many subscribers, all paying slightly more than six times as much. Not really, there must be an intersection between them and we don't know how large it is. And I don't believe there's many other magazine/news sites as successful as NYT so the revenue number is more likely 3x~4x even assuming no intersection and 100% conversion rate. The real issue is that traditional media's competitive edge was its infrastructure for content distribution, not the content itself. Sadly, people willing to pay money for high quality journalism seems minority so its budget is. Otherwise, ads-powered yellow journalism cannot be thriving as is. In this landscape, there's simply not much incentive to pursue such aggregated subscription model for media itself. Maybe there can be suitable business models for aggregators like FB or Google, but I don't think this is what you really want.
- benrbray 6y ago
  I think the point is that a cheaper subscription model would bring in a lot of new subscribers that were previously paying nothing. There's a quote that goes along the lines of "those who don't read the news are uninformed; those who read the news are misinformed". For me, I see NYT as one of the more credible new sources, but it has a history of bias against reforms to wealth inequality, which is an important issue for me. Accordingly, I can't justify using it as my sole source of news, and I can't afford to pay more than $20/mo total for this sort of expense. So, an option to pay $20/mo for access to 5-6 different news sources would be really appealing to me. Until then, I'll keep using my 3 free articles / month from the random news outlets that get posted to HN/reddit.
freddie_mercury 6y ago
> The NYT now has (for argument's sake) six times as many subscribers, all paying slightly more than six times as much. There have been many many efforts to have sites that provide access to multiple news sources for a single price. Apple News, PressReader, Magzster, and more. Newspapers and their corporate owners have ample data on your claim that low single prices massively increase the audience. I'm guessing your claim is not supported by the real world data and that's why they haven't adopted the model. After all, only 16% of people have said they are willing to pay any amount of money to read the news. That's a total market of 40 million people. The NY Times has 6 million subscribers, so they've already captured 15% of the market. Your claim that they could capture 6x means this mythical service would capture 90% of the total available market. Which just seems...implausible on the surface. Netflix doesn't even have remotely that penetration -- only 51% -- and they've been around forever, have massive brand recognition, have tons of money, have unique properties to draw viewers, etc, etc.

dragandj 6y ago

Let's not forget that these music services are possible because the authors are paid peanuts, i.e, almost nothing for their work (other than a handful of the most popular chart topping acts). The thing with journalism is that you can't rely that much on back catalogs and artistic enthusiasm. An indie band might share all their music on Spotify for $1.37 a month revenue for the love of music, but that $1.37 will not buy you much of quality reporting...

summerlight 6y ago

> The NYT now has (for argument's sake) six times as many subscribers, all paying slightly more than six times as much. Not really, there must be an intersection between them and we don't know how large it is. And I don't believe there's many other magazine/news sites as successful as NYT so the revenue number is more likely 3x~4x even assuming no intersection and 100% conversion rate. The real issue is that traditional media's competitive edge was its infrastructure for content distribution, not the content itself. Sadly, people willing to pay money for high quality journalism seems minority so its budget is. Otherwise, ads-powered yellow journalism cannot be thriving as is. In this landscape, there's simply not much incentive to pursue such aggregated subscription model for media itself. Maybe there can be suitable business models for aggregators like FB or Google, but I don't think this is what you really want.

benrbray 6y ago
I think the point is that a cheaper subscription model would bring in a lot of new subscribers that were previously paying nothing. There's a quote that goes along the lines of "those who don't read the news are uninformed; those who read the news are misinformed". For me, I see NYT as one of the more credible new sources, but it has a history of bias against reforms to wealth inequality, which is an important issue for me. Accordingly, I can't justify using it as my sole source of news, and I can't afford to pay more than $20/mo total for this sort of expense. So, an option to pay $20/mo for access to 5-6 different news sources would be really appealing to me. Until then, I'll keep using my 3 free articles / month from the random news outlets that get posted to HN/reddit.

freddie_mercury 6y ago

> The NYT now has (for argument's sake) six times as many subscribers, all paying slightly more than six times as much. There have been many many efforts to have sites that provide access to multiple news sources for a single price. Apple News, PressReader, Magzster, and more. Newspapers and their corporate owners have ample data on your claim that low single prices massively increase the audience. I'm guessing your claim is not supported by the real world data and that's why they haven't adopted the model. After all, only 16% of people have said they are willing to pay any amount of money to read the news. That's a total market of 40 million people. The NY Times has 6 million subscribers, so they've already captured 15% of the market. Your claim that they could capture 6x means this mythical service would capture 90% of the total available market. Which just seems...implausible on the surface. Netflix doesn't even have remotely that penetration -- only 51% -- and they've been around forever, have massive brand recognition, have tons of money, have unique properties to draw viewers, etc, etc.