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> 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 intersecti

> 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.