5 ms·

> As the other poster wrote, how else would you expand your readership? By creating a valuable product, finding potential costumers, and offering the product f

> As the other poster wrote, how else would you expand your readership? By creating a valuable product, finding potential costumers, and offering the product for sale. Why would it be different than any other business? It would be ridiculous to expect every SaaS business to offer their services for "a few bucks", and yet, for some reason, people think it is egregious that publishers don't do this. Bizarre. Though, I do have the say the newspaper industry caused this; for years, when the internet was still new, most newspapers gave away their best content. That was a huge mistake; it lead people to significantly devalue news.

hobofan 6y ago
How do you expect people to go from "not customer" to "loyal customer" without going to through the intermediate step of "occasional reader"? > By creating a valuable product, finding potential costumers > Our websites, as they're designed, are probably a little annoying to people who are not our loyal readership. That's by design; > again, NOT our occasional readers As I read it, you are expecting a occasional visitor to stick with your bad-UX site and stick with it despite that, until they at some point came to the site so often that they have learned to endure the bad UX?
- x0x0 6y ago
  I expect via the well-known method of signing up for a trial subscription.
corty 6y ago
Articles are more of a product that is sold, and less of a service. There is no close interaction required like in a real service business. A service customer has to interact with the service provider and therefore a longer-term ongoing relationship is beneficial to both. But even then, a low-individuality service can be one-off and is expected to be. Think e.g. of a car wash. Or renting VMs in the cloud. So I don't think newspapers, selling their totally unindividualized, standardized and prepackaged good (can't even pick just the sports section) is anything like a "service" or comparable to most SaaS. However, they continue behaving like it saleswise, alienating their readership
x0x0 6y ago
Also, everyone in here is (oddly?) discounting the fact that making it easy to consume individual articles at some presumably-low price would inevitably reduce the number of monthly subscribers. Some subs would save money; some subs would think they would save money.

hobofan 6y ago

How do you expect people to go from "not customer" to "loyal customer" without going to through the intermediate step of "occasional reader"? > By creating a valuable product, finding potential costumers > Our websites, as they're designed, are probably a little annoying to people who are not our loyal readership. That's by design; > again, NOT our occasional readers As I read it, you are expecting a occasional visitor to stick with your bad-UX site and stick with it despite that, until they at some point came to the site so often that they have learned to endure the bad UX?

x0x0 6y ago
I expect via the well-known method of signing up for a trial subscription.

corty 6y ago

Articles are more of a product that is sold, and less of a service. There is no close interaction required like in a real service business. A service customer has to interact with the service provider and therefore a longer-term ongoing relationship is beneficial to both. But even then, a low-individuality service can be one-off and is expected to be. Think e.g. of a car wash. Or renting VMs in the cloud. So I don't think newspapers, selling their totally unindividualized, standardized and prepackaged good (can't even pick just the sports section) is anything like a "service" or comparable to most SaaS. However, they continue behaving like it saleswise, alienating their readership

x0x0 6y ago

Also, everyone in here is (oddly?) discounting the fact that making it easy to consume individual articles at some presumably-low price would inevitably reduce the number of monthly subscribers. Some subs would save money; some subs would think they would save money.