9 ms·

Yeah, this is basically correct. The key issue is that people don't want to pay $2/month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20/month to a single org

• raffraffraff 5y ago
  A bundle deal would be cool. But I'd prefer to pay the $20/month to read x articles regardless of who writes them.
  • monkeydust 5y ago
    Agree. That way you can discover new writers that you will come to like.
  • skinkestek 5y ago
    Or even better $10 for n tokens, $20 for n * 2,5 tokens, $30 for n*3 tokens or something to that effect. Charge me monthly to to up but not if I have more than m unspent tokens.
• ALittleLight 5y ago
  I would like a "Build your own magazine" type deal. Let me configure a list of the writers I want to read and give me a sizable discount on the subscription or a bundled deal. I don't want to pay 10 dollars a month to each of 20 writers, but I would pay 20 dollars a month to read and support 20 writers.
  • eandre 5y ago
    The writers you're most likely to want to read – the top-earning writers – have already demonstrated (through Substack) that they can easily acquire an audience of tens of thousands of subscribers by charging $5-10 dollars per month for themselves. Why would they participate in the bundle you're suggesting?
    • z77dj3kl 5y ago
      Advertising? Have some articles be part of the bundle as a "preview", and most articles behind an individual subscription? This idea of building your own newspaper sounds kind of interesting actually: a mix of authors you've picked and an automatically curated content from other authors to help you find new authors.
  • CJefferson 5y ago
    The problem with this type of thing (channel unbundling has the same problem), is the finance doesn't work out. After someone has written something / produced a TV channel, sending it to one more person costs basically nothing. So, if (making up some simple numbers) there are 100 writers who want paying $10 each, and 100 customers who want to pay $10 each, you can: * Charge each customer $10 and let them read every writer (most of which they won't want) * Charge each customer $1 a writer, then they get to read 10 writers. * Charge each customer $10 a writer, then they get to read 1 writer. People often say they want to pay a smaller amount for a subset of content, not realising that if everyone does that, you just end up spending the same amount as you started, on a subset of content.
    • jeremiahlee 5y ago
• native_samples 5y ago
  You're assuming that people care about the output of 20 writers though. Probably they don't. You need dozens or hundreds of substitutable writers under a single roof if you're reporting factual updates about a concrete situation as quickly as possible. Natural disasters, elections, sports, law changes, etc. Substack is for analysis and commentary. Traditional newspapers also bundle a handful of "superstar" writers along with their news, but many of those writers aren't very good and especially in the past 8 years many of the better ones have been purged because the best analysis requires free thinking, but free thinking is incompatible with a hard left takeover of an institution. It's no coincidence that Substack's top earning writers like Greenwald, Taibbi, Scott Alexander have all been purged from other media outlets for their un-woke writing: there is demand for such analysis but newspapers are trying to extinguish it. In Taibbi's case he was pushed out of the media outlet he himself founded! Substack is now monetizing this demand, apparently, very successfully (the deals they cut with those writers have supposedly all been very profitable for Substack).
• user3939382 5y ago
  Just to play devil’s advocate: anytime a new idea comes along there will always be someone advocating for the status quo, and that the status quo is inevitable. I am reminded of the financial commentator on the radio in the early 2000’s predicting that Amazon would fail because it had stopped offering free shipping. Time will tell. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I’m rooting for substack.
  • lmm 5y ago
    In fairness free shipping with Prime is a cornerstone of Amazon's business model these days.
    • adventured 5y ago
      Rather importantly it's not free shipping, you're merely paying a discounted rate for shipping. You get cheaper shipping, Amazon gets increased customer retention by getting you to make an upfront financial outlay for future shipping use (which the customer then feels compelled to try to get the most out of). If Amazon made Prime free for everyone and kept their retail prices unchanged, there'd be a good argument for saying it's free shipping.
• new299 5y ago
  > The logic is simple: an individual writer is always relatively niche. Niche means small audience. Small audience means you have to charge more per person to cover your costs. I guess the question is does that model work? Rather than catering to a generalist audience focus on a niche and charge more to people who can't get that content anywhere else. Free content then plays to the more generalist audience and helps attract people who are more seriously interested in your niche. I started doing this with my substack, which is aimed at the relatively narrow niche of sequencing technologies (biotech). The information I provide, isn't really available elsewhere and requires an industry background, and significant research. This information can play into investment decisions, so I've priced it to reflect that (~$50/m). I don't have enough paid subscribers to justify the effort yet. But every paid subscriber provides some meaningful amount of money... I could see this working in other areas too. I'm not sure the niche even needs to be super small. For example, English language reporting on Japan is generally pretty bad. Could you find at least 200 people worldwide willing to pay $50/m for detailed well sourced reporting on Japan? It seems likely to me... It doesn't even matter if those 200 people republish your work in some form. They're paying privilege of getting that information first.
• Gravityloss 5y ago
  I get it why readers can't pay individual writers in the newspaper world. That's because it only makes sense to print and deliver one kind of identical newspaper and deliver that to everyone. The printing is done with plates. You make one plate per page (well a few pages at a time) and you use that plate to print thousands of copies of the page. The page contains an assortment of articles. The newspaper is physically delivered to homes and news stands. Now we're in the internet. There are no such constraints. Why not just pay directly per article? Spotify for example collects money but distributes it to artists, per-listen. Spotify has basically almost all the music in the world. And other services have it too. Anybody can upload to Spotify or Apple Music or Tidal or what you have. So Spotify is not really doing curating or having a quality standards or an editor anything, like a newspaper, it's just a way to collect and distribute money. There is the still-unloved problem of curation. You could use humans for good curation but discoverability is quite bad. (Edit: yes in the newspaper world there is the syndication, Reuters, AFP etc, too, and staff writers etc, it's a bit more complicated.)
  • ljm 5y ago
    I'm sure a columnist would find a way to make this work, but the typical journalist adapting a report from AP or Reuters won't.
    • Gravityloss 5y ago
      No, that's the problem. If I want to listen to Lady Gaga, I can do that from any of the music services. The artist gets a cut from my monthly payment to whichever service I use. If I want to read an article about traveling to Iceland during Covid times and it's in Washington Post while I subscribe to the New York Times, I can't, unless I subscribe to the Washington Post. Maybe a writer writing to NYT does get money according to the amount of clicks to their article. Some articles can even be free and the money comes from ad revenue. But it's still a small walled garden. People just don't get to see many well written articles because they are locked behind this small garden paywall and most people don't want to pay the entrance fee. How about a "Writer Money Distribution service". People could subscribe to it. You could build a curated edited newspaper out of such articles, if you wanted. But a user could also read any article, and they would know that their monthly money would be distributed to the writers according to the what they did read. There could be even multiple services and the same writer could publish to multiple with no exclusivity clause. Edit: Hell, Hacker News is one excellent article curation service that has supplanted the place of a newspaper. But there's no revenue feedback mechanism. What does the writer benefit from being linked to from HN? Many people use some go-around-the-paywall service since they don't want to subscribe, which indeed would be irrational for only a few articles every now and then.
• Lazare 5y ago
  > The key issue is that people don't want to pay $2/month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20/month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a "newspaper". ...actually, I'd *VASTLY* rather pay a small monthly fee to a small number of writers I care about, than a larger fee for a collection of writers that I don't. More to the point, I am doing that, and a fair number of other people are too. If baffles me to see someone advancing the argument that "people don't want to..." and then listing something which people are very much currently choosing to do. Many people want to do exactly that! (Although I think we agree that the number of people is unlikely to be enough to be truly disruptive.) > Maybe Substack will go the Medium way and try to aggregate Very possibly, but if so, I expect the people enjoying their current business model will simply migrate to a competitor. $5/month for a writer I truly love is a reasonable ask. $5/month split across six writers, only one of whom I particular care for is in many ways less attractive; I may be getting more writing but the writer is getting less. Aggregation is not obviously the only business model that makes sense here, and I think Medium - and come to that, the news industry as a whole - shows off its weaknesses very clearly. I think the real weakness of Substack is not that "nobody wants what they're selling", but that they have very little moat. Substack doesn't need to worry that Yglesias will realise that actually he hates making more money than the entire NYT editorial board combined and quits blogging to go back to the traditional media; Substack needs to worry that he'll jump to his own platform and avoid their fairly hefty monthly cut.
  • mint2 5y ago
    6 writers you care about okay but where can investigative pieces that take months or years to create fit into that? We’d need 10x that number, pay like 60 writers if we want to read articles that have actual research on a weekly basis, not a daily basis.
    • Lazare 5y ago
      > where can investigative pieces that take months or years to create fit into that? They don't. The problem is, they don't fit in ANYWHERE. Nobody wants to pay for that, and in fact, nobody ever has. As has been documented ad infinitum at this point, serious, long form, investigative journalism has always been cross-subsidised from other revenue streams, because at no point has their been an audience willing to pay the actual cost of investigative journalism. Traditionally the funds came from advertising, particularly classified ads, but classified ad revenue died...what, over two decades ago now? Print advertisement revenue followed, the weird shift so many newspapers tried into video was an embarrassing disaster, and here we are, 20+ years of flailing later and no replacements visible. Will Substack solve this? Absolutely not. Hell, by continuing the great unbundling it might make it worse by undermining the revenue stream for the 2-3 newspapers still trying to make a go of it. Which is, ultimately, my point: Your argument seems to be "unbundling will fail, because it won't pay for the high quality journalism people want". My argument is "unbundling will succeed, because people don't want to pay for high quality journalism".
• ridruejo 5y ago
  “ The logic is simple: an individual writer is always relatively niche. Niche means small audience. Small audience means you have to charge more per person to cover your costs.” Except, with the Internet you don’t have physical/geographical constraints for distribution and suddenly a niche audience, at a global level, is not so niche. And it makes it a viable model, a thousand people paying $5/mo and all of a sudden you are making more than most journalists AND with much greater freedom of expression
• AzzieElbab 5y ago
  I pay for some subscriptions on Substack. I get access to writing I will not find elsewhere. I think the article is missing one important point. Specifically, all journalists read and reprint each other. Strong independent authors on Substack influence rest of media. Kind of surprising that the author(an insider) fails to see this
• refurb 5y ago
  I’m not so sure. Substack is clearly not blogging as I can’t remember the last time I paid for a blog. And the financial returns are real. I vaguely recall someone, Glenn maybe, who shared they had 6,000 subscribers at $60 per year or $360,000 in income. Clearly more than enough to sustain a writer.
• trhoad 5y ago
  > They want to pay $20/month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a "newspaper". I think the demise of the publishing industry proves this point comically incorrect!
  • ghaff 5y ago
    Basically most people don't want to pay period. Very few are paying $2/month for individuals either. ADDED: Of course, very few is not no one. "Very few" people in the scheme of things buy a lot of books either but some authors make a lot of money. But if you're betting on how much money a book will bring in, don't give up your day job. And, with respect to journalism, the bar is even higher if you're talking investigative journalism that may not produce results for many months if ever.
    • skinkestek 5y ago
      I'd say only because there haven't been any good options yet. I happily paid for Blendle as long as they had my best interest in mind (refundable) and only didn't pay more because there wasn't more relevant articles for me. I'll happily pay for substack etc as well if there is something really interesting, but it either needs to be very interesting, small amounts or someone needs to come along with a real all-you-can-read-model like Spotify. Ideally I want the option to pay pr piece, or pay a bit more for all todays posts from a channel (newspaper).
    • newsclues 5y ago
      Free is preferable, but if required to pay, I want to pay as little as possible and only for what I want.
  • dash2 5y ago
    https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/the-new-york-times-success-with-digital-subscriptions-is-accelerating-not-slowing-down/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/the-new-york-times-success...
• inglor_cz 5y ago
  "The key issue is that people don't want to pay $2/month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20/month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a "newspaper"." That is not my experience at all. Buying a newspaper where you are only interested in 15 % of the content is like buying an entire CD with perhaps two really good songs. This model used to be the norm, but consumers hated it and it is becoming obsolete.
  • warkdarrior 5y ago
    The winning model is all-you-can-eat subscriptions. Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Video, Disney+ don't offer subscriptions by singer, by actor, by screenwriter, or by director.
• marstall 5y ago
  Also, the psychology of most people's internet browsing is that of a casual, enjoyable activity undertaken to escape from whatever else they're doing, with only a few moments spent reading a typical article. Insert a purchase decision into that flowful sesh (even for as little as a penny) and most will find it more relaxing to just instead go and click on one of the many free articles at their disposal being served up by free aggregators (like this one). These debates always pop up here with little awareness that the newspaper industry tried micropayments 20 years ago and it didn't work. Paywalls were discovered in 2011 or so, they worked, and that's pretty much been that. Source: I founded a micropayments company in 2002 and worked at a newspaper 2009-2013.
• lumost 5y ago
  The problem with aggregation is that there is a regression to clickbait. If I charge 20 dollars per month to access the work of 1k writers and pay the writers based on views/production. Then I will pay the most prolific/clickable writers at the expense of quality. Paying more for a smaller collection of writers may provide me more value.
• caseysoftware 5y ago
  A very similar argument could have been applied to travel agents a generation+ ago. There was a single bill to pay instead of booking your own hotel, flights, cruise, rental car, etc, etc. It turns out that many (not all) people are willing, able, and actively want to make the choices to curate their experience and see what happens. Yes, it's more work but it's probably closer to what they want.. OR if they miss, it's on them with few others to blame. We've reached the point where there is SO much noise and the algorithms are optimized to feed you more noise that people suffer. In some cases, it manifests as the constant anxiety and stress of "omg this thing happened!" while in others, it's just the constant interruptions. Regardless, I suspect we're going to see the pendulum swing back and we'll see strategic disconnection to filter out the noise, chaos, and BS. If that's correct, Substack nailed the timing and should do well for quite a while to come.
• dionidium 5y ago
  > The key issue is that people don't want to pay $2/month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20/month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a "newspaper". My experience is the opposite. I get the Boston Globe delivered every Sunday. It's fine. I flip through it. Occasionally there's a story I care a lot about. Some weeks there's nothing. I read it mostly because I feel loosely obligated to try to keep up with current events. On the other hand, I subscribe to Matthew Yglesias's Substack and the hit rate is like 85%. Nearly every article perfectly aligns with one or more of my interests. His policy focus almost exactly overlaps my policy interests. It's kind of uncanny. If I had to cancel one or the other it's really not even close.
• smsm42 5y ago
  > The problem is that the NYT, Guardian, Mail etc. have a lot of experience at doing aggregation well. Depending on what you mean by "well". I haven't "read" the newspaper in any traditional sense - i.e. reading it as a whole product, not picking a single article - in decades. I haven't subscribed to a traditional newspaper (I exclude special interest magazines) for even longer. I know for a fact that the work of real journalists (investigative, etc.) is being routinely suppressed or restricted by their major newspaper employees because of reasons having nothing to do with reporting. I am getting much more high-quality content from independent journalists (including Substack ones, but not only) and writers than I could ever have found in any newspaper. I struggle to find anything that traditional newspapers like NYT do "well" for me. They have a variety of topics? Who cares. If I'm interested in what a certain author has to say or in a certain topic - which rarely happens with NYT nowdays, but nevertheless - I don't care who pays the salary to the writer. I know that there's no chance a single subscription - or even several of them - would cover even part of my interests, I'd be needing my hundreds-strong RSS feed anyway. So what's the point? What exactly is being done well there?