7 ms·
The rich niche
- bediger4000 5y ago> Credible information shouldn’t be a luxury good. Shockingly, a good substack article.
- Gys 5y agoA better quote: > Jonah Peretti was right in 2017 when he warned that paywalls are “bad for democracy.” Credible information shouldn’t be a luxury good. Paywall does not automatically mean luxury? I think the actual problem is the average internet user expects everything to be free, independent from his/her income. Anecdotal: I have friends with iphones of whom I wonder how they can spend so much on a mobile. It is about making choices.
- pessimizer 5y agoA paywall does always mean luxury. It's spending money on things you don't need. If your friends have recent model iphones, that is also luxury. Apple is a luxury brand.
- anm89 5y agoMost of this article seems to be one anecdote about how someone made the author a bad job offer once. Couldn't care less.
- hammock 5y agoAuthor's argument seems to be that the only profitable publishers are subscription-based, and therefore cater to the rich, because only the rich can afford subscriptions. That seems to ignore...the entire history of publishing. Like how a newspaper used to cost a quarter and everyone read it.
- xyzzyz 5y agoThe newspaper price was heavily subsidized by ad revenue. If the paper had to depend solely on the sales revenue, the price would have had been much higher than a quarter, and consequently, much fewer people would buy it regularly.
- hammock 5y agoAd-supported business models are more prevalent and profitable now then at any other time in history. Why do you think publishing was left out?
- ohwellhere 5y agoNewspapers were information and entertainment to many; the eyeballs coming for the latter subsidized the former. They lost the entertainment eyeballs -- now what happens to those who need reliable information? This article is decrying the outcome of that, maybe.
- xyzzyz 5y agoSame reason why horse drawn coaches were left out despite demand for transportation being higher than ever: newspaper ads lost to competition from other advertising venues, because they provided inferior product.
- ghaff 5y agoThis probably isn't exactly correct but, as I recall, the idea was that the subscription/newsstand revenues paid for the printing and distribution of the physical paper while advertising paid for the creation of the content.
- AlbertCory 5y agoFor my book, I did a ton of historical research, mainly the LA Times (via newspapers.com). You can get a free trial of that without paying, but the subscription price is pretty nominal. You can probably get a paper from where you grew up, too. Anyway, it's pretty eye-opening to see how much of the paper in the late 70s was ads. Like, 3/4 of most pages in the front section, after the first three. The Sunday paper was 300+ pages. They were raking it in. They could afford to subsidize some foreign bureaus. Why was that? There was no other good way to reach the Southern California audience. I got my job at Xerox by answering an ad in the Sunday Times. So they had a monopoly, and now it's gone.
- throwaway22032 5y agoYou can argue that this is a feedback loop, though. I can survive on minimum wage in the UK, therefore if I earn min wage + 1,000 (after tax), I can afford these subscriptions. The question is whether I prefer that over other things. I prioritised learning materials, computers, etc in my youth when I had a hilariously low budget and it paid dividends. The questions IMO are: 1) to what extent is the economy zero sum, e.g. can everyone avoid being a retail worker and 2) if we satisfy 1, how do we expand critical thinking such that people invest in themselves
- ahelwer 5y agoReading the news is, in my opinion, nearly diametrically opposed to investing in yourself. You will get a better understanding of current events (upon hearing of them from others, the best filter that money can't even buy) by reading history books exploring the past couple hundred years. The news is an entertainment product where personalities are constantly making statements or predictions that never pan out, and they never face any penalty for it. Look at how nearly everyone involved in the media push for the Iraq war still has a career and is seemingly respected by their peers. Look at how half the media lost their heads over the Trump/Russia thing, leading people on for three years straight, never amounting to anything. Someone who completely ignored that entire thing would be massively better off intellectually (and be better informed about the world) than someone who hung onto the daily "the walls are closing in" predictions. Daily or even weekly, maybe monthly reading of the news is over 95% noise and is a pure negative for personal development.
- throwaway22032 5y agoI agree, I guess I was addressing the general point about paying for information. Orwell's Books vs. Cigarettes is just as poignant today as it was then. By forgoing that pint at the pub earlier and buying textbooks, now I can afford both.
- metabagel 5y agoTrump's ties to the Russian government and intelligence services are far from a hoax. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/513499-republicans-incriminate-trump-decimate-his-russia-hoax-narrative https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/513499-republicans-i... https://i.redd.it/nf1crtngi3iy.jpg https://i.redd.it/nf1crtngi3iy.jpg
- sandworm101 5y agoI was recently a rep for the office's annual charity drive. At the end of it our office (west coast) was compared to offices in other parts of the country. While we had lots of one-time donations, literally nobody signed up for "workplace giving", to have money regularly taken off their paychecks. It is about fear an uncertainty. When people are stretched thin they will still give money when they can. But when is key. They will give money out of their pockets when asked but will not commit to future giving because they are unsure of that future. Subscriptions are for people who are confident in their month-to-month financial position. If you want to sell to the normal people, those who live from paycheck to paycheck, then you need to stick to single payment schemes.
- fallingknife 5y agoOffice charity drives are already bad enough in that they socially pressure employees to give money. I would be furious if the company I worked for asked me to start recurring donations out of my paycheck. Keep employer-employee relationships to strictly business. I can donate to charity on my own time.
- sandworm101 5y agoIt was a little more than that. There was some employer matching of funds, up to a point. And having it come off your paycheck saves a step come tax time.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- TravHatesMe 5y agoMy father mentioned that while working for banks, back in his day (~25 years ago), there were "guidelines" of how much you should donate to $bigNameCharity depending on your position. He was pretty much forced to donate $1500/year, a lot of money back then. Of course, way up the hierarchy, someone was friends with the charity's founders. And of course, these charities paid out huge salaries and expensed extravagant "business trips". Typical.
- mabub24 5y agoThe author mentions that they've contributed to Puck, which is a comical example of this: https://puck.news/ https://puck.news/ Open up the side menu and you'll see you can select each of Puck's area of interest: - Hollywood - Wall Street - Silicon Valley - Washington It would be easier to describe these as "bubbles".
- paulpauper 5y agoI think this is also why some writers are making so much from substack. There is a huge market for affluent readers with disposable income. People will pay to support their favorite creators.
- seibelj 5y agoHigh quality news is paid for by people who want to read high quality, sophisticated news. There is ample free news out there - I would call it buzz feed, instagram, local media websites, and on and on. These are more bite-sized and ad-driven. Most people don't want to read their news in novella format, but for those that do, they are more willing to pay the fees necessary to produce it for the limited audience that reads it.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago"one valid criticism often leveled at them is that they are catering to rich and influential people" It's not actually a valid criticism, and it is also not a problem. Anybody who worries about that is free to launch another publication targeted at whomever they fancy. What IS a problem is that people really think that kind of thinking has merit.
- escapedmoose 5y agoI’ve been a subscriber to the print edition of Wired for about 4 or 5 years now. Lately the ads and articles targeted at the absurdly-affluent have got on my nerves, and I don’t think I’ll renew again. I can’t say whether this is because the ads are now more pervasive, or because I’ve become more class-conscious over time. As a side note, does anyone find it ridiculous that a combined household income of $100k is supposedly “affluent?” When my partner and I broke that barrier, we were living in a shitty apartment with a roommate. Didn’t feel affluent
- ForHackernews 5y ago> does anyone find it ridiculous that a combined household income of $100k is supposedly “affluent?” It's 150% of the median household income[0] in the United States, so no I don't think it's that ridiculous. [0] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...
- jseliger 5y agoDepends on where you are and who you are. Housing costs vary dramatically across the U.S.: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388. In addition, most zoning regulations reduce the supply of housing and thus raise prices as demand go up. Someone who bought a place in California or New York or Boston 30 years ago may have seven figures in a primary asset and relatively low earnings.
- BizarroLand 5y agoI'm making $120k in Seattle and it seems like I'm no better off than my mom was making $35k as a nurse when I was a kid. Sure, that was 20 something years ago but its absurd how I make nearly 4x the money and it still doesn't go as far as it used to. Annual vacations, family car, 3 bd house at an affordable price. Sure, we didn't have cable but we would get dvd rentals and broadcast TV worked pretty well. Now you are lucky to get 3 channels that work consistently even with an amplified antenna.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoIt's far from just writing though, isn't it? With the massive shift in the percentage of GDP that flows to capital rather than labor, the motivation for almost all economic activity to focus on the desires and whims of the rich gets stronger and stronger. Luxury spas, housing, boats, clothing, resorts, processed foods, even popular entertainment: cater to the whims of the rich, and you seem to have more of a chance of making a living than catering to the needs of the less-rich and poor. Of course, this is more or less precisely the opposite of what an economy is supposed to do, but is simultaneously obviously the inevitable behavior of an economy structured and run by the assumptions of 21st century US capitalism.
- JSavageOne 5y agoThat's how capitalist societies centered on maximizing profit have always worked. When someone tells someone else to "pick themselves up by their bootstraps", really what they're saying is "sell someone to someone else with money willing to pay for your service". Homeless people and poor people are basically invisible to the economy, and serving them literally contributes nothing to the economy (directly at least) since GDP by definition only includes monetary transactions. Even as a white collar worker, you'll quickly realize that the executives calling the shots are generally already rich themselves, and their bosses the investors are even richer. Money dictates everything we do down to the mission of our companies and the role of our jobs. Sure you can opt out, but then you're essentially taking a vow of poverty, and unless you're rich already that's a pretty big risk. It's no surprise that workers realizing that they are effectively servants of the rich have backlashed and opted out. This phenomenon of serving rich people exists not just within our labor market, but also in politics. In theory a democracy should reflect the will of the people, but in practice the rich own the media/advertising, and the poor are too busy working to make ends meet to be politically active.
- mech987 5y ago>Jonah Peretti was right in 2017 when he warned that paywalls are “bad for democracy.” Haven't we also come to the conclusion that ad-supported clickbait journalism is bad for democracy?
- rthomas6 5y ago> One of the more cringeworthy cliches is “riches in niches.” cliches, riches, niches. (Proounced clee-shays, ritches, nee-shiz.) Hooray English!