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Effectively, this is a "one subscription that works everywhere" value proposition for consumers, using collective bargaining power to keep the price reasonable.
by onion2k 4y ago
Effectively, this is a "one subscription that works everywhere" value proposition for consumers, using collective bargaining power to keep the price reasonable.
The problem with focusing on money is that you're trying to convince users to go from "free, paid for with data" to "actually costs money, paid for with actual money", and that is never going to sound like a good deal to someone who doesn't really value either the content they see enough to support it or their privacy enough to avoid ad tracking.
In my opinion the only way for micro-payments and subscriptions to work will be if there's another reason to use them besides simply paying for content. Unlocking exclusive stuff is the obvious one, but I imagine there are others.
- mgrund 4y agoI absolutely agree, it is incredibly hard to get money out of consumers pockets. For this very reason, a lot of bootstrapping efforts go into collaboration with players in niches where consumers do spend money historically, for example the classical news medias. The "one subscription works everywhere" story in that case is access to a lot of medias all over the world with the same subscription so that the medias increase average visitor revenue and consumers don't have to tie themselves to one or two news sites they might accept to pay for, but instead can browse freely and automatically compensate each content creator as they do so. They basically get to compete on quality, not scale. The issue with unlocking exclusive stuff is that everybody (even very large players) is struggling to put together enough "stuff" to justify a subscription by itself. This is basically the problem subscription networks solve by making content creators collaborate on adding stuff to the package.