7 ms·

The end of the subscription era is coming

133 points by CharlesW 3y ago

grumblepeet 3y ago
Asks me to sign up for a subscription.
- danjc 3y ago
  This
- pryelluw 3y ago
  Says that it’s coming, not that it’s here. (-:
cutler 3y ago
[flagged]
- superhumanuser 3y ago
  To prove the point?
- passwordoops 3y ago
  It's not a paywall, just a marginally less obnoxious demand to subscribe before seeing the content. At least Substack waits for you to get 3/4 through
  - grishka 3y ago
    At least Substack doesn't break if you disable JS for it.
    - bilal4hmed 3y ago
      Im not sure what the problem with a paywall is? Dont want to see ads, care about privacy but also dont want to pay for content ??
      - rebolek 3y ago
        If you need to pay for subscription to read about how subscription is ending, that's sort of amusing. Anyway, this article isn't paywalled and can be read without subscription.
      - joshjob42 3y ago
        Ads are annoying, and virtually nothing is valuable enough to bother paying to read a single article for. I subscribe to a number of substacks by writers I know produce reliably good content all the time, but random articles on HN ain't it chief.
      - grishka 3y ago
        Implied contracts aren't a thing. If someone sends me some trash along with the content I requested, I'm absolutely free to configure my own device to ignore the trash and only display the useful content. I've never seen paywalls neither on Medium nor on Substack, but I've seen plenty of annoyances like Substack's "hey, did you know this is a mailing list, subscribe to it" in-your-face modal and Medium's "sign up blah blah" thing that takes up half my viewport area.
- eatonphil 3y ago
  HN is officially ok with it. From the FAQ: > Are paywalls ok? > > It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Firefox with uBO and uMatrix - I didn't hit a paywall.
MostlyStable 3y ago
And what does the author think the alternative is? He mentions the collapse of advertising, so they clearly don't think that ad-supported models are the way of the future. I am completely unconvinced. The fact that the "average/median" income from these models is low is completely unsurprisng. We should expect that the vast majority of the income would go to the very top performers. This is not an indication that subscription doesn't work, just that it's going to end up looking like acting, music, and professional sports. Those are all real careers that have persisted for a very long time where the "average" wage is extremely low. This article does a bad job clearly stating what the author thinks the problem is (just vaguely gesturing at average wages without explaining why that should matter), doesn't suggest an alternative at all and instead seems to snidely be sniping at non-mainstream journalists and creators. I am deeply unimpressed.
- pphysch 3y ago
  Yeah, the idea that rent-seeking behavior will magically dry up requires an exceptional argument, which is not presented here.
- rvrs 3y ago
  What's worse is that the author fails to acknowledge is that these writers have the opportunity to cater towards niches and global communities. There are vast, global audiences who would definitely pay for content and commentary from people who represent them and their interests. Moreover, online creators don't always have one source of revenue. This practice is employed widely by YouTubers: they supplement their ad revenue with merch, patreon, Twitch streaming, and so on. The average earnings on a single platform mean absolutely nothing.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- midasuni 3y ago
  Years ago I subscribed to a daily newspaper (still subscribe to a weekly news magazine), I subscribed to insurance for my car, home, etc - still do. I subscribed to cable tv, I subscribed to my phone line, I subscribed to my apartment by paying rent, I subscribed to a transport service by paying for a season ticket. As recently as 5 years ago I subscribed to a milk and bread service. Subscriptions are nothing new. Those subscriptions (short of cable tv) would be nothing unusual 100 years ago. His examples of beer and cinema are odd as I current consume both, neither through a subscription, however mail order wine clubs date back 100 years. What is new is the subscription to things you already own, the “heated seat” debacle for example.
ccooffee 3y ago
I'm reminded of the quote from Keynes: "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." While I think the author does a good job pointing out how unsustainable this business model is, predicting the end of the subscription model seems a large leap. Given that the author doesn't frame the discussion with a solid prediction, this article comes across as a "it doesn't make sense to me" rant with a little bit of embellishment to predict a downfall at some unstated time in the future.
- rotifer 3y ago
  Somewhat tangentially, that quote seems likely to be from a financial advisor named Gary Shilling [1], rather than Keynes. [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Right. The fact that only a tiny few earn enough to live off hasn't stopped the music and book industries from existing well before subscriptions were a thing. The article is a collection of observations and numbers with no interesting conclusion.
arbuge 3y ago
"This piece exists thanks to the munificence of my paying newsletter subscribers"
- rebolek 3y ago
  Irony-meter goes really to maximum on this.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  It does seem like a self-parody.
foooorsyth 3y ago
In the context of software I’ll unapologetically defend the subscription model. I’m not maintaining your software forever (when the platform it’s on often has breaking changes version to version) without recurring revenue. If I have to only focus on B2B software to make that happen, so be it. Mobile platforms really forced the hands of developers here. Windows will happily run 30 year old software — you could actually “finish” software and move on to the next project. iOS and Android won’t run apps from 5 years ago. Their store policies constantly change and you have to frequently keep up with new agreements lest your store listing be removed. And of course your app will be downranked into oblivion on the store search if you’re not charging a fee — why would the App Store promote apps that don’t make money for the App Store owners, and why would they promote one-time payment apps over subscription apps?
- layer8 3y ago
  The issue is that iOS and Android require constant updates to apps in the first place. That’s the insane state of affairs that needs to change. That aside, I’m fine with paying a yearly subscription that is roughly 10% of the price I would be willing to pay for a one-time purchase, based on my average personal operational lifetime for an unchanged piece of software. The issue is subscriptions whose prices exceed that.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > In the context of software I’ll unapologetically defend the subscription model. I’m not maintaining your software forever So ... don't? It's just one model for selling software. Another one is once-off purchases. If you can find people to pay you a monthly fee for your application (whether phone, desktop or other), good on you! Someone else may decide to just charge that once-off fee, that you get over 12 months. After all, even with a subscription model, you aren't going to maintain something forever unless a significant portion of your subscribers remain. Even if someone is paying you to maintain something forever, be honest, how long will you take their $1.99/m? You need a large enough number of someone's to pay you monthly to maintain that software. There's risks and trade-offs for both sales models. Charging a small monthly fee makes it easier to acquire users, but that ease means that someone else charging a small monthly fee is losing those users (and one day you'll be that someone else losing users too). Charging a once-off fee means that you get your money upfront, you have no further costs for that product, and the customer gets no additional value over and above the value they got on day 1. The downside is that you'll make less money off a good product than with a subscription model. > . Mobile platforms really forced the hands of developers here. Windows will happily run 30 year old software — you could actually “finish” software and move on to the next project. iOS and Android won’t run apps from 5 years ago. Their store policies constantly change and you have to frequently keep up with new agreements lest your store listing be removed. And of course your app will be downranked into oblivion on the store search if you’re not charging a fee — why would the App Store promote apps that don’t make money for the App Store owners, and why would they promote one-time payment apps over subscription apps? It sounds to me like your biggest beef with once-off sales has to do with products that are mobile apps. Maybe you don't already know this, but mobile apps are the worst place to try to make money with creating software products. Mobile apps are complementary to some other product (your bank provides a free app, etc). If you want to sell software, mobile apps are not the product with which to make money, because you can't count on being the lottery winner that manages to get 10% of whales on your app.
rcarr 3y ago
His graph should be labelled with "exerted effort" involved rather than "technical distribution". It's about the same amount of difficulty to distribute podcasts/books/music on the internet, but podcasts require the least amount of effort (connect microphones to pc, hit record in any basic audio recording app) whereas books require a sustained amount of effort across time as does music. Publishing a book also requires you to learn specialist software for publishing the book (although Vellum seems to have simplified this) and music requires you to master a DAW. Obviously narrative films and games require not only more effort but 99.99% of the time, a team to make.
- louky 3y ago
  My Guitar->microphone->audio recording app model of music production doesn't even require knowing what a "DAW" is, yet works fine for me and others.
  - shwaj 3y ago
    Are you doing it professionally or as a hobby? I’d wager that >99% of artists who make a living from music use a DAW (or pay someone else to)
h4l 3y ago
My intuition is that it's not possible to have an open platform like substack where the majority are making enough to live off. Imagine that was currently the case. People would see the platform as easy money and jump in. The quality of the median writer would drop, as would the median income, until the perception that it was easy money reduced enough to stop people joining.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  There are plenty of markets like that. YouTube and twitch are very popular. It’s just that the top 0.0001% make a good living while the rest don’t make any money
  - patmorgan23 3y ago
    I think that percentage is a lot bigger if you only count the people who are posting regularly.
    - sebazzz 3y ago
      Yes, but you're (1) still dependent on "The Algorithm". Popular channel Lesics saw its ads and views disappear overnight with no obvious reason. Hopefully the EU's DMA/DSA legislation will force some transparency there.(2) for most the ads are not enough and true income is made through Memberships and Patreon and swag in a store.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        >for most the ads are not enough and true income is made through Memberships and Patreon and swag in a store. you're close. Ads don't make money, ads do. To clarify: Being sponsored directly by an ad can make you almost as much money as tha ads you get from the Youtube system. So all those RAID SHADOW LEGENDS ads you see from gaming youtubers? Yeah, odds are even the tiny (10k subscriber) channels can make a few hundred off of that pitch. Patreon is decent, but it's another stream of income you need to put work into to really pay off with. Those who treat it as a donation box don't get too much. Swag is really nice but you need a decent following first. You probably already make a decent side hustle from YT ads alone by the time you consider merch.
1-6 3y ago
Correction: It's the end of the [unlimited] subscription era. All-you-can-eat is no longer sustainable. Long live subscriptions with monthly tokens that do not roll-over. For example, binge watch all you want, you can but up to 6 a month but you'll pay for > 6. Payment will always be required for Premium content or content augmented with AI. Micropayments and tokens will gain more adoption but it'll be more like a Costco Membership. Companies still love the fact that subscriptions give them longer lead time insight into consumer behavior. That part isn't going away anytime soon as investors love that data.
notatoad 3y ago
huh, really... https://ibb.co/KNX20Xk https://ibb.co/KNX20Xk
costanzaDynasty 3y ago
As long as the quality of the content was good I would alway pay for an ad-free version. But the quality has greatly diminished across the board and Ive stopped paying for any subscription. New sites are the worst at this. They've pandered to their sub base at the expense of the average reader. I just find it funny that all the journalists finally got off Twitter and every story that's been hiding in plain site for the last decade is now in their Sunday edition ever week.
nickdothutton 3y ago
I like constraint based planning. What is the constraint here on making money through subs? Human beings/consumers? Time the humans have to spend reading? Talent of the writer?
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >What is the constraint here on making money through subs? mostly consumers and disposable income, I imagine. you can only keep up with so much content, and if each content is a cost stream, you will be selective after a while. This is what's happening with the TV streaming wars as we speak. as for disposable income; spending power has been on the downfall for decades now, and there's speculation of an upcoming recession. Both of those also start to make consumers focus less on spurious entertainment
cole-k 3y ago
While the piece is thought-provoking, I think that the author would do well to substantiate their claims. Even an interview with some hypothetical "side hustlers" to understand their motivations would be better than guessing why they are on the site. It kind of seemed like they were saying "it is [or will soon be] unsustainable to try and make a living out of being a Substack writer," but I would want to know how many people enter the platform with that goal in the first place. Twitch, YouTube, Soundcloud, good-old-fashioned blogging, I'm sure you could name several other pursuits that are in a similarly unprofitable position for the average content creator. I would wager most people don't start out trying to make a living on these platforms. Maybe the point is that there are people who are just scraping by on these platforms who will soon have the rug pulled from under their feet when consumers wise up to how much money they're throwing away to subscriptions? That didn't come across too clearly to me, though.
coffeebeqn 3y ago
There are so many different types of subscriptions that it’s unhelpful to bunch them together. The monthly box subscription was always a gimmick people were bound to get sick of. Then there’s stuff like a gym membership or Amazon prime or game pass. Some offer good value, some bad. I’d imagine the bad value ones - like monthly boxes of random crap you don’t need will indeed die off
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Those boxes work when there is some inefficiency to exploit so you get good enough of apparent value. Like there is enough massively discounted stock. But as more of it is eaten or more players enter it will fail. And then you don't likely have big enough scale to get good value specially when you need to do curation, collating and shipping. Amazon Prime is probably mostly workable model as long as you keep raisin price and making offering worse and including the actual costs in item costs. Or simply don't pay enough to where ever you get content.
mrkramer 3y ago
Maybe it's time for micropayments?
- TylerE 3y ago
  Literally no one actually wants micropayments. Having ever little event in your life become a payment is true dystopia.
  - mrkramer 3y ago
    >Having ever little event in your life become a payment is true dystopia. It's already here for decades; each time you use Google or Facebook, you are giving in your privacy for free use of those services. But casual users don't care about their privacy so the ad based business model for Web services will prevail for a very long time.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > each time you use Google or Facebook, you are giving in your privacy for free use of those services You decide to use Google or Facebook once or infrequently. That’s the transaction cost. After that, it’s effortless. Micropayments involve constant transaction costs. They don’t work. A defining pillar of luxury is freedom from transaction costs; excluding those who can pay from your market is garbage economics.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Yet tech people will insist it's a tech problem. Clay Shirky basically called it a couple decades ago that there's a mental transaction cost to buying things. I guess it's sufficiently indirect sometimes that it works. "Hmm. Is it worth it to turn on this light given that it's going to cost me $X cents to have light for the next hour?" But $1/song only lasted as long as that was the only legal model relative to buying a disc. And 5 cents for an article wouldn't work either.
- rebolek 3y ago
  I'm hearing about this for so long, yet never seen it anywhere. When financebros talk about micro-anything, they usually mean something like few hundred or thousand dollars. For me, micro means cents or even less.
NooneAtAll3 3y ago
I felt like this was a lot of water and not much substance combine that with +47% being "almost doubling" and graph having one axis going "from easy to hard", while the other "from hard to easy"... and I get totally lost
trollied 3y ago
> The New York Times costs $7 for a hard copy This made me WTF. Crikey.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Cheaper to print it yourself
- ghaff 3y ago
  I didn't know but I can't say I'm really shocked. It was at least a couple bucks years ago. And newsstand prices for most periodicals have long been multiples of the subscription price. I'm always a bit surprised there's a big enough market for magazines at grocery stores and airports but impulse purchases I guess.
- _delirium 3y ago
  I think he may have been confused by looking at the NYT online store [1]. They will sell you back issues for $7 for a weekday paper, or $12 for a Sunday paper. But the back issue price is marked up from the cover price. The newsstand price if you’re buying today’s newspaper in person somewhere is currently $4 for Mon-Sat and $6 on Sunday. [1] https://store.nytimes.com/products/print-newspapers?variant=40695958929478 https://store.nytimes.com/products/print-newspapers?variant=...
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    $4 is still quite the inflation. Maybe I'm just a boomer recalling the old days where you could throw in a few quarter at a kiosk and get today's paper. Perhaps I'd feel better if I knew that 800% markup went to paying writers, but I've also become much more cynical in those 20 years.
- brightlancer 3y ago
  The Sunday edition may be $7 at a newsstand; I'm pretty sure they M-Sa isn't near that (yet). I checked home delivery to the Bronx and the regular price is $20/week ($1,040/year). There was a default offer of 50% off to bring it to $520 for the first year, but maybe he saw $845 the last time he looked. Regardless, it's very expensive.
mst 3y ago
It seems possible that at some point you'll see a hybrid between the NYT and substack models - basically a pre-selected bundle of some subset of a bunch of authors' work where you -also- have an option to subscribe to a particular author directly. I'm sure such things are already possible but the thing I'm thinking of is the bundles not being exclusive, so a piece that's available in 1+ bundles is still also available as part of the full subscription. (possibly combined with some or all of the options operating on a token model rather than a 'get exactly all of this' one) Note that I'm only endorsing this so far as it seeming -possible- and not necessarily -good- or -successful-, and assuming somebody does try it your guess is at least as good as mine as to how it'll turn out.
- jon-wood 3y ago
  Depending on who was curating this I’d be up for it, and will now be quite surprised if Substack don’t make it happen at some point. I think there’s a lot of value in being able to delegate to someone who knows a particular field the ability to say “hey, these are the people you should be paying attention to”. I could totally see this being used both from a “here’s people who think like I do” perspective, and others providing a more adversarial version with commentators from all sides of a field.
  - mst 3y ago
    They could pretty much do it by having things like the 'for paying subscribers of X' attribute that work as 'also free on B' and 'also for paying subscribers of B' and the bundle could (at least initially) be pretty much just the current substack UI. I'm sure if substack actually do something like this, they'll give it a little more thought than I just did, of course.
- cole-k 3y ago
  https://setapp.com https://setapp.com is one example of a service that does bundling, albeit by offering what seems to be the full features of many things for a single subscription price (instead of your thought of a subset of features). It's not clear to me whether all of the apps offered are subscription-based, though. It's a model I'd be more willing to try than subscriptions to individual apps, although its OS and app offerings do not align with my interests.
ipqk 3y ago
lol, on Medium which I get a 50% banner ad asking me subscribe.
airstrike 3y ago
Unironically posted on Medium
taftster 3y ago
Ha ha ha ... as I get a popover / overlay for a subscription to Medium. Yeah, I'm thinking no, the era of the subscription is just getting started.
CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
Perhaps the subscription model for banal writing or news that doesn't affect you is coming to end and but not the subscription model. I mean, who needs to subscribe to a newspaper that is crammed with unactionable whitterings or the views of a single author? Maybe if it was £1pa and the author managed to write something useful each month it might represent value for money, but the thought of paying any more for the opinion of a single person seems absurd.
szundi 3y ago
You wish. I am in the GPS based fleet management/tracking industry. Running even the most simple system like this is unimaginable to be cheaper than a subscription for a service until you have like 1k vehicles and ok with basically a pickaxe. People take more and more complex and convenient stuff as granted, so we'll have subscriptions and big corporations giving these away for free just to bleed each other out (Thanks though).
katzgrau 3y ago
I recently bought a local news org. One of the things I hate about the media industry is the constant "we're dying" or "this is going to die." Go to a local news conference that's supposedly about the future and it feels a lot like a funeral. Some other way of doing things will come along. Help figure it out or get the fuck out of the way and stop trying to spread your shitty dark version of the future - because you have no idea what happens next.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >Some other way of doing things will come along given the motivation of those at top, that doesn't make me sigh in relief. The "other way of doing things" in the 2010's was ads everywhere and abuse of SEO to get people's eyes on what they want to see, not what's important. And that's not even going into the social media dark patterns. Now we have tech CEO's owning newspapers... so maybe those social media dark patterns will seep in in the end regardless. I don't think dismissing these possibilities is any more helpful.
vjk800 3y ago
As Nicholas Nassim Taleb would, maybe, speculatively, put it: highs school statistics teaching based on normal distributions claims another victim. The writers constantly writes about averages. Digital economies almost always follow heavy tailed power law distributions for which the mean is a completely worthless statistic. The top 100 or whatever creators in any market are clearly making it work nicely. The rest of the chumps are merely trying the market. How the game works is: you invest person time/money to try something. If it catches (which it almost surely will not), you will do very very well. If it doesn't, you go do something else. It's akin to playing the lottery, but maybe with a bit higher odds at succeeding. More people will never make a profitable career out of writing simply because there aren't any more readers to read all the stuff that's being written. If the top 1000 or so writers can approximately satisfy the reading needs of all the people in the world, the rest of the writers are not needed and they will not make any money no matter what monetization system is being utilized.
lapcat 3y ago
I don't think the comparison between the NYT and substacks or podcasts is apt, because the NYT is a NEWSpaper. Does it contain opinion columns? Yes, among countless other columns. But the fundamental purpose of the NYT is not just opinion. Whereas substacks and podcasts appear to be mostly opinion pieces. You don't often have news broken on them. What substacks and podcasts have shown is that some "thought leaders" can make a massively lucrative living independent from the newspapers, and more than they could make with the newspapers. But none of this applies to writers of news. News writers still need the news organizations, and the subscribers of the newspapers, to support them. The author talks about "writers" in general without making that crucial distinction. Hard news writing is mostly a thankless job. It rarely provides the opportunity to build a "personal brand" like opinion writing does, unless you're Woodward and Bernstein breaking Watergate. Even someone like Glenn Greenwald, who has broken some huge stories like Snowden, makes most of his money from spouting his opinions online rather than from breaking hard news.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Does the distinction matter as a business if opinions are making the most money? Hard news can simply be the way to draw in readers that are later sustained by opinions, so it's just a subsidy for the real money maker. Buzzfeed actually worked (works?) this way.
IAmPym 3y ago
This is absolutely not true for one simple reason: Subscriptions increase valuation of companies
tetrisgm 3y ago
This is probably a victim of DHH posting about their Once business model. Literally everything is a subscription now. Video, music, games. Enterprise software. It's just like your pg&e. Consumers like it enough. This is just as fruitful as fighting a commodity.
vonnik 3y ago
I love how the pop up I get from Medium for this piece is telling me to subscribe for $5/mo.
taurath 3y ago
It’s a bit of an investor trick as recurring revenue is treated as orders of magnitude more important than moment to moment sales. This is for some good reasons but there’s also reason to think it’s overvalued as every industry has very different rates of subscriber churn.
psychoslave 3y ago
I opened the page and got a pop up thrown at my face, with some text I didn't bother to read ending with "$5/month subscription".
cogs 3y ago
As an aside: Hardware as a service is annoying and feels horrible, but is probably the only way to achieve the long lifetimes we need for consumer goods in a world where reviews are unreliable and we need to stop wasting resources on planned obsolescence.
throwaway4PP 3y ago
this article reads like it was written by a LLM "Anyway, we all already know this because we all experience human life in 2023."
j45 3y ago
Internet connections still costs someone, monthly, or yearly. Electricity too. Equipment less so, but often it's leased. Bug fixes, patches, updates, scaling. Lifetime SaaS sales don't really last. Subscriptions might change (or return less margin), but it's hard to imagine other ways.
turnsout 3y ago
> OnlyFans experienced a 47% increase in the number of creators using its platform between 2021 and 2022. That’s almost a doubling Not so sure I agree with you 100% on your police-work there, Lou.
wrsh07 3y ago
Honestly, if the writer is saying "you can subscribe to 5-8 writers you love for the price of one NYT subscription and that's a terrible deal because it means the cost of writing has gone up" then I strongly disagree. That sounds like a fantastic deal, and I will gladly subscribe to stratechery and Molly White (whose letter is free btw) and Caitlin Kunkel and Byrne Hobart and Noahpinion and.... And still be paying less than a Times subscription with content tailored exactly to what I care about!!

133 points by CharlesW 3y ago

grumblepeet 3y ago

Asks me to sign up for a subscription.

danjc 3y ago
This
pryelluw 3y ago
Says that it’s coming, not that it’s here. (-:

cutler 3y ago

[flagged]

superhumanuser 3y ago
To prove the point?
passwordoops 3y ago
It's not a paywall, just a marginally less obnoxious demand to subscribe before seeing the content. At least Substack waits for you to get 3/4 through
- grishka 3y ago
  At least Substack doesn't break if you disable JS for it.
  - bilal4hmed 3y ago
    Im not sure what the problem with a paywall is? Dont want to see ads, care about privacy but also dont want to pay for content ??
    - rebolek 3y ago
      If you need to pay for subscription to read about how subscription is ending, that's sort of amusing. Anyway, this article isn't paywalled and can be read without subscription.
    - joshjob42 3y ago
      Ads are annoying, and virtually nothing is valuable enough to bother paying to read a single article for. I subscribe to a number of substacks by writers I know produce reliably good content all the time, but random articles on HN ain't it chief.
    - grishka 3y ago
      Implied contracts aren't a thing. If someone sends me some trash along with the content I requested, I'm absolutely free to configure my own device to ignore the trash and only display the useful content. I've never seen paywalls neither on Medium nor on Substack, but I've seen plenty of annoyances like Substack's "hey, did you know this is a mailing list, subscribe to it" in-your-face modal and Medium's "sign up blah blah" thing that takes up half my viewport area.
eatonphil 3y ago
HN is officially ok with it. From the FAQ: > Are paywalls ok? > > It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Firefox with uBO and uMatrix - I didn't hit a paywall.

MostlyStable 3y ago

And what does the author think the alternative is? He mentions the collapse of advertising, so they clearly don't think that ad-supported models are the way of the future. I am completely unconvinced. The fact that the "average/median" income from these models is low is completely unsurprisng. We should expect that the vast majority of the income would go to the very top performers. This is not an indication that subscription doesn't work, just that it's going to end up looking like acting, music, and professional sports. Those are all real careers that have persisted for a very long time where the "average" wage is extremely low. This article does a bad job clearly stating what the author thinks the problem is (just vaguely gesturing at average wages without explaining why that should matter), doesn't suggest an alternative at all and instead seems to snidely be sniping at non-mainstream journalists and creators. I am deeply unimpressed.

pphysch 3y ago
Yeah, the idea that rent-seeking behavior will magically dry up requires an exceptional argument, which is not presented here.
rvrs 3y ago
What's worse is that the author fails to acknowledge is that these writers have the opportunity to cater towards niches and global communities. There are vast, global audiences who would definitely pay for content and commentary from people who represent them and their interests. Moreover, online creators don't always have one source of revenue. This practice is employed widely by YouTubers: they supplement their ad revenue with merch, patreon, Twitch streaming, and so on. The average earnings on a single platform mean absolutely nothing.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
midasuni 3y ago
Years ago I subscribed to a daily newspaper (still subscribe to a weekly news magazine), I subscribed to insurance for my car, home, etc - still do. I subscribed to cable tv, I subscribed to my phone line, I subscribed to my apartment by paying rent, I subscribed to a transport service by paying for a season ticket. As recently as 5 years ago I subscribed to a milk and bread service. Subscriptions are nothing new. Those subscriptions (short of cable tv) would be nothing unusual 100 years ago. His examples of beer and cinema are odd as I current consume both, neither through a subscription, however mail order wine clubs date back 100 years. What is new is the subscription to things you already own, the “heated seat” debacle for example.

ccooffee 3y ago

I'm reminded of the quote from Keynes: "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." While I think the author does a good job pointing out how unsustainable this business model is, predicting the end of the subscription model seems a large leap. Given that the author doesn't frame the discussion with a solid prediction, this article comes across as a "it doesn't make sense to me" rant with a little bit of embellishment to predict a downfall at some unstated time in the future.

rotifer 3y ago
Somewhat tangentially, that quote seems likely to be from a financial advisor named Gary Shilling [1], rather than Keynes. [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/
IshKebab 3y ago
Right. The fact that only a tiny few earn enough to live off hasn't stopped the music and book industries from existing well before subscriptions were a thing. The article is a collection of observations and numbers with no interesting conclusion.

arbuge 3y ago

"This piece exists thanks to the munificence of my paying newsletter subscribers"

rebolek 3y ago
Irony-meter goes really to maximum on this.
MichaelZuo 3y ago
It does seem like a self-parody.

foooorsyth 3y ago

In the context of software I’ll unapologetically defend the subscription model. I’m not maintaining your software forever (when the platform it’s on often has breaking changes version to version) without recurring revenue. If I have to only focus on B2B software to make that happen, so be it. Mobile platforms really forced the hands of developers here. Windows will happily run 30 year old software — you could actually “finish” software and move on to the next project. iOS and Android won’t run apps from 5 years ago. Their store policies constantly change and you have to frequently keep up with new agreements lest your store listing be removed. And of course your app will be downranked into oblivion on the store search if you’re not charging a fee — why would the App Store promote apps that don’t make money for the App Store owners, and why would they promote one-time payment apps over subscription apps?

layer8 3y ago
The issue is that iOS and Android require constant updates to apps in the first place. That’s the insane state of affairs that needs to change. That aside, I’m fine with paying a yearly subscription that is roughly 10% of the price I would be willing to pay for a one-time purchase, based on my average personal operational lifetime for an unchanged piece of software. The issue is subscriptions whose prices exceed that.
lelanthran 3y ago
> In the context of software I’ll unapologetically defend the subscription model. I’m not maintaining your software forever So ... don't? It's just one model for selling software. Another one is once-off purchases. If you can find people to pay you a monthly fee for your application (whether phone, desktop or other), good on you! Someone else may decide to just charge that once-off fee, that you get over 12 months. After all, even with a subscription model, you aren't going to maintain something forever unless a significant portion of your subscribers remain. Even if someone is paying you to maintain something forever, be honest, how long will you take their $1.99/m? You need a large enough number of someone's to pay you monthly to maintain that software. There's risks and trade-offs for both sales models. Charging a small monthly fee makes it easier to acquire users, but that ease means that someone else charging a small monthly fee is losing those users (and one day you'll be that someone else losing users too). Charging a once-off fee means that you get your money upfront, you have no further costs for that product, and the customer gets no additional value over and above the value they got on day 1. The downside is that you'll make less money off a good product than with a subscription model. > . Mobile platforms really forced the hands of developers here. Windows will happily run 30 year old software — you could actually “finish” software and move on to the next project. iOS and Android won’t run apps from 5 years ago. Their store policies constantly change and you have to frequently keep up with new agreements lest your store listing be removed. And of course your app will be downranked into oblivion on the store search if you’re not charging a fee — why would the App Store promote apps that don’t make money for the App Store owners, and why would they promote one-time payment apps over subscription apps? It sounds to me like your biggest beef with once-off sales has to do with products that are mobile apps. Maybe you don't already know this, but mobile apps are the worst place to try to make money with creating software products. Mobile apps are complementary to some other product (your bank provides a free app, etc). If you want to sell software, mobile apps are not the product with which to make money, because you can't count on being the lottery winner that manages to get 10% of whales on your app.

rcarr 3y ago

His graph should be labelled with "exerted effort" involved rather than "technical distribution". It's about the same amount of difficulty to distribute podcasts/books/music on the internet, but podcasts require the least amount of effort (connect microphones to pc, hit record in any basic audio recording app) whereas books require a sustained amount of effort across time as does music. Publishing a book also requires you to learn specialist software for publishing the book (although Vellum seems to have simplified this) and music requires you to master a DAW. Obviously narrative films and games require not only more effort but 99.99% of the time, a team to make.

louky 3y ago
My Guitar->microphone->audio recording app model of music production doesn't even require knowing what a "DAW" is, yet works fine for me and others.
- shwaj 3y ago
  Are you doing it professionally or as a hobby? I’d wager that >99% of artists who make a living from music use a DAW (or pay someone else to)

h4l 3y ago

My intuition is that it's not possible to have an open platform like substack where the majority are making enough to live off. Imagine that was currently the case. People would see the platform as easy money and jump in. The quality of the median writer would drop, as would the median income, until the perception that it was easy money reduced enough to stop people joining.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
There are plenty of markets like that. YouTube and twitch are very popular. It’s just that the top 0.0001% make a good living while the rest don’t make any money
- patmorgan23 3y ago
  I think that percentage is a lot bigger if you only count the people who are posting regularly.
  - sebazzz 3y ago
    Yes, but you're (1) still dependent on "The Algorithm". Popular channel Lesics saw its ads and views disappear overnight with no obvious reason. Hopefully the EU's DMA/DSA legislation will force some transparency there.(2) for most the ads are not enough and true income is made through Memberships and Patreon and swag in a store.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >for most the ads are not enough and true income is made through Memberships and Patreon and swag in a store. you're close. Ads don't make money, ads do. To clarify: Being sponsored directly by an ad can make you almost as much money as tha ads you get from the Youtube system. So all those RAID SHADOW LEGENDS ads you see from gaming youtubers? Yeah, odds are even the tiny (10k subscriber) channels can make a few hundred off of that pitch. Patreon is decent, but it's another stream of income you need to put work into to really pay off with. Those who treat it as a donation box don't get too much. Swag is really nice but you need a decent following first. You probably already make a decent side hustle from YT ads alone by the time you consider merch.

1-6 3y ago

Correction: It's the end of the [unlimited] subscription era. All-you-can-eat is no longer sustainable. Long live subscriptions with monthly tokens that do not roll-over. For example, binge watch all you want, you can but up to 6 a month but you'll pay for > 6. Payment will always be required for Premium content or content augmented with AI. Micropayments and tokens will gain more adoption but it'll be more like a Costco Membership. Companies still love the fact that subscriptions give them longer lead time insight into consumer behavior. That part isn't going away anytime soon as investors love that data.

notatoad 3y ago

huh, really... https://ibb.co/KNX20Xk https://ibb.co/KNX20Xk

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

As long as the quality of the content was good I would alway pay for an ad-free version. But the quality has greatly diminished across the board and Ive stopped paying for any subscription. New sites are the worst at this. They've pandered to their sub base at the expense of the average reader. I just find it funny that all the journalists finally got off Twitter and every story that's been hiding in plain site for the last decade is now in their Sunday edition ever week.

nickdothutton 3y ago

I like constraint based planning. What is the constraint here on making money through subs? Human beings/consumers? Time the humans have to spend reading? Talent of the writer?

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>What is the constraint here on making money through subs? mostly consumers and disposable income, I imagine. you can only keep up with so much content, and if each content is a cost stream, you will be selective after a while. This is what's happening with the TV streaming wars as we speak. as for disposable income; spending power has been on the downfall for decades now, and there's speculation of an upcoming recession. Both of those also start to make consumers focus less on spurious entertainment

cole-k 3y ago

While the piece is thought-provoking, I think that the author would do well to substantiate their claims. Even an interview with some hypothetical "side hustlers" to understand their motivations would be better than guessing why they are on the site. It kind of seemed like they were saying "it is [or will soon be] unsustainable to try and make a living out of being a Substack writer," but I would want to know how many people enter the platform with that goal in the first place. Twitch, YouTube, Soundcloud, good-old-fashioned blogging, I'm sure you could name several other pursuits that are in a similarly unprofitable position for the average content creator. I would wager most people don't start out trying to make a living on these platforms. Maybe the point is that there are people who are just scraping by on these platforms who will soon have the rug pulled from under their feet when consumers wise up to how much money they're throwing away to subscriptions? That didn't come across too clearly to me, though.

coffeebeqn 3y ago

There are so many different types of subscriptions that it’s unhelpful to bunch them together. The monthly box subscription was always a gimmick people were bound to get sick of. Then there’s stuff like a gym membership or Amazon prime or game pass. Some offer good value, some bad. I’d imagine the bad value ones - like monthly boxes of random crap you don’t need will indeed die off

Ekaros 3y ago
Those boxes work when there is some inefficiency to exploit so you get good enough of apparent value. Like there is enough massively discounted stock. But as more of it is eaten or more players enter it will fail. And then you don't likely have big enough scale to get good value specially when you need to do curation, collating and shipping. Amazon Prime is probably mostly workable model as long as you keep raisin price and making offering worse and including the actual costs in item costs. Or simply don't pay enough to where ever you get content.

mrkramer 3y ago

Maybe it's time for micropayments?

TylerE 3y ago
Literally no one actually wants micropayments. Having ever little event in your life become a payment is true dystopia.
- mrkramer 3y ago
  >Having ever little event in your life become a payment is true dystopia. It's already here for decades; each time you use Google or Facebook, you are giving in your privacy for free use of those services. But casual users don't care about their privacy so the ad based business model for Web services will prevail for a very long time.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > each time you use Google or Facebook, you are giving in your privacy for free use of those services You decide to use Google or Facebook once or infrequently. That’s the transaction cost. After that, it’s effortless. Micropayments involve constant transaction costs. They don’t work. A defining pillar of luxury is freedom from transaction costs; excluding those who can pay from your market is garbage economics.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Yet tech people will insist it's a tech problem. Clay Shirky basically called it a couple decades ago that there's a mental transaction cost to buying things. I guess it's sufficiently indirect sometimes that it works. "Hmm. Is it worth it to turn on this light given that it's going to cost me $X cents to have light for the next hour?" But $1/song only lasted as long as that was the only legal model relative to buying a disc. And 5 cents for an article wouldn't work either.
rebolek 3y ago
I'm hearing about this for so long, yet never seen it anywhere. When financebros talk about micro-anything, they usually mean something like few hundred or thousand dollars. For me, micro means cents or even less.

NooneAtAll3 3y ago

I felt like this was a lot of water and not much substance combine that with +47% being "almost doubling" and graph having one axis going "from easy to hard", while the other "from hard to easy"... and I get totally lost

trollied 3y ago

> The New York Times costs $7 for a hard copy This made me WTF. Crikey.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
Cheaper to print it yourself
ghaff 3y ago
I didn't know but I can't say I'm really shocked. It was at least a couple bucks years ago. And newsstand prices for most periodicals have long been multiples of the subscription price. I'm always a bit surprised there's a big enough market for magazines at grocery stores and airports but impulse purchases I guess.
_delirium 3y ago
I think he may have been confused by looking at the NYT online store [1]. They will sell you back issues for $7 for a weekday paper, or $12 for a Sunday paper. But the back issue price is marked up from the cover price. The newsstand price if you’re buying today’s newspaper in person somewhere is currently $4 for Mon-Sat and $6 on Sunday. [1] https://store.nytimes.com/products/print-newspapers?variant=40695958929478 https://store.nytimes.com/products/print-newspapers?variant=...
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  $4 is still quite the inflation. Maybe I'm just a boomer recalling the old days where you could throw in a few quarter at a kiosk and get today's paper. Perhaps I'd feel better if I knew that 800% markup went to paying writers, but I've also become much more cynical in those 20 years.
brightlancer 3y ago
The Sunday edition may be $7 at a newsstand; I'm pretty sure they M-Sa isn't near that (yet). I checked home delivery to the Bronx and the regular price is $20/week ($1,040/year). There was a default offer of 50% off to bring it to $520 for the first year, but maybe he saw $845 the last time he looked. Regardless, it's very expensive.

mst 3y ago

It seems possible that at some point you'll see a hybrid between the NYT and substack models - basically a pre-selected bundle of some subset of a bunch of authors' work where you -also- have an option to subscribe to a particular author directly. I'm sure such things are already possible but the thing I'm thinking of is the bundles not being exclusive, so a piece that's available in 1+ bundles is still also available as part of the full subscription. (possibly combined with some or all of the options operating on a token model rather than a 'get exactly all of this' one) Note that I'm only endorsing this so far as it seeming -possible- and not necessarily -good- or -successful-, and assuming somebody does try it your guess is at least as good as mine as to how it'll turn out.

jon-wood 3y ago
Depending on who was curating this I’d be up for it, and will now be quite surprised if Substack don’t make it happen at some point. I think there’s a lot of value in being able to delegate to someone who knows a particular field the ability to say “hey, these are the people you should be paying attention to”. I could totally see this being used both from a “here’s people who think like I do” perspective, and others providing a more adversarial version with commentators from all sides of a field.
- mst 3y ago
  They could pretty much do it by having things like the 'for paying subscribers of X' attribute that work as 'also free on B' and 'also for paying subscribers of B' and the bundle could (at least initially) be pretty much just the current substack UI. I'm sure if substack actually do something like this, they'll give it a little more thought than I just did, of course.
cole-k 3y ago
https://setapp.com https://setapp.com is one example of a service that does bundling, albeit by offering what seems to be the full features of many things for a single subscription price (instead of your thought of a subset of features). It's not clear to me whether all of the apps offered are subscription-based, though. It's a model I'd be more willing to try than subscriptions to individual apps, although its OS and app offerings do not align with my interests.

ipqk 3y ago

lol, on Medium which I get a 50% banner ad asking me subscribe.

airstrike 3y ago

Unironically posted on Medium

taftster 3y ago

Ha ha ha ... as I get a popover / overlay for a subscription to Medium. Yeah, I'm thinking no, the era of the subscription is just getting started.

CrzyLngPwd 3y ago

Perhaps the subscription model for banal writing or news that doesn't affect you is coming to end and but not the subscription model. I mean, who needs to subscribe to a newspaper that is crammed with unactionable whitterings or the views of a single author? Maybe if it was £1pa and the author managed to write something useful each month it might represent value for money, but the thought of paying any more for the opinion of a single person seems absurd.

szundi 3y ago

You wish. I am in the GPS based fleet management/tracking industry. Running even the most simple system like this is unimaginable to be cheaper than a subscription for a service until you have like 1k vehicles and ok with basically a pickaxe. People take more and more complex and convenient stuff as granted, so we'll have subscriptions and big corporations giving these away for free just to bleed each other out (Thanks though).

katzgrau 3y ago

I recently bought a local news org. One of the things I hate about the media industry is the constant "we're dying" or "this is going to die." Go to a local news conference that's supposedly about the future and it feels a lot like a funeral. Some other way of doing things will come along. Help figure it out or get the fuck out of the way and stop trying to spread your shitty dark version of the future - because you have no idea what happens next.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Some other way of doing things will come along given the motivation of those at top, that doesn't make me sigh in relief. The "other way of doing things" in the 2010's was ads everywhere and abuse of SEO to get people's eyes on what they want to see, not what's important. And that's not even going into the social media dark patterns. Now we have tech CEO's owning newspapers... so maybe those social media dark patterns will seep in in the end regardless. I don't think dismissing these possibilities is any more helpful.

vjk800 3y ago

As Nicholas Nassim Taleb would, maybe, speculatively, put it: highs school statistics teaching based on normal distributions claims another victim. The writers constantly writes about averages. Digital economies almost always follow heavy tailed power law distributions for which the mean is a completely worthless statistic. The top 100 or whatever creators in any market are clearly making it work nicely. The rest of the chumps are merely trying the market. How the game works is: you invest person time/money to try something. If it catches (which it almost surely will not), you will do very very well. If it doesn't, you go do something else. It's akin to playing the lottery, but maybe with a bit higher odds at succeeding. More people will never make a profitable career out of writing simply because there aren't any more readers to read all the stuff that's being written. If the top 1000 or so writers can approximately satisfy the reading needs of all the people in the world, the rest of the writers are not needed and they will not make any money no matter what monetization system is being utilized.

lapcat 3y ago

I don't think the comparison between the NYT and substacks or podcasts is apt, because the NYT is a NEWSpaper. Does it contain opinion columns? Yes, among countless other columns. But the fundamental purpose of the NYT is not just opinion. Whereas substacks and podcasts appear to be mostly opinion pieces. You don't often have news broken on them. What substacks and podcasts have shown is that some "thought leaders" can make a massively lucrative living independent from the newspapers, and more than they could make with the newspapers. But none of this applies to writers of news. News writers still need the news organizations, and the subscribers of the newspapers, to support them. The author talks about "writers" in general without making that crucial distinction. Hard news writing is mostly a thankless job. It rarely provides the opportunity to build a "personal brand" like opinion writing does, unless you're Woodward and Bernstein breaking Watergate. Even someone like Glenn Greenwald, who has broken some huge stories like Snowden, makes most of his money from spouting his opinions online rather than from breaking hard news.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
Does the distinction matter as a business if opinions are making the most money? Hard news can simply be the way to draw in readers that are later sustained by opinions, so it's just a subsidy for the real money maker. Buzzfeed actually worked (works?) this way.

IAmPym 3y ago

This is absolutely not true for one simple reason: Subscriptions increase valuation of companies

tetrisgm 3y ago

This is probably a victim of DHH posting about their Once business model. Literally everything is a subscription now. Video, music, games. Enterprise software. It's just like your pg&e. Consumers like it enough. This is just as fruitful as fighting a commodity.

vonnik 3y ago

I love how the pop up I get from Medium for this piece is telling me to subscribe for $5/mo.

taurath 3y ago

It’s a bit of an investor trick as recurring revenue is treated as orders of magnitude more important than moment to moment sales. This is for some good reasons but there’s also reason to think it’s overvalued as every industry has very different rates of subscriber churn.

psychoslave 3y ago

I opened the page and got a pop up thrown at my face, with some text I didn't bother to read ending with "$5/month subscription".

cogs 3y ago

As an aside: Hardware as a service is annoying and feels horrible, but is probably the only way to achieve the long lifetimes we need for consumer goods in a world where reviews are unreliable and we need to stop wasting resources on planned obsolescence.

throwaway4PP 3y ago

this article reads like it was written by a LLM "Anyway, we all already know this because we all experience human life in 2023."

j45 3y ago

Internet connections still costs someone, monthly, or yearly. Electricity too. Equipment less so, but often it's leased. Bug fixes, patches, updates, scaling. Lifetime SaaS sales don't really last. Subscriptions might change (or return less margin), but it's hard to imagine other ways.

turnsout 3y ago

> OnlyFans experienced a 47% increase in the number of creators using its platform between 2021 and 2022. That’s almost a doubling Not so sure I agree with you 100% on your police-work there, Lou.

wrsh07 3y ago

Honestly, if the writer is saying "you can subscribe to 5-8 writers you love for the price of one NYT subscription and that's a terrible deal because it means the cost of writing has gone up" then I strongly disagree. That sounds like a fantastic deal, and I will gladly subscribe to stratechery and Molly White (whose letter is free btw) and Caitlin Kunkel and Byrne Hobart and Noahpinion and.... And still be paying less than a Times subscription with content tailored exactly to what I care about!!