4 ms·

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 auth

by 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.
- mst 3y ago
  My thought was to let you have e.g. a book review bundler that got only the review posts from mixed sources and say 1/3 of the review posts from ones that are all reviews ... both because that sort of subsetting works better here than it would for apps and because it means that it can make sense to subscribe to both a bundle and a contributor thereto, so neither channel is risking cannibalisation by recommending the other.

by mst 3y ago

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.

mst 3y ago
My thought was to let you have e.g. a book review bundler that got only the review posts from mixed sources and say 1/3 of the review posts from ones that are all reviews ... both because that sort of subsetting works better here than it would for apps and because it means that it can make sense to subscribe to both a bundle and a contributor thereto, so neither channel is risking cannibalisation by recommending the other.