6 ms·

I mean, yeah? This entirely misses the point of the article. In fact, it couldn't have been a worse shot. I don't know enough about the economics of this stu

I mean, yeah? This entirely misses the point of the article. In fact, it couldn't have been a worse shot. I don't know enough about the economics of this stuff, but I'm willing to pay for good online writing. I have a national paper subscription, two magazines and a handful of substacks I subscribe to. But this feel like a price point issue for me. Why is everything $9.99/month (close to $15/month CAD)? Where are all the $2.50 or $5.00 subs? I feel like we anchor to $10 because it's a nice easy number, but the average person just can't afford very many of these, and no single subscription is good enough. So we sustain our desire to not pay for anything.

rectang 2y ago
I'm willing to sign up for some cheap subscriptions through Apple that I'd be unlikely to make directly because I don't have the energy to scrutinize individual vendors regarding hidden charges, dark patterns, data collection, security breaches, etc. I agree that the difference between $2.50 and $10.00 is significant, but addressing all the trust issues is too.
- dandandan 2y ago
  Apple News+ helps there a lot. $13/mo for articles from a ton of paid outlets. It’s not everything on those sites, but I find that most of the popular articles are available.
paulddraper 2y ago
It went the same way as a $5 lunch.
red_admiral 2y ago
Blogger siderea has talked about this a lot in relation to patreon, and the challenges for any platform wanting to replace it. EDIT: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html and https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1371510.html https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1371510.html Apparently it comes down to how card processing fees work, as long as there's a constant fixed cost per payment (whether or not there is also a percentage fee), "microtransactions" become uneconomic for the platform. Apparently the problem with letting people pay say $10 into an account and then dispense $1 a time to read articles is that makes you a "payment processor" in some states which comes with strict regulations and extra costs. EDIT2: and yes, we've already tried blockchain for that too.
- exe34 2y ago
  i suppose you could make a $10 donation to the site and they could give you free coupons for articles.
  - adolph 2y ago
    The coupons could be on a cryptographic ledger so you have access to it from mobile/desktop/family members and any article could ask for payment from it or maybe different pricing for different sales funnel entry points. I think this is what Brave browser has set up, but I havnt been motivated enough to inquire.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Or they could just be… in a regular old database of the issuer, who is the one that will validate them anyway when you redeem them for articles?
  - lxgr 2y ago
    If the articles are still free for everyone, sure! If not, that’s not a donation, but rather a regular payment for goods and services.
    - exe34 2y ago
      do clubs count as payment processors? do hotels/bars who keep a tab with pen and paper?
      - lxgr 2y ago
        I don't know what counts or doesn't count as a payment processor exactly in these states (GP brought that up, not me). In any case, the tax status of a payment (donation or payment for goods/services received) would most likely be orthogonal to that, i.e. I don't think you could skirt any of these requirements just by saying you're taking donations.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
bsder 2y ago
> Why is everything $9.99/month (close to $15/month CAD)? Money handling is expensive. Rampant fraud is the big problem. Even if you don't ship physical objects, your system will get used to test out stolen credit cards, for example. As such, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will immediately outsource money handling, which means that your minimum price is now limited by how much your processor charges.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  > As such, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will immediately outsource money handling, which means that your minimum price is now limited by how much your processor charges. Which should be significantly less than a dollar for small charges. Processing fees get in the way of charging a dollar each month, but they're perfectly compatible with charging $5. And that $5 could be for multiple months.
  - bsder 2y ago
    A payment processor generally also charges something simply for usage of service. And, even if they don't (and I'm having trouble thinking of any that don't), you almost always need a full time programmer supporting your monetary transaction flow. Sure, supporting that overhead doesn't matter if you have a million transactions a month. If, however, you only have a hundred transactions a month, a salary of $120K per year means that you need roughly $100 each in profit in order to support that programmer. A thousand transactions in a month means you need roughly $10 profit each to support that programmer. You need 10K transactions per month before you are at $1 profit per transaction to support your programmer. How many businesses have ten thousand transactions a month? Not very bloody many. Basically, only the very top 50 out of 250K creators (0.02%!) on Patreon pass that mark. It's REALLY rare. Sure, when you are at scale things are cheap. However, before then things are very expensive.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      You do not need a full time payments programmer to handle that many transactions running through a processor. And as you say, there are services that handle the entire shop process, for a few more percentage points or a few hundred dollars per year, whichever you prefer. If someone is charging ten dollars a month, it's not because of how much payment processing costs.
erkt 2y ago
Or some sort of system to pay per article. I’d toss a quarter here and there for content.
lstamour 2y ago
It’s like cheap Canadian cellphone or internet plans - you have to wait until a news org offers a deal, then sign up for it. Managed to get cheap NYT and WSJ subs from it. You have to cancel when the price goes up and then accept the offer at cancellation to keep your low price for one more year, forever. Honestly, if my local library offered more online news subscriptions, I would much prefer that. How we ended up in this scenario where everyone, even Medium, shows me a paywall with high subscription fees to bypass it is not sustainable worldwide in the long run. I don’t mind paying for content, but keep it reasonable!
- ljf 2y ago
  I feel very lucky that my local library has 'libby' an ebook reader that also has magazines and some papers - all for free. It is pretty nice to read a couple of magazines in the evening, as an alternative to 'just one more social media app...'
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
p3rls 2y ago
I chose to go with a $3 subscription model myself, at that cheap it's just a waste of time to go through the unsub process. Cha Ching.
TZubiri 2y ago
Because the time cost of getting out your credit card, risk of unwanted charges, overhead of managing a subscription, a new account per password, far outweighs 2.5$ The difference between k+2.5 and k+10 is very small. But you quadruple the income to the business, and so the value of the product (more resources can be invested) K can be labelled as transaction costs, price must be higher than tx costs.
joe_the_user 2y ago
I thought the point of the article is that pathological economics cause "progressive" magazines to pointlessly harangue and leave ignorant their impoverished audience knowing full well this audience won't subscribe. IE, it was parody and social commentary. This is your last free article. There will be no more, forever seemed to be a reference to Orwell's A boot stomping on a face, forever, etc.
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
Bundle subscriptions would make a lot of sense. I'd pay $10/month to access "the news". I'm not going to pay $10/month to access 1% of the news. At the same time, $10/month is more money than the $0/month the news sites are getting from me right now. This is particularly infuriating when multiple newspapers belong to the same group, and yet they maintain individual subscriptions. I can't see many people subscribing to more than 1-2 of them. They could easily make an "overall" subscription that provides a lot better value and likely get a lot more customers. But no, they'd rather try to squeeze more money per person out of a much smaller group...

rectang 2y ago

I'm willing to sign up for some cheap subscriptions through Apple that I'd be unlikely to make directly because I don't have the energy to scrutinize individual vendors regarding hidden charges, dark patterns, data collection, security breaches, etc. I agree that the difference between $2.50 and $10.00 is significant, but addressing all the trust issues is too.

dandandan 2y ago
Apple News+ helps there a lot. $13/mo for articles from a ton of paid outlets. It’s not everything on those sites, but I find that most of the popular articles are available.

paulddraper 2y ago

It went the same way as a $5 lunch.

red_admiral 2y ago

Blogger siderea has talked about this a lot in relation to patreon, and the challenges for any platform wanting to replace it. EDIT: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html and https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1371510.html https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1371510.html Apparently it comes down to how card processing fees work, as long as there's a constant fixed cost per payment (whether or not there is also a percentage fee), "microtransactions" become uneconomic for the platform. Apparently the problem with letting people pay say $10 into an account and then dispense $1 a time to read articles is that makes you a "payment processor" in some states which comes with strict regulations and extra costs. EDIT2: and yes, we've already tried blockchain for that too.

exe34 2y ago
i suppose you could make a $10 donation to the site and they could give you free coupons for articles.
- adolph 2y ago
  The coupons could be on a cryptographic ledger so you have access to it from mobile/desktop/family members and any article could ask for payment from it or maybe different pricing for different sales funnel entry points. I think this is what Brave browser has set up, but I havnt been motivated enough to inquire.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Or they could just be… in a regular old database of the issuer, who is the one that will validate them anyway when you redeem them for articles?
- lxgr 2y ago
  If the articles are still free for everyone, sure! If not, that’s not a donation, but rather a regular payment for goods and services.
  - exe34 2y ago
    do clubs count as payment processors? do hotels/bars who keep a tab with pen and paper?
    - lxgr 2y ago
      I don't know what counts or doesn't count as a payment processor exactly in these states (GP brought that up, not me). In any case, the tax status of a payment (donation or payment for goods/services received) would most likely be orthogonal to that, i.e. I don't think you could skirt any of these requirements just by saying you're taking donations.
ToucanLoucan 2y ago

bsder 2y ago

> Why is everything $9.99/month (close to $15/month CAD)? Money handling is expensive. Rampant fraud is the big problem. Even if you don't ship physical objects, your system will get used to test out stolen credit cards, for example. As such, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will immediately outsource money handling, which means that your minimum price is now limited by how much your processor charges.

Dylan16807 2y ago
> As such, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will immediately outsource money handling, which means that your minimum price is now limited by how much your processor charges. Which should be significantly less than a dollar for small charges. Processing fees get in the way of charging a dollar each month, but they're perfectly compatible with charging $5. And that $5 could be for multiple months.
- bsder 2y ago
  A payment processor generally also charges something simply for usage of service. And, even if they don't (and I'm having trouble thinking of any that don't), you almost always need a full time programmer supporting your monetary transaction flow. Sure, supporting that overhead doesn't matter if you have a million transactions a month. If, however, you only have a hundred transactions a month, a salary of $120K per year means that you need roughly $100 each in profit in order to support that programmer. A thousand transactions in a month means you need roughly $10 profit each to support that programmer. You need 10K transactions per month before you are at $1 profit per transaction to support your programmer. How many businesses have ten thousand transactions a month? Not very bloody many. Basically, only the very top 50 out of 250K creators (0.02%!) on Patreon pass that mark. It's REALLY rare. Sure, when you are at scale things are cheap. However, before then things are very expensive.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    You do not need a full time payments programmer to handle that many transactions running through a processor. And as you say, there are services that handle the entire shop process, for a few more percentage points or a few hundred dollars per year, whichever you prefer. If someone is charging ten dollars a month, it's not because of how much payment processing costs.

erkt 2y ago

Or some sort of system to pay per article. I’d toss a quarter here and there for content.

lstamour 2y ago

It’s like cheap Canadian cellphone or internet plans - you have to wait until a news org offers a deal, then sign up for it. Managed to get cheap NYT and WSJ subs from it. You have to cancel when the price goes up and then accept the offer at cancellation to keep your low price for one more year, forever. Honestly, if my local library offered more online news subscriptions, I would much prefer that. How we ended up in this scenario where everyone, even Medium, shows me a paywall with high subscription fees to bypass it is not sustainable worldwide in the long run. I don’t mind paying for content, but keep it reasonable!

ljf 2y ago
I feel very lucky that my local library has 'libby' an ebook reader that also has magazines and some papers - all for free. It is pretty nice to read a couple of magazines in the evening, as an alternative to 'just one more social media app...'

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

p3rls 2y ago

I chose to go with a $3 subscription model myself, at that cheap it's just a waste of time to go through the unsub process. Cha Ching.

TZubiri 2y ago

Because the time cost of getting out your credit card, risk of unwanted charges, overhead of managing a subscription, a new account per password, far outweighs 2.5$ The difference between k+2.5 and k+10 is very small. But you quadruple the income to the business, and so the value of the product (more resources can be invested) K can be labelled as transaction costs, price must be higher than tx costs.

joe_the_user 2y ago

I thought the point of the article is that pathological economics cause "progressive" magazines to pointlessly harangue and leave ignorant their impoverished audience knowing full well this audience won't subscribe. IE, it was parody and social commentary. This is your last free article. There will be no more, forever seemed to be a reference to Orwell's A boot stomping on a face, forever, etc.

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago

Bundle subscriptions would make a lot of sense. I'd pay $10/month to access "the news". I'm not going to pay $10/month to access 1% of the news. At the same time, $10/month is more money than the $0/month the news sites are getting from me right now. This is particularly infuriating when multiple newspapers belong to the same group, and yet they maintain individual subscriptions. I can't see many people subscribing to more than 1-2 of them. They could easily make an "overall" subscription that provides a lot better value and likely get a lot more customers. But no, they'd rather try to squeeze more money per person out of a much smaller group...