3 ms·

maybe it's time for paid subscription model?

• dredmorbius 12y ago
  I'm leaning to something closer to a patron / member model, though with most content generally available. We're seeing a reprise of earlier forms of media. Truth is: there is a social (and business) need for quality and reasonably unbiased information. There's also value to those who want to control such a feed (the dark side of media). Advertising has sustained the concept in some form or another for several hundred years, with a few big shake-ups. But there've also be (and continue to be) highly ideological organizations (see Fox News / NewsCorp / WSJ, well know, but also The Economist, and on the left, papers such as The Guardian, Mother Jones, or The Christian Science Monitor). The problem, in an online era, of subscriptions only is that it closes your distribution down too much. Providing early access might be a way around that, though information tends to get out very, very quickly. Of numerous bad options, it strikes me as one of the less-bad (see LWN.net which uses it). Another is partnering with someone who has a clear interest in your demographic -- DICE buying Slashdot, for example, though that doesn't seem to be going all too well from either a content or business stand point so far as I can tell. Hacker News follows the same model, more successfully (on both grounds) via Ycombinator. Advertising, though, seems to me a dead end. And it's going to be all kinds of hurt for the current iteration of Silicon Valley if it plays out as I suspect it will.