Subscription Hell
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
> It’s not just Bloomberg and media — it’s software too. I used to write everything in Ulysses, a syncing Markdown editor for OS X and iOS. I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments illustrate, that price is vastly out of proportion from the cost of providing the software (which I might add, is entirely hosted on iCloud infrastructure).
I have noticed this as well, that a not-small number of software programs have turned from "give us one money for this version" to "give us slightly smaller amount of one money per month, but do it in perpetuity if you want to keep going with the data you've entered."
That, to me, is crap and is incredibly frustrating, especially when the subscription model is coupled with a data lockout threat. A task manager, a word processor, even a drawing program...none of these ought to require a subscription to be able to use. Sure, have a subscription service for something that needs upkeep, like a syncing service (but get out of here if all you do is just lump it into the user's iCloud storage) or a data feed. But it's almost insulting to say "we used to charge you $50 once, now we're charging you $29.95 per month forever (if you want to see those notes in two years, and no, we don't have a data takeout API); it's such a deal!"
That means I always will have access to my projects and to the level of functionality I start with. But I keep getting upgrades as long as I keep paying, and they get the steady revenue stream that means they don't have to play weird marketing games.
I wasn’t aware that the perpetual fallback license only covered the latest version at the time of subscription/renewal. That’s less than ideal, but apart from that, I think they’ve pretty well nailed the subscription-based model. It’s actually the _only_ software I’ve used where I feel the subscription model terms were actually an improvement over what I had before.
E.g. I start paying month-to-month at 2016.2, after 12 months I have a license to 2016.2. But say after the first month, 2017.1 comes out. Then after 13 months I now have a license for 2017.1.
Why can't all subscriptions work like those old license schemes do?
"that price is vastly out of proportion from the cost of providing the software"
That's just an unfounded assumption by the author. He says he knows this, even though he doesn't know how many developers are working on it, what they get paid, how much time each release takes, how large the code base is, or how many users the product has. Essentially, he has made up a cost in his head, and decided that the costs must be less than his fantasy. For all we know, he's one of 2 users, and the cost for keeping his editor available is $100k/yr/user.
This also completely ignores the fact that prices for software aren't generally set using cost plus pricing.
Of course, in the long term, customers will revolt, and do so swiftly, and without mercy.
Instead of the several thousand dollars you would have had to pay for the various softwares in the lineup up front, you just pay $50 a month. Which is reasonable of you previously used more than just Photoshop and maybe upgraded every 3 to 4 years.
If the end result is a similar cost, I would much rather keep my capital in the business and make a monthly payment.
A year of updates.
A lifetime of Sketch
Your license comes with a year’s worth of updates.
Once that year is up, you can keep using the last
version of Sketch you downloaded, forever.
* There is no incentive for feature creep caused by having to "sell" the next version to your current userbase every so often.
* The developer does not have to keep supporting old versions forever.
If you have no idea how much income you are going to make, stuff become a hell of a lot more complicated, unless you have a substantial cash reserve available - not a luxury that everyone has. The directors spend a hell of a lot more time running around banks begging for short term financing, cutting costs and planning out 100 different potential scenarios.
If I had to run another business, I would definitely look to running some kind of subscription scheme..
And if you get a reputation as a hostage holder, you will likely spawn competition that avoids your negatives.
I’m sure you will get some residual low hanging fruit in the form of people that buy subscriptions and don’t care enough to cancel.
Doesn’t seem like a winning business model though.
If you sell a one time license to somebody there is no incentive for the seller to keep making the product better, to care keep caring for you.
With a subscription model - especially a non-annually-paid one, they have to keep working to keep you.
It's also a way more sustainable business model and probably the only thing which can replace ads in practice. If a service like facebook gets a load of money out of you per year, there's no way they would switch to a one-time fee instead. If it were to be replaced by a subscription though, then you're still a constant money flow for them, which would work much better.
For Facebook - I don't think forced subscription would work. People would be forced to think about how much they value the service (a less ubiquitous one at that).
In reality, those companies who don't do scummy things like attempt to lock your data or similar, will be out competed by those who do.
I strongly disagree on this one. If they want to sell you version 2.0 (upgrade), they better make sure those new features are worth their money.
With a subscription model, you either keep paying them or you lose it all. Why would they improve their product when you're already paying them x/month?
Some time ago I bought Affinity Designer because I don't want to pay Adobe for a subscription. And going back to that website, one of the first things they promote is "No subscription. Only €54.99".
Seems obvious that any big player that is switching to subscription only, is leaving a gap for smaller companies that support people like us.
Even Apple somewhat relies on this, except it's been in 2 year intervals. It's the point of so called "planned obsolescence."
So if you're an indie developer, you only have a few options.
1.Go through the rat trap of doing ads and trying to grow a huge userbase with marketing etc..., which everyone hates but most tolerate because it's free.
2. Charge a 1 time fee and hope that you price it right to support long term development and sustainment, knowing that you'll probably limit your market significantly.
3. Charge a recurring low(er) fee and draw a balance between losing a lot of very price sensitive people and having to run a marketing campaign and ad system.
No good option there but subscription seems to have the most benefits. By the way, everything needs upkeep.
As a software (SaaS) developer, I find this comment outright bizarre. I find it is hard to make a living with $50/month subscriptions, if you write niche software (and believe me, you DO write niche software, you are not Dropbox), much less support an entire company.
Have you actually done the numbers before writing that "price is vastly out of proportion"? Just take the total cost (roughly 2x salary) of several people, divide by that $40/year and see how many subscriptions you come up with. I'm getting ~25000 subscriptions for 5 employees, just to break even, and we haven't even touched the marketing required to get 25000 subscriptions.
Furthermore, only devs complain about the "proportion of providing the software". Didn't especially Indie devs here on HN take their time to learn the lessons of value-based pricing?
I do charge monthly for my app. It's 30 bucks a year for a B2C app. Expensive some might say, fair for others. But I can at least confidently tell that most users use my app every single day. And people who won't use it for more than a few months came away way cheaper than if the one-time-fee was 30-40 bucks to start with.
Oh and providing an app as a one-time-fee for $5 or some ridiculous undervalued price that is considered "acceptable" simply doesn't work in niches.
Users are balking at the price because it's garbage to expect them to support some gigantic business for a simple thing. This is very common (1Password has over 75 employees!!!) and the sense of entitlement developers have to try to force their users to support a grandiose business, no matter how bloated and unnecessary the people are, isn't sustainable.
Also, I wonder whether this will lead to a slower development of the software. Before you’d have to create a leap forward to impress people to buy the new version, if the old version was still good enough.
Carrot Weather App is another good one. Pay $5 once to get a really polished weather app with some basic "cloud" functions thrown in, like notifications to a phone device, some fun "achievements," and a pretty good weather data feed. If you want the super-accurate feed or if you want more advanced notifications and mobile device access (e.g. repeatedly on your Apple Watch), pay up for the subscription because it costs the dev more. And, if you stop paying, that $5 you initially paid is still valuable because the underlying app still works.
Most subscription software is a terrible deal in comparison. I have tried to avoid subscription software as much as possible. But we have a family subscription for 1Password because $REASONS. We pay $60 per year for (in comparison to Office) a small software product, with small cloud storage, of which we only need a couple of megabytes for storing encrypted passwords.
Also, I wonder whether this will lead to a slower development of the software.
Most likely. Once you are locked into some proprietary data format, it is often more expensive to move to an alternative, and it is easier to subscribe. Once a substantial part of the user base has a subscription, there is no more need to entice users with a new version.
Subscription software does not benefit the user.
I am not sure if that would be bad, though. Often enough, I feel that software vendors either just change the UI so they can show non-technical people how "improved" their new version is (MS Office), or they introduce arbitrary incompatibilities, so you need the most recent version to edit files that have been created/modified with that new version (I'm looking at you, Autodesk!).
With a subscription model, at least these vendors could focus on changes that actually provide value to their customers rather than making arbitrary changes just to make people buy a new version they might not really need.
In the knowledge-based industry such as software the cost of labor has the biggest share in cost structure. And unlike materials, the labor itself is a subscription. Social policies that make firing hard make it even more so. No wonder that revenue structure also tends to shift towards subscription-based models.
I thought this was absolutely ridiculous since the custom markdown would have simply gotten written as plain text. I asked why they're limiting the user like that and got even more ridiculous response: apparently they didn't want other people to get confused in case I ever shared the files that were outside their own file based schema. This non sequitur infuriated me enough to ditch the software.
None of it made any sense until they announced the subscription model.
I’m always annoyed about whiny iOS developers complaint about how they cannot make money without obnoxious schemes like this or gambling mechanisms. Software ISVs in olden times had a tiny market, huge expenses around retail channels and distributors, etc. They made money.
You will generally make far more money charging $5/mo forever than you will charging $50 once for identical software. Not to mention the steady cash flow.
An extreme example, but I always pirated Photoshop (as did probably half the people who ever used Photoshop). But now I pay $60/mo for it and a bunch of the other Creative Suite apps. I never would have paid whatever the 4-figure price was even when I was getting paid to make graphics at work. But I'll gladly pay $60/mo to have access to everything now even though I don't get paid for any graphics or video work.
> I have noticed this as well, that a not-small number of software programs have turned from "give us one money for this version" to "give us slightly smaller amount of one money per month, but do it in perpetuity if you want to keep going with the data you've entered."
Like Sketch App which used to be just US$99[1] and is now US$99/year[2]. Although in this example, "slightly smaller" doesn't apply
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20160416212244/http://sketchapp....
Your license comes with a year’s worth of updates. Once that year is up, you can keep using the last version of Sketch you downloaded, forever.
That sounds ok to me.
Now imaging a world 15 years from now where Adobe totally goes under due to competitors making much better programs. Their servers go away and now, and you can't even start your licensed software without running it through a debugger and trying to crack the license check.
This. If you sell an app and service together, you can charge a recurring fee. If your app is more traditional, then a one time fee for the app is appropriate. Note, this does not mean that you can just add a service willy nilly like and start charging a recurring fee. That's crap.
If I am paying for software that I use to be more efficient and increases my profits, I am OK with a subscription model, or whatever model is offered. This is, as long as the cost of the software is considerably lower than the value bump I get from using it.
With discretionary spending, it takes a lot for me to buy a subscription. If I spend more than X% of a given month consuming what that subscription provides, I will consider buying it. Otherwise, I am fine not consuming that particular service at all.
I subscribe to a few magazines and Spotify. I read content online from many sources, but will not buy a subscription to each one of them. None of them are valuable enough for me to subscribe.
If there was a way to pay, say $20 per month, and have a set of credits that I could redeem at Washington Post, The Economist, New York Times, Bloomberg, etc, on a per-article basis (I make the decision after the first paragraph or two) I would jump at that right away. The system would need to be very user friendly and almost friction-free.
blendle.com offers basically exactly what you're asking for. (Not in any way affiliated with the site, just an occasional user)
i think this model doesn't work (but i'm willing to be pleasantly surprised). Imagine you read 10 articles a day, 30 days a month. That's 300 articles - that's about 6.6 cents an article, spread across many different organizations.
Those articles will need a readership in the 10,000's per article for any sort of return on investment with those sort of prices. Granted, a high quality article is going to be able to reach that, but there's limited time per person to read, and that 10 articles per day read is on the high end - most people read much less than that.
the data will be useless other than as a source of information. If you have data for an online vector editor, the vector data can be legally taken out via a common format (such as json), but there'll be no importers for this shape of data.
Any business can easily construe a common machine readable format that's also completely custom, and unimportable anywhere else, to satisfy the letter of the law.
Frankly, the writing has been on the wall for something like at least 10 years and surely came into life once Adobe announced the CS 5.5 subscription model in 2011.
And what can be done about that ?
There's obviously a middle ground, like being able to at least use the version you paid for indefinitely but having to pay a smaller price to upgrade. But which direction a pricing structure goes also depends a lot on the niche and type of software.
Citing the worst examples of "subscription abuse" isn't really an argument either. Of course you can find examples on each end of a spectrum. But as far as most software pricing goes, if it's so bad, then people wouldn't pay.
However, that is not the case. Everyone stops using your app at some point. So you don't need to support users forever, you just need to support them for some finite amount of time. Some users might use your app for a few years, some use your app just for a few weeks. Some users will email you half a dozen times, but most will never email you. Your app price should be priced so you can afford to support the average user.
And another thing that people forget: When your user base is growing, the amount of word of mouth recommendation you get also grows, and you automatically start selling more licenses, so your revenue also grows.
Pay-once and subscription aren't really that different in practice. Pay-once even has an advantage: You get all the money up front. And that's awesome if you are planning to grow your company.
This logic applies to literally any one-time purchase that includes a warranty, yet the consumer goods sector has managed it somehow. What's really happening is a deterioration of the idea of "owning[1]" software. I'm sure it's great for the publisher, but it's almost all downside for the user. I'm still using an email app that was acquired and shut down by Google in 2012 and it continues to work just fine. On PC I use WinRAR from 10 years ago with no issue. I can't imagine having to pay for all of these little apps on a subscription basis and then having to find alternatives when the creators get acquired/go bankrupt because the subscription is no longer supported.
Edit: To add to that, if the cost of the subscription is to provide me with superior support, will publishers selling me these subscriptions be removing the warranty disclaimer from their EULA? Probably not, right?
[1] Yes, you never "owned" it, but licensed a copy - but in practice it was similar to owning a physical good.
> But as far as most software pricing goes, if it's so bad, then people wouldn't pay.
And yet people keep paying ransomware for access to their important files.
The way things should work is like this: Subscription for when you want to use the software and open format data files that you're always easily able to export and download.
If a company goes out of business or does something stupid then another one will pop up to handle your needs. This aligns incentives correctly while still allows a healthy dose of competition.
A good example is the Adobe Creative Suite 6 Master Collection which was so expensive to buy in Australia that it was cheaper to fly to the US, buy a copy and fly back. Now, you can get a years subscription to Creative Cloud for 'All Apps' for about 1/5th of the price of what CS6 MC was in Australia. It is still expensive, and after 4 or 5 years you will have spent more but thats significantly longer than Office 365 which costs about 2/3rd the price per year of a copy of Office 2016 outright.
In the US, companies have product liability to correct defects for the lifetime of the product, subject to routine limitations. [1]
So companies create business models to compensate for this limitation.
Companies figured this out with software decades ago, so it’s certainly possible (eg, Microsoft).
[1] https://injury.findlaw.com/product-liability/what-is-product...
Many many companies still allow this, but I think if you want support you should be paying a support fee (e.g. monthly subscription).
This is not how prices are set. They are set on the willingness and ability to pay. Water costs nothing to produce but if I have it all you will pay me everything you have.
For example if their main competitor went bust and not a single atom changed inside this company, they could charge you more.
Do they have a monopoly or is it hard to migrate? These are the conversations the people who set the price are having. They are not talking about people being upset if they still pay.
The net effect is that large swaths of society and indeed the world get the internet services for free, subsidized by purchases made by richer westerners, purchases and services they themselves could never afford. This model works well with the economic structure of web publishing, where marginal cost of serving an existing page to a new customer is essentially zero - even for the obese, media rich pages the author is referring to.
Once you move to a flat fee, this massive redistribution ceases. There is a clearly defined model of customer, say, those living in the middle class of an OECD country, that is targeted to maximize revenue, and a paywall is put in place that excludes 95% of the rest of the world. These are people for which 9$ might represent a tenth of their wage, and who might not even have access to modern banking through which to purchase internet services.
The open web was created by hacker ethos, but paid for using ads; a flat tax against widely variable income is strongly inequalitarian and exclusionary.
> Once you move to a flat fee, this massive redistribution ceases
I think this largely disregards the effects of targeting. A lot of the things (payday loans as the prime example) advertised to people less well off are reverse redistribution, exploiting the financial situation / needs of viewers.
And, of course, that must be the very individual who wants those "immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format."
No one is saying that the fee should be flat. There are ways of selling roughly the same service for different prices - just look at air travel.
I'm not going to pretend that this is the end all solution. But both the open web and journalism cannot survive in the present state. We have to adapt.
Seems like there is a market for deeper analysis done stratchery, the information and couple of others, but it barely sustains a few writers, hardly able to compete with the large scale newsrooms of WSJ, WaPo, NYT, ...
The issue many people, myself included, have with subscriptions are that you pay $x / month whether or not you read that month's product. And whether or not you read every article or just one. So for me, as a consumer, my "price per article" goes from small to literally infinity (pay but read zero articles).
Now the pay per article model works so much better. You can charge me to read a single article but I pay nothing if I read nothing. This is the model that blendle.com uses and my experience was that even though their "per article" price was much higher than I originally thought reasonable (9 cents to 50 cents) I was paying basically $50 a month for subscriptions to the publications that I read (WSJ, Economist, NYT, WaPo, etc) and with Blendle I end up putting maybe $15 or $25 per month into my Blendle wallet. So its half as expensive for me and I still get to read, advertising free, any article in those publications. Blendle's money back if its click bait policy is the clincher. When you read a lemon you get your money back.
I win (save money) they win (they get paid for their journalism).
It’s not like an a la carte model couldn’t also fund profitless journalism, but I think it might push things even more in that direction.
I think they do understand what people want, but they have a healthy, eat your vegetables kind of take on things too.
Look what happens whenever a city adopts a $0.05 plastic bag tax. When Washington DC did it, plastic bag use dropped by 50% - 70%. I'd see people that just spent $30 bucks at the store with their arms overflowing with stuff rather than pay that extra nickel.
I'd expect prompting users to choose whether reading a story is worth $0.05 to them every time will cause them to read and engage significantly less.
The tone of the engagement matters, too, because it works on psychological levels most people aren't aware of. It's essentially brainwashing. To me, "Buying" means assessing and confirming value, "Upgrading" means reassessing the value and how relevant the new features are to me, and "Renewing a subscription" means to keep the status quo and automatically remain up to date. Upgrade notifications feel like nagging, while subscription renewal notices are almost alarming.
Nag all you want because I can just use what I have now. Yay! I upgraded and now all the icons are in different spots. Maybe they added something interesting. I hope it still reads my old files.
End the subscription and who knows what happens. Yay! I renewed my subscription and now all my most precious files are no longer in danger of being wiped from existence. Subscribing sure saved my butt. I'm so glad I did!
Overall, though, I think the subscription model exists to take advantage of inattentive customers, which makes up the bulk of any user base. A person forgetting to cancel their subscription is as good as a new subscriber and there are all sorts of situations where that can happen to anyone. Hell, those are probably the same customers that didn't notice when a new version was released, so the company even makes up for missed upgrades. I have no real data to back that up, but it fits with a lot of personal observations.
My purchase of <$2 apps in the Google Play store went up tremendously when I could do it with just a fingerprint read instead of a full password entry.
The amount of money I spend with Amazon's one-swipe checkout is obnoxious.
Ask me to give you my full address twice and manually enter a credit card, even if you have an item I really want? Nope, probably not doing it.
The example that gives me a little bit of optimism in the long run is power: people don't really have a problem with the fact that their power bill is pay-per-use, and if it discourages them from unduly wasting power, all the better.
But the problem you describe is still significant: people are _already_ used to that dynamic for electricity, and it's not clear to me how to get over the hump where they'd treat micro transactions for publishing in the way you describe. Most people aren't remotely rational enough to realize on their own that stressing over each minuscule payment has a cost of its own and coming up with a better strategy for handling it. (In the electricity example, this is the difference between 1) calculating the power usage of each device in your house and considering whether you want to pay a few cents before flicking that light switch or 2) conserve in common sense ways and adjust if necessary based on your monthly bill.)
> When Washington DC did it, plastic bag use dropped by 50% - 70%. I'd see people that just spent $30 bucks at the store with their arms overflowing with stuff rather than pay that extra nickel.
Case in point... This may be one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. My city has had a ten cent bag tax for a long time now, and the way everyone reacts is 1) carry it in your hand if it's one or two small things, 2) pay a freaking dime if you have too much stuff and be slightly more likely to remember your reusable bag next time.
The price is so low that there is little friction. You also get a full refund if you are disappointed, further reducing friction.
Furthermore you don't pay every time but you pay from an account with Blendle.
You or I may prefer the microtransaction model to free with ads or subscription-based, but I suspect there's a lot about the market that we'd prefer was different, and that's because we're not typical of the market.
I feel I used to follow Google quite closely before and I cannot remember seing any hints of this.
My feeling has rather been that any form for paying has been looked at as second class compared to ads at that company.
Youtube Red still isn't available here and I haven't heard a thing about the idea they had last year that we could pay to avoid ads.
Do you have any pointers?
I've had the same gripe with games for years. I stopped paying for Xbox live and World of Warcraft because they're the same - if I only played for a few hours in a month, I've paid over-the-odds. I can't predict in a given month how likely I am to have how many hours, so I end up paying them £0. They could get more money out of me if they had a better PAYG or tiering option.
That’s the secret. Price your subs so it’s a better offer for the lightest of users. Not hard in the music business that was ripe for disruption.
And I think that’s the message in the article. Subs themselves are not the problem , but the way they are priced . (Although the fact that he spends so much money on subs kind of negates his argument. It seems like people like him are happy to pay which reinforces the soundness of the business case).
Incidentally I subscribe to ms office even though I would never have paid a one off fee for it. I think it’s cheap enough to justify its value. I also subscribe to Netflix but should really cancel. In europe there is not much content there. When I first got it i watched maybe 4 or 5 interesting documentaries now I never see anything there worth watching. I might unsubscribe after my daughter finishes binging gravity falls. (She’s not a big user either we both find YouTube more interesting and relevant than European Netflix)
Free shit forever?
For me the nice thing about blendle is cheap access to several sources, if they have a prepaid plan that charges monthly at $10 for 60 articles (16c/article), I would do that.
I think it depends a lot on if you experience journalism as more similar to a gym (exercise for your brain) or netflix/hulu (entertainment).
Netflix released data showing that people added documentaries and art house movies to their queues but never watched them. Instead they watched the same action movies and comedies over and over.
It’s the same reason as why gyms charge per month not per visit. What people say they do and what they actually do is barely connected at all.
Their only positive income is investment rounds. Negative return on investment.
It’s like subsidizing your company with credit cards. And having a business model of “apply for new credit cards”
> The issue many people, myself included, ...
> my "price per article" goes from small to literally infinity
This is a problem for the producers too if they try a pay-per-unit model instead: their income could waiver unpredictably between more than enough and literally negative (not meeting the production costs). Either way, someone is gambling.
> Blendle's money back if its click bait policy is the clincher.
That sounds like something I'll have to investigate. Thanks for the pointer.
It's worth it to me to avoid managing dozens of separate logins for every site.
Why do you think they don’t understand? AFAIK, Blendle’s business model (even at those prices you think are too high) hasn’t proven viable yet.
You can scroll through their list of recommended articles, but if you already know the article you want to read (if, for instance, i find a WSJ article on HN that i want to read) there's no easy way to pay for that article on blendle. They need a tool that lets me paste in a canonical article URL and get the corresponding article on Blendle.
It also allows you to get a refund after reading an article if you think it was clickbait.
Articles are $0.09-0.50 in my experience.
One of the challenges is that if you look at this as a single consumer / single producer model it is very hard to see the economics. That is why internet advertising is also hard to see sometimes. Nearly everyone I know tells me "How do they make any money on internet ads? I never click on them." And for lots of people that is true, but for another population it is not true. And when you look at page views as a 'population' of say a million different people, and 1% of them, or 10,000 of them click on an advertisement that pays $0.10 per click, that is $1,000 of revenue from that one article. And if the marginal cost to host a single article on a web site is $1 per month, there is tremendous leverage there.
So this model insures that nearly everybody that reads and article has paid a small amount. This is more reliable income than Internet Ads even with 99% of the readers not clicking. And the article lives forever, and as we see on this web site some articles get cycled through popularity again and again every couple of years. People who have blog sites and track metrics see this effect when someone puts them on Reddit (for example).
A static article page can service a lot of page views with very little hardware. Nginx on a current server can serve the same article up at 50,000 page views per second if there is enough network bandwidth and the article is on an SSD. Hosting costs go up when you add a bunch of dynamic content but much of that can be hosted on CDNs and distributed to the edge. Done with any mount of care and planning and it costs little to host material on the web.
The problem is most publishers still don't necessarily believe this model or think it'll work, or think it's too risky. Blendle was able to do it because they started their own platform and essentially required little work from the publishers themselves to integrate (Blendle devs did most of the work to import the content, publishers just had to agree), and the Blendle solution doesn't "rock the boat" for these publishers, i.e. doesn't change existing users on their web site's behaviors.
Citation needed. This comes up quite often, and people like to assume they know what users want all the time. But is there actual, scientific evidence that, given the same content, a plain HTML+CSS web page that's not interactive but well put together is less compelling to users than a JS-heavy, interactive, overengineered, ad-ridden, tracker-infested and bloated one? Moreover, where do we get the backing evidence for the currently-popular aesthetic choices other than the subjective taste of designers themselves?
They understand how much more expensive an image and JS heavy site is to develop and host, so they must have good reason to go through the trouble?
Oh come on, NO I do not want that! One of the biggest problems with ads, news sites and other stuff is that almost any of these “experiences”, especially with video, are a drain on data plans and implemented terribly. Give me an article. If that article has some simple images and plain text as ads, that would be fine. The issue is that instead, sites take way too many liberties and turn it into a pop-up, slide-out, scripted mess that destroys the whole “experience” of reading an article.
And somebody should tell web sites that it used to cost 25 cents for an ENTIRE daily newspaper (that still contained ads), which can’t be more than a few bucks a month. If your subscription is ANY more than a couple of bucks, it will fail.
While something like Netflix/Spotify would be nice from a user/consumer perspective, there is both the difficulty of gathering everyone under one platform and the risks of having a single (or a few) number of brokers of news across the board.
1. Whitelist the site
2. "Nah, journalists should go hungry" - this dismisses the popup and lets you read the article with your blocker intact
3. 5c - read the article ad-free
4. 10c - 1 hour of no-ads
5. 30c - 1 day of no-ads
I've converted to US cents, but even in local currency think these prices are extremely reasonable, and I'd love to see more sites offer similar rates
(Everytime I talk about cryptocurrencies on HN, I get downvoted without any proper response. So bring it on! ;))
There still doesn't seem to be a "Twitter of Micropayments" yet.
Gratipay shut down, (RIP) https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981?gi=54bc4ed25327
Patreon takes a percentage, which, to me, seems unjustifiable.
But then you point out that there is no viable micropayments platform. Doesn't seem like there's much to mention beyond "yup, still doesn't exist."
It was kindof upsetting to read this after having switched the article into Firefox's reader mode, because the page was completely unusable.
If you want to talk about consumers' wallets not existing in a vacuum: if your 3.5 KB article is sending me 10 megs of crap, then your mobile users' carriers are charging them more than the advertizers are paying you.
There are some real challenges in figuring out how to fund journalism, but if bandwidth is one of them you're doing something very wrong.
Over 6MB of those 10MB is just one bloated photo [1]. It can be compressed down to 1-2MB. Moreover, if it was a proper responsive image, it would not be larger than 100-200 KB for most readers because a good JPEG compressor can pull 2 bits per pixel [2].
Ironically, image optimization apps don't get that much coverage.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/vikbajaj20...
> We didn’t need paywalls on the early web because we focused on plain text from other users. Plain text is easier to produce, lowering the friction for people to contribute, and it’s also cheaper to store and transmit, lowering the cost of bandwidth.
I still want plain text, and I think there must be others like me — we just want to read what they have to say, which is more immersive than the ten megabytes of dreck they sent me could possibly be.
As an immigrant, it's not possible for me to get a credit card, only a debit card. When I was under 18, it was also very difficult to do online shopping (I just made Christmas & birthday lists and asked my parents to eBay things for me then).
Every time I change country, which has happened 13 times and counting, I lose access to whatever services I had enjoyed. Subscriptions have really messed me up. For example, my bank accounts at UBS and the Swiss Post Office started charging me monthly fees after age 21. I didn't know, until my parents got nasty letters to their address telling me I was overdrawn. I hadn't used the accounts for 3 years, and when I left, they were free, so I didn't think to close the accounts. I had to pay to bring the account above zero just so I could close it. Not to mention phone subscriptions, Internet bills, rent, etc.
The lack of a stable home means I can't subscribe to Spotify. This pushes me towards the few pre-paid models that are left. I have MP3s that work offline with no need for cellular data. When I finally do get a chance to pay (e.g. a band I like is playing a show on the other side of the country), I make a huge effort to go there, buy their CDs, t-shirts, and everything else so I can support them - because that might be the only chance I get to pay them. Having been to over 300 concerts, I actually think I'm a bigger fan than most passive consumers, even though I'm excluded from the business model that record companies like. I feel like artists make more money from touring than ads/subscriptions, but I have no data to support that feeling. If there were a way to support journalists/programmers like touring bands, I think that could provide an alternative source of revenue.
May I suggest setting up a project board when you move with stuff like 'update address for <SERVICE X>' & clone all the issues when you move? Helps to avoid accounts getting closed for missed payments at least.
I get it, monthly subscription is a constant flow of money which makes things more predictable (and more profitable), but these things add up for the user.
Here are some apps on my phone that changed to a subscription model
- Timepage: Really nice calendar from Moleskine
- Day One: A journaling app
- Ulysses: Mentioned in the article
- Spendee: Budgeting app
Some other subscription apps:
- Moleskine actions: A todo list from Moleskine
- Carrot weather: Really cool weather app that already costs a steep $5 (for a weather app), but still has a in-app subscription for extra stuff (arguably not needed but still)
- CamScanner: Usable on free tier, but watermarks scanned PDFs. Why does this need a monthly subscription? Bought ScanBot for $5 instead.
- Bear: Note taking app
There is absolutely no reason why a calendar or a journaling app should have a monthly subscription.
I am glad that I went in early on apps like Day One and Timepage and got a lifetime subscription out of it, but if it wasn't for this, these apps would have been off my phone already.
It's odd that I am starting to get happy when a new major version of an app (like OmniFocus) gets announced and it's just a one time price instead of a subscription.
I can't imagine how such a system would be implemented though. And I'm sure there would be new unintended consequences with such an incentive structure. But something like that would be nice!
And unfortunately, it has the huge problem that a lot of technologies that could track what you do could be misused. An anonymizing scheme similar to Apple Pay might work.
Someone already mentioned software subscriptions and Adobe Photoshop, in the context of professionals vs hobbyists. If Photoshop is too expensive, then someone will create an alternative that is cheaper. That's basically what happened with shareware in the 80s and 90s. When proper price signals are in place, the market will adjust and new opportunities will be created for entry-level players that want to address gaps in the product offerings.
Finally, in terms of accessibility: remember that there are insitutions called libraries that are the great equalizers when it comes to accessing paid content. For many years now one can go in and read any magazine or newspaper that one could want, without paying a dime. If you find yourself complaining about content subscriptions, you might be better served by making sure that your local library is fully-funded.
The golden age of journalism, pre-web, was based on price signals being divorced from content because of classifieds propping up everything else.
We have been given the web that we want. It has been found wanting, because we ourselves are wanting.
Newspapers were absolutely using classifieds to blow up their revenue, but advertising still played a big part and I doubt if classifieds were a significant source of revenue for most magazines (a quick look didn't turn up much in terms of figures).
Web publishing developed the way that it did because publishers weren't particularly good at foreseeing what the end-game was going to look like, combined with a good bit of hubris about what actual effects the web would have on print publishing. The resultant excessive ad tracking occurred because publishers were trying to, ahem, "polish a turd".
Yet, most people don't bat an eyelash when paying $100-200/month JUST for cell phone service, then $100/month for cable, etc. How about car payments and insurance?
If you use these services daily, then a subscription model makes sense. They're providing value to you every day.
Problem is I don't use most of these services daily. Had Bloomberg decided $10-$15/month was the right range, I'd pay it happily. You can't charge $35/month for something that was previously free with zero value add and expect people to pay it.
Rarely does anyone think something should be free.
What people are actually thinking is: this thing is free and I'll use it while it is, but if there's a paywall, I'm done.
This is very different than "should be free" because we are really saying it's value to me is $0.
And, everyone is batting an eye at the rising prices of cable, cell phone service, insurance, etc. In fact, it's so blinding we can't even open our eyes to look at anymore.
If I subscribe to a print mag, once it's delivered I have access to that content until I decide to throw it out. If I bought Photoshop, I get to use that version (sans major OS up grades of my hardware) as long as I want.
Membership is binary, or has levels.
Not really. Nowadays, it's truly a strike of luck if a page looks half-readable- hell, perhaps even readable at all if I haven't turned on JavaScript and let it load resources from three dozen different locations. And "immersive experiences"? I'm sure people will have plenty of chances to appreciate them when most sites bring their cellphones or laptops down to their knees, even if they are at most a couple years old.
Ravenous subscription fees to replace formerly ad-supported content is not really much of a solution, it's just shifting the problem somewhere else. Sure, it might work for some services in which you effectively have a captive customer base (Thanks to vendor lock-in or a monopoly in your particular niche) or if said fees are kept low enough, but it's bound to end up as saturated as ad-supported content ended up being. Expect a raise in reports of freeloaders, account-sharers and see if the administrative/consumer support overhead is well worth it in the end.
We didn't win but it definitely piqued the interest of the crowd and the judges (Sam, Michael, and Adora). We're not pursuing it but hopefully others do.
Imagine if back in the day Rails Casts was $3 an episode instead of $20 per month for unlimited monthly access.
Suddenly if you wanted to learn Rails, you'd end up watching many dozens or hundreds of 5-10 minute videos for $3 a pop. You would constantly feel like you're being nickel and dimed. It's hard enough to get someone to buy from you once, but expecting someone to make dozens or hundreds of small transactions would be madness.
It creates a really high pressure scammy feel to it IMO.
Don't you feel the same way?
I think the greatest loss of the modern web has been this explicit move away from literacy. It's like the dark days of television are back again.
And this is exactly why Rails Casts was great. You would Google "how do I sort table columns in Rails" and find the episode, watch it in about 10 minutes and implement it in your code base. Rails Casts has been dead for years and it still ranks in the top 3 today on Google for that phrase btw.
I don't want to flip through 1,000 pages in a book to find 1 specific feature I am struggling with right now. I may never find it.
Says who ?
In other news: stuff costs money.
Think magazines like Vogue, with 800 pages of ads that people are looking at for the season's trends. Or other shopping magazines. Also, local newspapers provide useful local business advertising.
A good media property knows that ads are as useful as other content.
When you visit a web page, you can pay for the content by clicking Yes in a dialog box. When you don't have money in you wallet, you can fill it up using your credit card, or some bank solution. The price is shown in your currency of choice, but all the transactions happens on the blockchain.
People who make web pages can paste in some javascript to charge for content. No third party organization needs to get involved and the seller can't get charge backs. The transaction fee will be low so that you can charge pennies for a news article. This will work without you giving away you credit card number, name, address, e-mail etc. to the seller.
With microtransactions you only pay for what you want to consume and you don't need 10+ different subscriptions. That is the benefit.
If you only want to spend 2 dollar a month, that's fine.
I see no reason the US dollar is unsuitable for microtransactions.
The user doesn't need to know what a cryptocurrency is, the dialog will be displayed in dollar, or whatever currency you happen to use in your country.
Today's system is more complicated. You have to create an account, confirm e-mail, remember your password, enter credit card number, address, expiration date etc.
do they really want these immersive experiences? Do consumers even have a choice?
Starting something like this would have a huge chicken and egg problem though because no content creators would join a platform without a large existing user base. And I think Youtube and others would have trouble trying out a new business model because they might lose the confidence of their ad customers.
1c a minute seems like exactly what I'd be willing to pay, as well. Just for an example, a relatively small livestream I watched last week would have made $1200; there's no way they're making that much on ads. If that's the case, channels would market it as an upgrade too - "join our supporter's club, and get a badge".
Subscription revenue is great business. And the optimization of price to maximize profits is a set of fun math problems.
It sounds to me like the author doesn’t love how much he spends on things but isn’t willing to do without. Also known as optimal pricing...
There are only so many ways to make money: ads, once off charges, term payments, and recurring charges. A consumer license to use vs physical ownership is incredibly interesting. Buying a Mario Brothers cartridge for the original Nintendo vs games delivered online. You could see a compelling case for the Nintendo Switch to offer a subscription service giving access to X games every month.
I don’t find either right or wrong. They just “are” so to speak.
My bit to add: Since somewhere they can't be responsible for doing without a given service (have everything), someone is at fault! The developers! Of course, those lazy bastards.
I understand the attraction to this, but it makes me think of a problem I haven't yet been able to define well, so I've been calling it the "Japan Tourist Problem" in my head while I chew on it.
Basically, it's pretty common knowledge for everyone thinking about being a tourist in Japan for a week or two that the JR pass exists and is an unbelievable value. Essentially, it's unlimited rides on the bullet train and Jr lines for a flat fee of ~200usd. Round trip is nearly the same price without the jr pass. It pays for itself.
Problem one, outside of the standard jr pass are about 5 or 6 "specialized" passes with very unique usage rules, like "only good for rides within Tokyo metropolitan area" or "only good for northeastern Japan rides" or "good for tourist bus only" I dunno it's impossible to keep track, but that's the idea.
And then when you actually get to Japan, you'll discover the full almighty power of the national Japanese tourism board. They got their fingers in everything. If you're ever about to spend money on something, there's probably some way you could save by exercising tourism board initiative 235.b:a, including a full on tax exemption. Little packages for bus + hotel + hot spring pass, with a vending machine voucher and an exclusive packet of stickers which have a QR code on the back you can redeem in the Line app. Endless. I'll try to find specific pamphlets and flyers when I get home but it's just so many packages, deals, all mandated from the tourism board itself (I'm not talking private hotel package type things here).
My point is that should this concept of the author's take off, we'll just be in some new decision-lock hell, where you'll never be getting"the best deal" because to do so would require solving the most insane graph reduction problem ever conceived.
This is exactly how I feel about "travel hacking". Not the earning points part, which is fairly straightforward, but the redemption part. If I want to go to Bogota on vacation for specific dates and I have hundreds of thousands of airline miles and rewards points spread across a half dozen programs, the number of options is ridiculous. I can book with cash, pay with reward points, or book via dozens of different airlines and partner airlines with various fare classes, stopover options, etc. Worse, if you're fortunate enough to have a lot of flexibility around when and where you travel ("I want to go to South America sometime this summer"), the complexity skyrockets even further. It's just frustrating because even when I do piece together a deal, I can't help but feel that I'm still paying double what I would if I looked at the options differently.
You cannot netflixify journalism. It's different to movies or music. Journalism is not art. The online subscription business model doesn't work for journalism, because alternatives are far more easily accessible than print media. News are not unique works, news articles share the same base - things that happened anywhere in the world. Why should I get multiple subscriptions then?
My dad subscribed to both "The Edmonton Journal" and "The Edmonton Sun". Why? Because each had it's own bias and perspective on current events. What you're describing is not only not new, it's literally the dominant business model for print journalism for the last 100 years. Will it translate to the internet? I guess we're about to find out.
I wish there was some way I could pay in a central place to support good journalism, across multiple sites, but there just isn't one.
For entertainment I use Patreon, which seems to be doing a good job with the Youtube channels I like, particularly the ones that seem to get demonitized. One place and I can choose where my money goes. Though they did freak everyone out a few months ago with a change to their policies, they rolled that back after the outrage.
I wonder if Steem will help with this. I haven't tried that Steem-powered decentralized Youtube competitor yet, but it sounds fascinating.
That said, I will still take this ala-carte world over Cable TV style bundling. But if some vendors of Internet content can work out some revenue sharing / cross-subscription mechanisms, I would be willing to give that a look if it mapped to my interests cleanly enough.
> We didn’t need paywalls on the early web because we focused on plain text from other users.
> Plain text is easier to produce
Actually is this even true? Take a newspaper like the Washington Post. Now I've seen All the President's Men, where two reporters spend days and weeks, driving and flying around the country, for just a few articles. I know Watergate was an usual amount of investigation, but I still would think the research and writing is the most expensive part of an article.
> Today’s consumers [...] want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts,
> graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format.
Of course a member of Hacker News is unusual, but I know my family members are the same way, always complaining about how complicated websites are. Maybe we're all just old fuddy duddies. But if it's the young who want all this fanciness, those are the same people who aren't going to pay more than 99 cents for a newspaper subscription.
I still think pretty websites should not be a huge expense. Hire a graphic designer to give you a framework, some stylesheets. Custom multimedia affairs for each article have always, always, always been annoying to me.
I've cut it down to one physical newspaper subscription, use the BBC or DW or other public news sources only once or twice a day, and that's pretty much it.
The most notable thing is that I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything, I was just reading the same stuff obsessively before anyway. It's a little hard these days to escape the event driven newscycle but it's not a bad idea.
It gets a little more complicated with bigger companies and software though. For example, how can adobe price Photoshop fairly for a hobby user that uses it once a month and a production designer who uses it 8 hours a day?
This may be why subscriptions are so expensive - because part of the cost of the subscription is customer support, and the less expensive it is the more customer support costs.
*alternate, complementary theory: the less it costs the more poor people have it where they have to do more financial juggling and get into weirder situations. Thoughts, HN?
As for cable, i pay 0$, because I don't need it, at all.
Cell phone bill is 23$/month for 2 people, using USmobile.com You get 100minutes and 100 MB of Data and 100 text messages per month. I don't need all those data hungry apps anyway.
Car insurance: metromile.com lets you pay roughly 2c - 3c per mile plus about 15$/mo base. That's much better than 100$ per month.
Who the heck wants all this? "all of our research shows people want high-definition images with their stories, instant loading of articles on the site, and interactivity. ", " Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format." Is this really what the majority of people want?
I'd gladly have a simple page with simple graphics with a nice readable layout. that last thing i want is some stupid video playing in the middle of the page, slowing things down.
There's also a breakeven point with metromile (Google Fi, etc) and a standard subscription. If I recall correctly, they are targeting people who don't drive very frequently, which isn't what I'd imagine publications would want to do.
the author just has trouble saying "no"
> a pretty crappy product btw
“There are two ways to make money in business: You can unbundle, or you can bundle.” — Jim Barksdale.
Many subscription-based products or services are working non stop to update their product or service. Whether it's to generate and curate content or update/fix/improve software.
Not like it's a totally new, shocking concept.
That being said, I wonder how much money they will make from subscriptions, and how much they will have to spend trying to protect their IP now. Youtube and other streaming sites have people streaming the cable version of channels from one subscription, and broadcasting it out to everyone. Even a reasonable security team of half a dozen people to police these policies would seem like a million dollar investment, and having a paywall makes it a cat and mouse game of security.
This is jarringly bad analysis that says more about TechCrunch's view of "content" than it does about anything else.
The cost of the "plain text" produced by the likes of true journalistic organizations like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, WaPo, et al comes from the salaries of the journalists and the resources needed to support them (travel, domestic bureaus, foreign bureaus, fees, etc.).
We didn't need paywalls on the early web because... well, maybe we did need them and we failed to build them or invest in alternatives: Look at what's happening to journalism.[0]
The author may have a point about there being an opportunity to streamline something, but if it doesn't result in money being directed to people creating the content that really matters (and honestly, people voting with their pocketbooks is the only rational way to choose just which content that is, unless you want someone else deciding for you), then it changes nothing.
Personally I'm happy to send subscription money to these organizations, at least, and grateful for the privilege to do so.
[0]: lmgtfy https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2...
Relying on subscriptions is not a valid model for every newspaper. "General purpose" newspapers co-evolved with advertising, which made them pursue large audiences. "News" themselves are advertisements, things to be disseminated, unless we 're talking about some specialized report that only experts can understand. The fundamental need of people to "get the news" is easily satisfied with anything, from facebook to reddit, and people are not going to be paying to have things advertised to them en masse. Subscriptions will eventually lead to the content being increasingly less popular and specialized, which means either the nature of the content will have to change or some of them will shut down. It works when 4-5 major newspapers do it, but when every newspaper becomes subscription-based, the model will break down for all of them.
Also i find it hard to believe that readers "want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format". If anything those pages are annoying as hell (bloomberg autoplaying the videos on its articles is a culrpit here). In fact this techcrunch article is enjoyable because it almost pure text and it didnt need any fancy fonts.
What is being sold? If it's news, is it sold by category? Is the news sold or is it the critical analysis that actually matters? Maybe news should be free, the analysis paid.
When is it sold? Is today's news sold or all the news since the beginning of time? Maybe today is paid but yesterday is free and then paid again?
Where is it sold? USA has a GDP, Hungary has another. Maybe Hungary should be cheaper, tier the country, tier the price.
Why is it sold? Is it to make money or to improve quality? Slapping a price on a product without making the proper changes hurts long term success.
Who is the seller and who is the buyer? Is the seller a B2B company, then buyers should be businesses. Are intended buyers, investors, then target them.
How are you selling? Subscription is tried and tested. Perhaps using micro-payments could also be a solution.
Without applying these questions, the future is segregating services between those who can afford to pay and those who can't but need/want it. It can lead to a virtuous cycle for the wealthy and a vicious cycle for the poor.
Now if they charge less, then that person (for instance, me!) can more easily pay for everything they love.
They just don't seem to understand that people have a certain amount of money, they cannot pay the prices for everything if they try to gouge too much money. Basically, they will get the more well off folks, but the issue is that there are only so many rich people - there are more ordinary people than there are wealthy people so subscriptions that cost a lot won't be much for the rich, but will be a lot of everyone else.
- For some products with high upfront costs, it makes them more accessible for learning, etc. ($10/mo for Photoshop vs. hundreds). Though, I've moved to one-time-fee Affinity suite of software now. However, for students and others with low-income that want/need to learn software like Photoshop, this opens up some options without having to go the piracy route
- At some point I think it gets expensive fast, where we're shelling out a lot per month for just a few services. This is good and bad. When there's a lot of useful things out there, it can feel like it's just adding up to too much. I think it may prohibit being able to use a wider variety of paid products (especially when you paid once for something that now wants a subscription). However, maybe this will help us use more discretion in the subscriptions we choose, instead of subscribing to crap or things we never use anyway. Not sure how much of "subscription fatigue" is a problem or just a unfound worry
- All this said, I'm still somewhat of a "I need to own X, not rent it" old-man-yells-at-cloud kind of person. I prefer to own music instead of using streaming services and so forth. It mostly comes down to personal and philosophical preference. I don't always like ceding control to the entity I am paying, when I could "own" the product instead. I tried streaming music for a while, but then here and there, artists/albums/labels would no longer be accessible due to a contract issue with Spotify/etc. I don't want to cede that level of control. When I own music I can download the MP3s, put them on a usb drive and listen in my car, etc. instead of hoping Spotify's DRM isn't going to screw my library.
- When it comes to online publishers, I just do not get enough value from them to subscribe, and I only view an occasional article, when linked from a site like HN. But because of security, privacy, and performance, I block ads. Not sure what the golden "fix" is for this industry, or at least what my part in it would be.
Maybe Bloomberg has a lot more resources to throw at this but for a smaller company that has a hacked together or otherwise inflexible subscription system is a risky proposition. Breaking it for some portion of users can result in a lot of lost revenue and potentially effect your customers if the app downgrades/restricts them while you fix it.
It's also often created early on, and moving to something like stripe which helps with a lot of this still incurs the risks above.
> I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments illustrate, that price is vastly out of proportion from the cost of providing the software (which I might add, is entirely hosted on iCloud infrastructure).
...does this person understand how software works? Yes, the marginal cost of providing software to a particular person is almost always very low, sometimes so low it basically rounds down to zero. But you're not just charging to pay for the costs of delivering the software, but for developing it, too. And, of course, some goes to profit, which is perfectly reasonable in a capitalist word.
With businesses who are mainly reselling a thing, looking at it as "cost of thing + X% profit" is a perfectly reasonable way to frame things. There's only so much value a retailer or middleman can add, and generally there are competitors that could offer the same item. But when it comes to software, each individual item costs basically nothing to provide, so that kind of analysis fails and you have to accept that the price is essentially arbitrary.
I currently have 7 different subscriptions ranging from $5 to $15 per month. They add up to $61/month. That's less than I used to pay for a standard cable package. And combined they provide me so much more of what I actually want, at an overall higher level of quality.
As a bonus, I spend less time viewing advertisements now than at any other time in 40 years.
I'm living in subscription heaven!
That time is now almost over - we have established monopolies.
Established monopolies use their power - that's why they fought so hard to become monopolies in the first place.
This article is saying 'gee, I liked it when Uber kept giving me really cheap rides, but now it doesn't anymore, such hell!'
The only reason you were getting cheaper rides was because it was a mafia deal, I help you now, for free, but when the time comes, you do something for me. That's how it works folks...
>I’m frustrated that the web’s promise of instant and free access to the world’s information appears to be dying.
Free access won't die as long as there are people who are willing to work for free. It's not that subscriptions and paywalls charge money for something that was made by someone for free.
>I’m frustrated that subscription usually means just putting formerly free content behind a paywall.
That content was never free. Someone paid for it, typically advertisers. We all know the downsides of cost-per-click based economy. It's time to grow up. Kids eventually realize that food doesn't appear in the fridge magically, but someone pays a price for it and brings it home. The author also should realize that there is always a price to pay.
> the web’s promise of instant and free access to the world’s information appears to be dying.
That wasn't ever a promise, or rather, it wasn't "the web's" promise to make. It might have been the ad-hoc default for a while, but it turns out that it's not sustainable or scalable, no matter how much we'd like it to be.
A noble idea, but one not founded in much reality. The fact is, generally when you price lower, you don't get much more uptake in sales in a model like this.
Why they took as granted that web ads must be behavior-targeted? It does not even work. Ads were much better targeted in 2005 with context-based targeting than now. Now I see ads about things that I'm not interested in at all and that I hate almost everywhere.
On Youtube, depending on your source, you get from 1-4$ per 1000 views. It's not the users problem that payment for micro transactions doesn't scale.
I have a number of Software and Cloud Subscriptions which are justified as cost of doing business but they're nowhere near the value offered from Content subscriptions.
Personally I'm against subscriptions for Games or News, IMO both are time sucks that are a detrimental the more you spend playing or reading them. I'll look at an Amazon FreeTime subscription when the kids come of age because the iOS Store is a mine field of dark UX patterns designed for kids addiction to suck IAP's from parents.
Its also a nightmare for those of us who have to keep a close eye on AWS spending. Someone spins up an x1-large you didn't notice? Too bad, now pay us.
Its a terrible model for consumers in general. My wallet should not be open by default.
I’m looking at you, Wired Magazine.
Really? I thought "consumers" just want another shot of dopamine fueled bullshit, prettily packaged of course but crap nonetheless.
The realization that so much "engineering and design talent" goes wasted for this bullshit reminds me of what I said of - when I was 8 years old, 8 years. and people call me a cynical but I softened up loads since then! - the engineers sweating it out to run the Italian national broadcasting infrastructure. All that effort just to run a program the whole Sunday afternoon where a blondie that became famous for showing her thighs would ask people calling in from all over Italy, how many peas there were in a big glass jar: https://youtu.be/tRZ5y9seiLA
Of course they were waiting for the nuclear holocaust any day at that time, some maybe even wishing for it, given the situation...
These paywalls are blocking information about current events and one can argue that a society has an interest in keeping its population up to date on local and world events. Now, if all the reliable media will appeal mostly to people with means, what exactly are we expecting to happen?
And credible news has always spent more on content creation than niche news. The cost of content creation has not fallen, while the cost of distribution has fallen dramatically.
So, it's completely natural that the price difference at the consumer side between high and low quality news would have changed dramatically.
The problem is that you hit a news story on the major aggregators (google news, at least, gives you a bunch of stories on the same topic from different newspapers) and you have to pay money to the more credible sources, while the completely wacky takes are often free.
Personally, I'd really like it if apple (or someone similar with a history of, you know, treating users as customers) would create a news service where I give apple twenty bucks a month, and it lets me read 100 news articles from the major papers, distributing some of that revenue to the papers in question. (they could even have tiers. or an easy way for me to 'buy this article' for two fifty or whatever. Heck, the NYT could setup an easy apple pay 'buy this article for two fifty' button without more apple help than is required to make apple pay work, and I'd probably use it at least once a week.)
As is, I periodically subscribe to the NYT on my kindle, but while the reading experience on the kindle is wonderful, the discovery experience is terrible. I usually read it for a while, then I cancel after realizing I haven't been using it (see the discovery complaint)
They aren't Apple but they do the pay per article thing.
In all honesty, I'd happily pay for Facebook, or Hacker News, if it included bundled access to major news sources. I'd also happily try out a micropayment service for articles behind a paywall.
Most articles I read are hacker news links or Facebook links. I think that's the best way to monetize.
People in Europe will soon get this wakeup call. Services that were only marginally profitable are already shutting down because of GDPR.
I'm confident that the EU government and its citizens have little idea of the consequences that will result from their privacy legislation.
It's OK to not have everything, you know?
I purposely do not add new aggregator sites when bored. In fact my fallback (Fark) is woefully out of date. If I feel the urge to read that I immediately pick a side project and open it up.
We have way too many consumers in this world. Not enough producers.
Tho I do troll Craigslist for machinery when bored as well but hitting the limits on the amount of tooling my garage can hold.
> All of these subscriptions are starting to add up.
Just thought I'd save everyone the time of reading this article. Not much substance.
>"Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format."