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Comment by KoftaBob | Hacker News Reader

What is it about news media, newsletters, etc that makes them so bad at pricing their subscriptions? When you consider the fact that the average reader will want to read a variety of publications/newsletters about topics, charging $7/month for JUST your news site is, I'm sorry to say, delusional.

This isn't to single out Aftermath specifically, I see this kind of thing all over the place. Lots of substack newsletters are particularly detached from reality when it comes to what they charge.

Yes, journalists need to be adequately paid of course, but I think this can be done much more effectively by charging a more reasonable monthly rate that will broaden the customer pool.

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It makes more sense when you consider that many of the journalists who have gone into newsletters are there because they felt that the need to appeal to "average readers" and build a broad customer pool (edit: often at the insistence of their evil bosses) was restricting their genius and that they'd have a better time narrow-casting to a smaller (but more consistently monetizable) fanbase.

That price point seems about right to me. I just signed up to The Economist Podcasts+ for a similar price because I listen to virtually every piece of content they produce. Sure it's just one publication but it's an excellent one in my opinion. If these folks think they can bring a similar level of value, go for it. I personally wouldn't pay a single solitary cent for people to write about video games but that's just my personal preference.

I think the logic is that getting anyone to get out their credit card and pay anything at all for content is a tough barrier, and the difficulty of crossing it doesn’t scale linearly with the asking price. That and micropayments remain an unsolved problem.

Now that Apple Pay and Google Pay are a thing, it’s become incredibly easy for someone to just tap a button, their face unlock does its thing, and payment goes through.

Unless you mean a psychological barrier?

Google and Apple instantly eat a third of your revenue.

That's for in app purchases. If you use Apple pay on your website, they don't charge any fee actually, only the payment processor does. Scroll to the bottom to see more detail: https://www.apple.com/apple-pay/

People used to pay a few bucks every day to read the news. People will pay $7 a day on coffee. But people are used to free, ad-supported news so they'll never pay what's required for real journalism.

You fundamentally misunderstand why people pay for those things.

They’re not paying to get news/articles about _a_ topic, they’re paying to get news/articles _from specific people_.

> but I think this can be done much more effectively by charging a more reasonable monthly rate that will broaden the customer pool.

Can it?

For many, just paying anything at all is the initial hurdle.

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