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Subscription Hell

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Re: Subscription Hell

#51

Post by psherman42 »

michaeltoth wrote: post #23
dopeboy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me and three friends worked on a similar idea at the YC hackathon a couple weeks ago. You'd pay us $10/month and we'd buy a lot of subscriptions to different newspapers. You'd install our chrome extension and when you came across a paywall, we'd autofill credentials that are just valid for one day. We didn't win but it definitely piqued the interest of the crowd and the judges (Sam, Michael, and Adora). We're not pur…

This is a cool idea, but I imagine this isn't legal, right? Creating an actual business out of this would have to require buy-in from the content creators

I think it’s funny how everyone is surprised that Silicon Valley hackathon-goers don’t understand or care about copyright. Maybe they’re just “disrupting”!

Re: Subscription Hell

#52

Post by vageli »

overlordalex wrote: post #29
Legogris wrote: post #15

A standard for micropayment for content needs to evolve. Our relationships to publishers have changed substantially. I would be willing to pay per read from sources like The Guardian, New York Times, The Economist, etc, but I am not frequent enough to want to subscribe. For the citizen who wants to get their information from different sources across the globe and political spectrum, it gets unreasonable to expect sub…

We have a local news website that I think has a realistic model. When you view an article with an ad-blocker it shows you a dialog with a variety of options: 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 eve…

Does the service require you to maintain a wallet with them? As in, you deposit money and transactions are drawn from your deposit? Otherwise, I can't see how accepting such a low amount per transaction could be feasible.

Re: Subscription Hell

#53

Post by alexbeloi »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

I am not sure why it is so fundamentally difficult for publications to understand what people want. 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 pa…

For some things I prefer the subscription model because of the incentives it creates, every article I read or day that I go to a gym lowers the overall cost-per-visit. With a per-article or per-visit model, I would be disincentivized to read and go to the gym. It also frees me from repeatedly making the same decision every day, do I value $1 more the content of this article? Do I value $10 more than going to the gym right now?

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).

Re: Subscription Hell

#54

Post by lajhsdfkl »

People need to understand that the alternative to ads is paying hundreds of dollars a month in subscription fees and then still not having access to all the services you would have had access to in an ad economy world.

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.

Re: Subscription Hell

#55

Post by godot »

lajhsdfkl wrote: post #42
ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

I am not sure why it is so fundamentally difficult for publications to understand what people want. 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 pa…

How do they win if they end up making less money? What you are paying for is journalists doing research every month to produce those articles so you could access them on demand. If you want that on demand access you need to pay them for the work they do every month not the work they do one off.

I think the idea is instead of having 1 user pay you $30 a month, you have 10 users (or more) paying you $3 a month, you end up with a net win (even at equivalent of $30 a month of revenue because now you've had more eyeballs).

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.

Re: Subscription Hell

#57

Post by carapace »

Legogris wrote: post #15

A standard for micropayment for content needs to evolve. Our relationships to publishers have changed substantially. I would be willing to pay per read from sources like The Guardian, New York Times, The Economist, etc, but I am not frequent enough to want to subscribe. For the citizen who wants to get their information from different sources across the globe and political spectrum, it gets unreasonable to expect sub…

The fact that "micropayments" weren't even mentioned in this article leads me to dismiss it.

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.

Re: Subscription Hell

#58

Post by always_good »

techsupporter wrote: post #33

At the time of this writing, all of the comments here are focused on content, but I want to touch on the author's bit about software: > 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 ill…

One-time payments for software amount to a pyramid scheme where you benefit from the money of future users. That's not without its downsides either, where your userbase grows indefinitely yet doesn't pay for its own support-email rent.

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.

Re: Subscription Hell

#59

Post by scarface74 »

jjeaff wrote: post #25
wand3r wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair hn does not operate news as a business but as a cost center that feeds recruitment for talent for both investment and hiring.

Which is an interesting issue that I have thought about recently. There are tons of services like this. One analog of this phenomenon are loss leader products in retail. Loss leaders in grocery stores (sometimes produce or in the case of Costco, hotdogs and soda for $1.50). Loss leaders have been responsible for putting lots of small businesses out of business. When enormous companies offer products for free, that ot…

Loss leaders have been responsible for putting lots of small businesses out of business.

I can't for the life of me understand how the HN success story Dropbox has a long term future.

For the same $9.99 a month that you pay for Dropbox's 1TB Of storage, you can get....

- 2TB of storage from Apple for iCloud

- 1TB for each of 5 users on One Drive plus access to the entire MS Office Suite for 5 computers and 5 mobile devices

- 1 TB per user plus everything else you get from G Suite.

-Amazon Drive is 1TB for $60 a year.

Yes I know that Apple isn't aimed at businesses, but the rest are.

Re: Subscription Hell

#60

Post by StudyAnimal »

d2p wrote: post #27
ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

I am not sure why it is so fundamentally difficult for publications to understand what people want. 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 pa…

This is my issue with most subscriptions too. The price has to be set based on the average use, which makes it really expensive for the infrequent user (and ultimately this means less conversions, yet nobody seems to care about this?!). 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 ov…

Obviously (in these cases) there are market segments that favor all you can eat subscriptions and those that favor à la carte. It makes sense that for most things the heavy users get the sub and the light users get to pay for what they use. However I thought of a counter example. Spotify. I would normally be a light user of music. I had some CDs in the 90s but lost interest in the whole thing by the time I graduated Uni. However it’s still nice to listen to some music sometimes. However I couldn’t imagine being able to buy all the singles I listen to in a month for less than €9.

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)

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