Won’t Subscribe
tbray.org
Won’t Subscribe
1–10 of 362 posts
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#2> “Hold on,” he says, “I’ve got an excellent publication, full of great journalism and delicious writing. I should be able to compete with those other things and maybe displace them!”
That seems pretty easy: If you're trying to sell a subscription to someone, give them a free one-month trial subscription with no strings attached (no credit card required). If they like it, they might switch to your publication.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#3It's so difficult to make money when everyone wants things to be free.
I pay for Medium and that's all right now. I would much like to see the micropayment future - it has to be part of the browser.
I would like to pay in lieu of time. If I could see page statistics of how much time it took for a page to be put together and costs of hosting - I could make a contribution based on this information. I've given random £100 to artists I love for the same reason.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#4I think paywalls for journalism are retrograde. The exact people who can benefit from good journalism (the uninformed) are the exact people who won't subscribe. The people who are already in the demographic for the publication and informed are the ones subscribing. This is the inverse of what you'd think you'd want as a journalist.
This is part of the overall news and social media echo-chamber, confirmation-bias inducing content in which the circle of group-think gets tighter and communities begin to think alike.
I understand that advertising models are collapsing and journalism is expensive. I know that subscription models and paywalls might seem to make sense since those who consume content benefit from it.
But I fear that all this will lead to the uninformed staying uninformed, those in group-think still group-thinking, and those that want to hear what they already want to hear continuing to hear those things as the subscriber model caters to the paying community who will vote with their feet if they don't keep hearing what they want to hear.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#5> “Hold on,” he says, “I’ve got an excellent publication, full of great journalism and delicious writing. I should be able to compete with those other things and maybe displace them!” That seems pretty easy: If you're trying to sell a subscription to someone, give them a free one-month trial subscription with no strings attached (no credit card required). If they like it, they might switch to your publication.
Without them requiring something like a credit card, it would be fairly easy for somewhat determined "attackers" to get an arbitrary number of free trials. At some point the Guardian (IIRC; may have been some other paper I read from time to time) had some sort of hilarious "we'll use cookies to enforce N free article views per month" policy. Of course this doesn't work well against people who know that they can delete cookies.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#6> “Hold on,” he says, “I’ve got an excellent publication, full of great journalism and delicious writing. I should be able to compete with those other things and maybe displace them!” That seems pretty easy: If you're trying to sell a subscription to someone, give them a free one-month trial subscription with no strings attached (no credit card required). If they like it, they might switch to your publication.
Without them requiring something like a credit card, it would be fairly easy for somewhat determined "attackers" to get an arbitrary number of free trials. At some point the Guardian (IIRC; may have been some other paper I read from time to time) had some sort of hilarious "we'll use cookies to enforce N free article views per month" policy. Of course this doesn't work well against people who know that they can delet…
There are still sites doing this. Bloomberg is one I can think of, since I've deleted my cookies (and other local storage) for that site more than once, with success.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#7How would you pay for individual articles?
Up-front? (If not, that's called donation.) If so, then what happens if you happen not to enjoy the content?
Will you (users) feel like playing lottery every time you purchase an article? Feel disappointed for the purchase you just made? Or just quit paying on a certain site, for a certain author etc. after reading too many 'bad' (subjectively) articles?
From this standpoint, I understand that subscriptions are for sites - they have editors, policies and a reputation to maintain and you buy into that with a single purchase.
Or rather not, as the article argues... and I argue that per-article micropayments may not be the way out.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#8It's so difficult to make money when everyone wants things to be free. I pay for Medium and that's all right now. I would much like to see the micropayment future - it has to be part of the browser. I would like to pay in lieu of time. If I could see page statistics of how much time it took for a page to be put together and costs of hosting - I could make a contribution based on this information. I've given random £1…
I agree about the micropayments future.
The thing holding it back is some kind of central authority that can process micropayments with significantly less friction and overheads.
Even better if people can accrue credit in some way that isn’t just paying fiat currency in, because we live as a privileged class to have disposable income that is essentially in escrow.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#9The subscription math is flunky for another reason - many subscriptions are shared within the same household, and doing so seems tacitly permitted by most subscription providers. But under a micropayments model, it is much more likely for multiple members of the same household to purchase multiple copies of the article. So the question often enough isn't about comparing a dollar for an article versus hundreds of dollars for a subscription, but about multiple dollars per article versus the cost of a subscription.
Re: Won’t Subscribe
#10> “But wait,” says Mr Manager, “you already subscribe to five publications, so you’ve proved you have a propensity to subscribe! You’re exactly my target market!” Wrong. It’s exactly because I’ve done some subscribing that I’m just not gonna do any more.
Exactly. Same thing is happening with cable unbundling. Few people want to subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, ESPN+, Disney+, Peacock, and YouTube TV/Sling/Fubo/Philo/whoever to get all the content they're interested in.