Won’t Subscribe

I unfortunately don't know any details other than it seems to be working. The content they have is highly in depth, and the comments section is excellent.

My experience was that I started reading the articles as a non subscriber. Because I enjoyed it I began visiting the site more and more. After some time it started to annoy me that I had to wait to read the latest content, and that's when I started subscribing. These days I read it less frequently, but I still subscribe to support the site.

Can anyone comment on whether Apple News: https://www.apple.com/apple-news/

Is a good option as a single-subscription aggregator of multiple magazines and newspapers?

From working in media, another problem with micropayments is deciding on that dollar cost.

Without coming up with some administration of value to each article (which I'm not saying isn't worthwhile, it's just not something that's typically done) -- and perhaps even then -- it's very challenging to come up with a value that readers might understand.

If everything is $1, but long investigations or in-depth reporting costs more than that, how do you stop losing potential subscribers (who would contribute more ARR) to these payments. And equally on the (admittedly large) percentage of stories that might not have such value, how do you price them?

This is why subscriptions tend to work. Slowly you can weed out material that isn't working for either acquisition or retention. But you are always going to have articles that are good retainers but poor acquirers. To a micropayment reader the value of that article is low, but to subscriptions it may be higher. You might never do that article if you marked everything by its CAC value, but if you didn't you may lose $5000 ARR.

How on earth do you price it fairly?

It's complicated.

I'd be in more favour of more expensive 24hr passes that show the value of the subscription to regular readers. Say $3 for 24hrs, and $30 for a month. I think in terms of small payments that's as close are you're going to get.

I've subscribed to The Economist for 25 years. Has been interesting to see it's transformations. Not only the transition to digital but also the topics they choose to cover - or not. I currently consume on my iPhone. Mostly I listen to it but do occasionally read. Before that I used Android. Certainly some usability issues that are annoying but most apps are worse.

> As the other poster wrote, how else would you expand your readership?

By creating a valuable product, finding potential costumers, and offering the product for sale. Why would it be different than any other business?

It would be ridiculous to expect every SaaS business to offer their services for "a few bucks", and yet, for some reason, people think it is egregious that publishers don't do this. Bizarre. Though, I do have the say the newspaper industry caused this; for years, when the internet was still new, most newspapers gave away their best content. That was a huge mistake; it lead people to significantly devalue news.