Won’t Subscribe

This is the second time in recent time that I've seen this issue talked about. I'm glad because it's been bothering me for a long time now.

A couple years ago I discussed it with some people from a newspaper I worked for, and the bottom line was that they don't see another way at the moment. I don't know for sure if they view any model other than a subscription as crazy because they don't understand it, or they think they'll make less money, but the basic idea at the moment seems to be to have a certain (not huge) number of loyal subscribers, people that basically open your page first thing in the morning.

Bray thinks they are wrong because he will never subscribe to everything, but I'm not so sure he is right either. Can a smaller newspaper really compete with the New York Times? If I can pick between a micropayment for a NYT article and a smaller regional paper, who will get my money? Subscriptions let the publishers keep their head above water, which is best they have for now.

The more I think about, the more I think the model of a newspaper in general is stuck in an era where you had to buy a physical good to read news. You buy a newspaper, you like it, you subscribe. It gets delivered to you to your house. This is no longer the case and I can read whatever I want from anywhere on the globe (and I do). Most likely we will need to lose what we have before we realize there is value in having a local newspaper. If there is.

There is easy solution for this: syndication/bundling.

1) You subscribe only NYT for $221.00/year

2) You subscribe NYT with digital syndication bundle for $521 and you get unlimited access to NYT and all other papers, including all local papers. The extra $300 is divided between papers according to the articles this subscriber reads from other sources.

We really need some intermediate solution for newspapers. And preferably it should have regional pricing, like videogames or music. I can't justify paying multiple instances of 200-300$/year, maybe one such sub at most. And even then I would like a clear online only way to subscribe/unsubscribe, and don't want to send a courier to Economist HQ with a papyrus scroll written in a blood of 13 young bulls killed under full moon on equinox declaring that I wish to unsubscribe.

Videogames solved this years ago and I don't get why newspapers are so slow. It is because of different generations? Game produces invented so many ways for monetization - e.g. papers could not only sell single articles but also bundle multiple articles on a single topic together and sell it discounted (e.g. I want to read about Armenia/Azerbaijan this week, maybe next week, but not whole year), they can bundle subs with some 3rd party content video/podcasts/games etc., pay as you want for bundle of articles or limited time sub but with tiered rewards for paying certain amounts, subscribers only discussion forum (real forum, not a godforsaken unmoderated board on the unusable engine). And so on, they don't even need to invent a lot, just copy existing practices.

If I am not wrong, this is what both Facebook and Apple trying to do. Both these platforms can sell individual articles but they choose not to do so due to high overhead in the payments infrastructure.

The problem in such a model is that the negotiating power of the publishers is much lower. And hence, they are always at the mercy of these aggregators. And I believe that will be the natural tendency of the aggregators, since they control the distribution.

Platforms like Scroll & Magzter are still in early times while Facebook and Apple are way ahead. All of them will invest in algorithms to surface personalised recommendations for users. They can easily tweak the algorithms to lean the way they wish to & the motivations will not always be clear since customers don't have visibility into their recommendation algorithms. And this will have a great impact on the Publisher since their revenue depends greatly on these recommendations favouring their content.

I had a subscription to one of the papers listed in the article. I could sign up online, but there was no way to unsubscribe. I explored all corners of their website, including links that promised unsubscription options but never led to any. They did offer me to sign up for another subscription if I wanted to give one as a gift.

They did provide an email address. I sent an email and was told to call a specific number in another country. I said I could not do that and they were surely able to let me unsubscribe via email. After that I only got automated replys.

I gathered all of this history and made a sucessful chargeback request. A year later I heard that the paper now offers working unsubscription online.