Subscription Hell

Spending for advertising has not changed overall, however it has shifted from newspapers to "online" which includes newspapers and google, but also "everyone else" ( https://www.statista.com/chart/372/quarterly-growth-of-us-on...). The newspapers maybe should pursue the ad revenue from TV, or find a way to cut out google.

Relying on subscriptions is not a valid model for every newspaper. "General purpose" newspapers co-evolved with advertising, which made them pursue large audiences. "News" themselves are advertisements, things to be disseminated, unless we 're talking about some specialized report that only experts can understand. The fundamental need of people to "get the news" is easily satisfied with anything, from facebook to reddit, and people are not going to be paying to have things advertised to them en masse. Subscriptions will eventually lead to the content being increasingly less popular and specialized, which means either the nature of the content will have to change or some of them will shut down. It works when 4-5 major newspapers do it, but when every newspaper becomes subscription-based, the model will break down for all of them.

Also i find it hard to believe that readers "want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format". If anything those pages are annoying as hell (bloomberg autoplaying the videos on its articles is a culrpit here). In fact this techcrunch article is enjoyable because it almost pure text and it didnt need any fancy fonts.

By the way, you can still get Matt Levine's daily newsletter for free by subscribing to the email version. That's all I want from Bloomberg really!

Maybe I'm wrong or in the minority, but I think if publishers want to make people pay for content then they should. Saying that people dont want to pay for something they used to get for free may be correct, but that doesn't make it right. Things that have value can be given away for free. Or they can be charged for. And that decision should be made by the producer, not the consumer.

> that price is vastly out of proportion from the cost of providing the software

This is not how prices are set. They are set on the willingness and ability to pay. Water costs nothing to produce but if I have it all you will pay me everything you have.

For example if their main competitor went bust and not a single atom changed inside this company, they could charge you more.

Do they have a monopoly or is it hard to migrate? These are the conversations the people who set the price are having. They are not talking about people being upset if they still pay.

Honestly, the subscription model is more honest than a one time purchase pyramid scheme. Software changes over time. It has to, new operating systems, libraries and hardware dictate forward maintenance costs, nevermind bugs and security flaws.