High quality news is paid for by people who want to read high quality, sophisticated news. There is ample free news out there - I would call it buzz feed, instagram, local media websites, and on and on. These are more bite-sized and ad-driven. Most people don't want to read their news in novella format, but for those that do, they are more willing to pay the fees necessary to produce it for the limited audience that reads it.
The rich niche
21–30 of 60 posts
Re: The rich niche
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Office charity drives are already bad enough in that they socially pressure employees to give money. I would be furious if the company I worked for asked me to start recurring donations out of my paycheck. Keep employer-employee relationships to strictly business. I can donate to charity on my own time.
It was a little more than that. There was some employer matching of funds, up to a point. And having it come off your paycheck saves a step come tax time.
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Re: The rich niche
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Office charity drives are already bad enough in that they socially pressure employees to give money. I would be furious if the company I worked for asked me to start recurring donations out of my paycheck. Keep employer-employee relationships to strictly business. I can donate to charity on my own time.
All charity done by big companies smells shitty to me... you're a multimillion $$$ company, and you want me to donate 20$ to feed the poor?
I get it, but - anecdotally - I know someone whose son was dying of cancer and the McDonald’s foundation absolutely helped them a great deal.
Re: The rich niche
#24I was recently a rep for the office's annual charity drive. At the end of it our office (west coast) was compared to offices in other parts of the country. While we had lots of one-time donations, literally nobody signed up for "workplace giving", to have money regularly taken off their paychecks. It is about fear an uncertainty. When people are stretched thin they will still give money when they can. But when is key…
I think the explanation is even simpler: People don't like adding yet another monthly expense unless it's truly necessary.
Even for financially comfortable people, a one-off donation to a charity is easier to reason about than taking the same amount of money and dividing it into 24 bi-weekly payments. Then I'd have to remember where to get the end of year receipt for those payments when I do my taxes. I'd also burden myself with the decision of when to cancel the donations, which is something the charity probably makes as difficult as possible to increase their retention numbers. If I did decide to cancel, I'd have to invest potentially an hour or more to track down the information, maybe call someone, deal with their retention pitch over the phone, and then remember to check in a few weeks to confirm it actually ended.
It's all a lot of hassle that I really just don't want or need. Far easier to just donate once at donation time and then file the receipt in my tax folder. I can always decide to donate again next year.
I already have probably 20 or more monthly recurring payments from my mortgage to all of the insurance payments and internet, gas, water, electric, NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, all of the software services I use and so on. Running a business can easily add 10-30 more monthly bills. I really, really don't want to add anything else to that list if I can avoid it.
Re: The rich niche
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
The newspaper price was heavily subsidized by ad revenue. If the paper had to depend solely on the sales revenue, the price would have had been much higher than a quarter, and consequently, much fewer people would buy it regularly.
Ad-supported business models are more prevalent and profitable now then at any other time in history. Why do you think publishing was left out?
Same reason why horse drawn coaches were left out despite demand for transportation being higher than ever: newspaper ads lost to competition from other advertising venues, because they provided inferior product.
Re: The rich niche
#26I was recently a rep for the office's annual charity drive. At the end of it our office (west coast) was compared to offices in other parts of the country. While we had lots of one-time donations, literally nobody signed up for "workplace giving", to have money regularly taken off their paychecks. It is about fear an uncertainty. When people are stretched thin they will still give money when they can. But when is key…
This took a lot of my mental energy when I was a teacher. I didn't have any of my bills on autopay because I had to constantly manage when I would have enough money in my account to pay any given bill. Even now that I'm much more comfortable I only have about half of my bills set to autopay just in case, e.g., one bill comes due the day before my paycheck lands in my account.
Re: The rich niche
#27I was recently a rep for the office's annual charity drive. At the end of it our office (west coast) was compared to offices in other parts of the country. While we had lots of one-time donations, literally nobody signed up for "workplace giving", to have money regularly taken off their paychecks. It is about fear an uncertainty. When people are stretched thin they will still give money when they can. But when is key…
Office charity drives are already bad enough in that they socially pressure employees to give money. I would be furious if the company I worked for asked me to start recurring donations out of my paycheck. Keep employer-employee relationships to strictly business. I can donate to charity on my own time.
I worked at a college and during the hiring process, they tried to coerce you to sign up to automatic payroll deductions for donations to the college itself. I believe it was an opt-in by default, and you had to explicitly opt out by filling out a paper form. I was kind of confused by the absurdity.
Re: The rich niche
#28I was recently a rep for the office's annual charity drive. At the end of it our office (west coast) was compared to offices in other parts of the country. While we had lots of one-time donations, literally nobody signed up for "workplace giving", to have money regularly taken off their paychecks. It is about fear an uncertainty. When people are stretched thin they will still give money when they can. But when is key…
This took a lot of my mental energy when I was a teacher. I didn't have any of my bills on autopay because I had to constantly manage when I would have enough money in my account to pay any given bill. Even now that I'm much more comfortable I only have about half of my bills set to autopay just in case, e.g., one bill comes due the day before my paycheck lands in my account.
Seems like it would be a fantastic feature for payment processors to provide scheduling! (and negotiating with subscription providers to operationalize that)
I dunno how many Bay Area SWEs/PMs can even grok such a lived experience, for them to prioritize it as a feature request.
Re: The rich niche
#29I was recently a rep for the office's annual charity drive. At the end of it our office (west coast) was compared to offices in other parts of the country. While we had lots of one-time donations, literally nobody signed up for "workplace giving", to have money regularly taken off their paychecks. It is about fear an uncertainty. When people are stretched thin they will still give money when they can. But when is key…
Office charity drives are already bad enough in that they socially pressure employees to give money. I would be furious if the company I worked for asked me to start recurring donations out of my paycheck. Keep employer-employee relationships to strictly business. I can donate to charity on my own time.
Many years ago I worked for a company where the CEO or maybe his wife were associated with the local United Way branch. We were asked to contribute our "fair share" to the United Way campaign. We got a day off or something like that but it was also made very clear that this was not actually optional.
And, yeah, to the other point, while I have subscriptions to various things it's not something I really want to do when I have a choice given that such things tend to be out of sight/out of mind.
Re: The rich niche
#30> Credible information shouldn’t be a luxury good. Shockingly, a good substack article.
A better quote: > Jonah Peretti was right in 2017 when he warned that paywalls are “bad for democracy.” Credible information shouldn’t be a luxury good. Paywall does not automatically mean luxury? I think the actual problem is the average internet user expects everything to be free, independent from his/her income. Anecdotal: I have friends with iphones of whom I wonder how they can spend so much on a mobile. It is a…
A paywall does always mean luxury. It's spending money on things you don't need. If your friends have recent model iphones, that is also luxury. Apple is a luxury brand.