Subscription Hell • Hacker News Board

Re: Subscription Hell

#261

Post by ChuckMcM » Sun, May 06, 2018, 9:13 PM UTC

lajhsdfkl wrote: post #221

ChuckMcM wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They win because they make more money. One of the challenges is that if you look at this as a single consumer / single producer model it is very hard to see the economics. That is why internet advertising is also hard to see sometimes. Nearly everyone I know tells me "How do they make any money on internet ads? I never click on them." And for lots of people that is true, but for another population it is not true. And…

>They win because they make more money. You have no data to back any of your hand wavy assertions. You are not smarter than the people that decide the business model for these publications. People are not willing to pay 10 or 20 cents to read articles that they clicked on a whim. We already know this from the app economy.

Actually I have quite a bit of experience around this. I've been working on understanding the economics of information since the mid 90's when I helped start an online web magazine about golf of all things. With the help of some grad students at Berkeley's Haas School of business we came up with the core mechanisms about how information can gain value and how it can lose that value. Also a number of ways to capture that value without destroying it in the process. The marketing person from that web property went on to Apple where they instituted the 99 cents per song music model that came to dominate music sales. The arguments against are familiar, "We sell an album not a song because those songs that aren't hits won't support their production costs.", "All songs will be tailored to sales and music quality will suffer.", "Labels (and by trickle down Artists) will make less because even buying 3 songs is less than they would get buying one $15 album." Instead the music industry flourished in the new system and more people got to experience more music more easily than ever before.

It isn't a question of smart or not smart, it is understanding that the economics of goods models we developed during the industrial revolution are not directly translatable to the economics of information.

I've been a fan of Blendle from the start because based on my research to date, I knew that if they could be operationally efficient enough, they would be able to facilitate per article transactions in an iTunes like model. And if they could do that it would have a larger impact than iTunes did on music. They continue to hum along and I continue to use them for that.

The "App" market is interesting because as I characterized information, Apps don't qualify, rather they contain algorithms. Because of that, their value is created through novelty rather than being intrinsic.

Re: Subscription Hell

#262

Post by siidooloo » Sun, May 06, 2018, 9:13 PM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #227

siidooloo wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, if the only app you need is photoshop you can own Affiniy Photo for $30. Or, you can own Affinity Design for $30. And this one is the real kicker, Blackmagic is giving away most of what you need for free, and if you need more you can get a permanent license for a few hundred bucks. How long do you think it will be before Adobe starts really bleeding.

Adobe has had cheaper competitors for ever - basically the only move it’s competitors have is to be cheaper. Adobe still exists.

I should also add, Quark was the king until it wasn’t. Adobe will be the king until they aren’t.

Re: Subscription Hell

#263

Post by kemonocode » Sun, May 06, 2018, 9:17 PM UTC

> Today’s consumers though have significantly higher standards than the original users of the web. Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format. That “quality” costs enormous sums in engineering and design talent, not to mention massively increasing bandwidth and storage costs.

Not really. Nowadays, it's truly a strike of luck if a page looks half-readable- hell, perhaps even readable at all if I haven't turned on JavaScript and let it load resources from three dozen different locations. And "immersive experiences"? I'm sure people will have plenty of chances to appreciate them when most sites bring their cellphones or laptops down to their knees, even if they are at most a couple years old.

Ravenous subscription fees to replace formerly ad-supported content is not really much of a solution, it's just shifting the problem somewhere else. Sure, it might work for some services in which you effectively have a captive customer base (Thanks to vendor lock-in or a monopoly in your particular niche) or if said fees are kept low enough, but it's bound to end up as saturated as ad-supported content ended up being. Expect a raise in reports of freeloaders, account-sharers and see if the administrative/consumer support overhead is well worth it in the end.

Re: Subscription Hell

#264

Post by dgudkov » Sun, May 06, 2018, 9:18 PM UTC

techsupporter wrote: post #33

At the time of this writing, all of the comments here are focused on content, but I want to touch on the author's bit about software: > It’s not just Bloomberg and media — it’s software too. I used to write everything in Ulysses, a syncing Markdown editor for OS X and iOS. I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments ill…

Many economical models (including working 9 to 5, btw) came from the times of physical labor. At that time the part of labor was relatively small in the cost structure, and the part of materials was big. And since materials is a one-time expense, it was natural to have one-time pricing.

In the knowledge-based industry such as software the cost of labor has the biggest share in cost structure. And unlike materials, the labor itself is a subscription. Social policies that make firing hard make it even more so. No wonder that revenue structure also tends to shift towards subscription-based models.

Re: Subscription Hell

#265

Post by habosa » Sun, May 06, 2018, 9:18 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

I am not sure why it is so fundamentally difficult for publications to understand what people want. The issue many people, myself included, have with subscriptions are that you pay $x / month whether or not you read that month's product. And whether or not you read every article or just one. So for me, as a consumer, my "price per article" goes from small to literally infinity (pay but read zero articles). Now the pa…

Have you tried Blendle? It's pay per story and has all of the major paywalled news sources.

It also allows you to get a refund after reading an article if you think it was clickbait.

Articles are $0.09-0.50 in my experience.

Re: Subscription Hell

#266

Post by rahoulb » Sun, May 06, 2018, 9:18 PM UTC

lajhsdfkl wrote: post #75

rahoulb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if the service is only marginally profitable without acting unethically it should shut down.

Showing ads is unethical now? >Maybe if the service is only marginally profitable without acting unethically it should shut down. Also I love this neo puritan thinking. I'm sure all the users of these services agree with your ideology and you forcing it down their throats is for their own good correct?

GDPR basically says “get consent for what you do with peoples data”. If you can’t do that I would say your business model is it very ethical.

Edit: or have “legitimate interest” - in either case it’s a very low bar for ethical standards so GDPR shouldn’t be an issue

Re: Subscription Hell

#267

Post by gwbas1c » Sun, May 06, 2018, 9:19 PM UTC

I thought cryptocurrency was supposed to magically enable micro-payments for web content? (joke)

In all honesty, I'd happily pay for Facebook, or Hacker News, if it included bundled access to major news sources. I'd also happily try out a micropayment service for articles behind a paywall.

Most articles I read are hacker news links or Facebook links. I think that's the best way to monetize.

Re: Subscription Hell

#268

Post by lifeformed » Sun, May 06, 2018, 9:20 PM UTC

dageshi wrote: post #150

lifeformed wrote: post #89

I wish I could just pay $x/mo for unlimited access to all media. It would get distributed to content creators proportionally based on my time using websites, music, videos, and games. No ads or subscriptions. I can't imagine how such a system would be implemented though. And I'm sure there would be new unintended consequences with such an incentive structure. But something like that would be nice!

Yeah I think the unintended consequence would be it'd be massively profitable to produce funny memes and little else.

Well that's already the case, isn't it? Getting someone to read a Pulitzer prize winning article online currently gets <1 page view's worth of ad revenue. Having someone look at endless pages of memes gets many page views.

Re: Subscription Hell

#269

Post by nteo9843nhtnt » Sun, May 06, 2018, 9:21 PM UTC

I think this is missing the bigger point. Ads are killing free but shitty web sites due to their (ads) numerous problems (malware, annoying, tracking, etc.). Subscriptions are going to kill mediocre web sites. We'll be left with better for-pay web sites and hopefully better ads on free web sites at the end of it all. That seems like a good thing.

Re: Subscription Hell

#270

Post by komali2 » Sun, May 06, 2018, 9:21 PM UTC

>One way we could fix that situation would be to allow subscriptions to combine together more cheaply. We are starting to see this too: Spotify, Hulu, and Scribd appear to be investigating a deal in which consumers can get a joint subscription from these services for a lower rate. Setapp is a set of more than one hundred OS X apps that come bundled for about $10 a month.

I understand the attraction to this, but it makes me think of a problem I haven't yet been able to define well, so I've been calling it the "Japan Tourist Problem" in my head while I chew on it.

Basically, it's pretty common knowledge for everyone thinking about being a tourist in Japan for a week or two that the JR pass exists and is an unbelievable value. Essentially, it's unlimited rides on the bullet train and Jr lines for a flat fee of ~200usd. Round trip is nearly the same price without the jr pass. It pays for itself.

Problem one, outside of the standard jr pass are about 5 or 6 "specialized" passes with very unique usage rules, like "only good for rides within Tokyo metropolitan area" or "only good for northeastern Japan rides" or "good for tourist bus only" I dunno it's impossible to keep track, but that's the idea.

And then when you actually get to Japan, you'll discover the full almighty power of the national Japanese tourism board. They got their fingers in everything. If you're ever about to spend money on something, there's probably some way you could save by exercising tourism board initiative 235.b:a, including a full on tax exemption. Little packages for bus + hotel + hot spring pass, with a vending machine voucher and an exclusive packet of stickers which have a QR code on the back you can redeem in the Line app. Endless. I'll try to find specific pamphlets and flyers when I get home but it's just so many packages, deals, all mandated from the tourism board itself (I'm not talking private hotel package type things here).

My point is that should this concept of the author's take off, we'll just be in some new decision-lock hell, where you'll never be getting"the best deal" because to do so would require solving the most insane graph reduction problem ever conceived.