Subscription Hell

I'm torn when it comes to subscriptions. Things that come to mind:

- For some products with high upfront costs, it makes them more accessible for learning, etc. ($10/mo for Photoshop vs. hundreds). Though, I've moved to one-time-fee Affinity suite of software now. However, for students and others with low-income that want/need to learn software like Photoshop, this opens up some options without having to go the piracy route

- At some point I think it gets expensive fast, where we're shelling out a lot per month for just a few services. This is good and bad. When there's a lot of useful things out there, it can feel like it's just adding up to too much. I think it may prohibit being able to use a wider variety of paid products (especially when you paid once for something that now wants a subscription). However, maybe this will help us use more discretion in the subscriptions we choose, instead of subscribing to crap or things we never use anyway. Not sure how much of "subscription fatigue" is a problem or just a unfound worry

- All this said, I'm still somewhat of a "I need to own X, not rent it" old-man-yells-at-cloud kind of person. I prefer to own music instead of using streaming services and so forth. It mostly comes down to personal and philosophical preference. I don't always like ceding control to the entity I am paying, when I could "own" the product instead. I tried streaming music for a while, but then here and there, artists/albums/labels would no longer be accessible due to a contract issue with Spotify/etc. I don't want to cede that level of control. When I own music I can download the MP3s, put them on a usb drive and listen in my car, etc. instead of hoping Spotify's DRM isn't going to screw my library.

- When it comes to online publishers, I just do not get enough value from them to subscribe, and I only view an occasional article, when linked from a site like HN. But because of security, privacy, and performance, I block ads. Not sure what the golden "fix" is for this industry, or at least what my part in it would be.

Sure, but you’re implying something super weird, namely that there’s a global maximum of engagement at the “text and CSS” extreme end of the spectrum, but as soon as you add any multimedia at all, even a single img tag, there’s a discontinuous drop and then the metrics improve the more and more you add even more multimedia.

After reading such many comments, feel the problem is not about Subscription this model; instead, it's about pricing.

Thanks for your reply. It was really interesting.

> This is exactly the kind of conspiracy-theory mindset I was talking about in my upthread comment.

This is however unneccessary IMO. Im referring to observed behaviour. I might be wrong but calling it a conspiracy-theory mindset doesn't help.

> What reason could they have for preferring ads, given the extra risks (esp legislative) and PR issues associated with it?

I don't know but if I had to guess Googles infrastructure and organization is heavily optimized for it.

> As I said, Google (I can't personally speak to Facebook) has put effort behind getting micropayments off the ground in a couple different formats, but there're substantial hurdles and substantial pushback on the part of publishers.

Ok, so now we are finally talking.

So the reason I couldn't "buy the ad spots" and sponsor writers of tech blogs (and here I'm referring to personal blogs, not news outlets dressed up as one) was because "publishers"?

Do we really think blog owners with google ads would complain if parts of their revenue came from users who hadn't had to suffer ads?

I can see one issue here and that is a lot of sites would probably try double dipping by trying to install a second ad network.

I'm honest but a bit annoyed here: I guess it is because Google used to be focused on creating good products for me but now it is about whatever publishers want.

Edit: also this doesn't explain Google's hesitation to introduce Youtube red, does it? Or are publishers also active in deciding what Google does on their own properties too?

You skipped over the meat of his post. If you don't need those extras, you can get photoshop AND lightroom for $9.99 a month. So you are getting it cheaper than you ever could.