61–70 of 610 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This site has employment ads for YC portfolio companies placed into the feed.
At least that's relevant and subdued. When I go to certain sites like Vox, I see repeated ads for women's clothing (wtf?, I'm a guy) that makeup around 40% of an article AND clickbait to other sites via Taboola.
A standard for micropayment for content needs to evolve. Our relationships to publishers have changed substantially. I would be willing to pay per read from sources like The Guardian, New York Times, The Economist, etc, but I am not frequent enough to want to subscribe. For the citizen who wants to get their information from different sources across the globe and political spectrum, it gets unreasonable to expect sub…
The fact that "micropayments" weren't even mentioned in this article leads me to dismiss it. There still doesn't seem to be a "Twitter of Micropayments" yet. Gratipay shut down, (RIP) https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981?gi=54bc4ed25327 Patreon takes a percentage, which, to me, seems unjustifiable.
But then you point out that there is no viable micropayments platform. Doesn't seem like there's much to mention beyond "yup, still doesn't exist."
You can't have it both ways. Either you pay for high quality content or you deal with intrusive ads.
I’m looking at you, Wired Magazine.
People need to understand that the alternative to ads is paying hundreds of dollars a month in subscription fees and then still not having access to all the services you would have had access to in an ad economy world. People in Europe will soon get this wakeup call. Services that were only marginally profitable are already shutting down because of GDPR. I'm confident that the EU government and its citizens have litt…
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…
This is my issue with most subscriptions too. The price has to be set based on the average use, which makes it really expensive for the infrequent user (and ultimately this means less conversions, yet nobody seems to care about this?!). I've had the same gripe with games for years. I stopped paying for Xbox live and World of Warcraft because they're the same - if I only played for a few hours in a month, I've paid ov…
Free shit forever?
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…
True. A subscription to Office 365 comes down to 99 Euros per years. Of course you’d pay maybe 150 every three years or so for a new version back in the days, but still that’s double. Also, I wonder whether this will lead to a slower development of the software. Before you’d have to create a leap forward to impress people to buy the new version, if the old version was still good enough.
Most subscription software is a terrible deal in comparison. I have tried to avoid subscription software as much as possible. But we have a family subscription for 1Password because $REASONS. We pay $60 per year for (in comparison to Office) a small software product, with small cloud storage, of which we only need a couple of megabytes for storing encrypted passwords.
Also, I wonder whether this will lead to a slower development of the software.
Most likely. Once you are locked into some proprietary data format, it is often more expensive to move to an alternative, and it is easier to subscribe. Once a substantial part of the user base has a subscription, there is no more need to entice users with a new version.
Subscription software does not benefit the user.
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…
edit: disregard my comment below, as others have reminded me, the yearly charge is for updates and will not stop you from using it completely if you decide not to renew it, you just don't get any more updates. So this isn't the best example > I have noticed this as well, that a not-small number of software programs have turned from "give us one money for this version" to "give us slightly smaller amount of one money…
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…
edit: disregard my comment below, as others have reminded me, the yearly charge is for updates and will not stop you from using it completely if you decide not to renew it, you just don't get any more updates. So this isn't the best example > I have noticed this as well, that a not-small number of software programs have turned from "give us one money for this version" to "give us slightly smaller amount of one money…
Your license comes with a year’s worth of updates. Once that year is up, you can keep using the last version of Sketch you downloaded, forever.
That sounds ok to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do they win if they end up making less money? What you are paying for is journalists doing research every month to produce those articles so you could access them on demand. If you want that on demand access you need to pay them for the work they do every month not the work they do one off.
I think the idea is instead of having 1 user pay you $30 a month, you have 10 users (or more) paying you $3 a month, you end up with a net win (even at equivalent of $30 a month of revenue because now you've had more eyeballs). The problem is most publishers still don't necessarily believe this model or think it'll work, or think it's too risky. Blendle was able to do it because they started their own platform and es…
Intuitively, I believe it's much easier to find one person to pay you $30 a month for quality journalism than to find 10 people to pay $3 a month.
Neither of us have data to back our assertions but my argument is that the people that care about and read quality journalism are well off people and the marginal cost of paying $10 or $30 a month is not significant for them.
>Blendle was able to do it because they started their own platform and essentially required little work from the publishers themselves to integrate
I've never heard of blendle until reading the comments in this topic but just as a comparison, the WSJ has 1,270,000 digital subscribers paying $45 a month. Blendle has 550,000 users.