[HN Gopher] The end of the subscription era is coming
___________________________________________________________________
The end of the subscription era is coming
Author : CharlesW
Score : 105 points
Date : 2023-09-09 17:36 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nickfthilton.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nickfthilton.medium.com)
| notatoad wrote:
| huh, really... https://ibb.co/KNX20Xk
| rcarr wrote:
| His graph should be labelled with "exerted effort" involved
| rather than "technical distribution". It's about the same amount
| of difficulty to distribute podcasts/books/music on the internet,
| but podcasts require the least amount of effort (connect
| microphones to pc, hit record in any basic audio recording app)
| whereas books require a sustained amount of effort across time as
| does music. Publishing a book also requires you to learn
| specialist software for publishing the book (although Vellum
| seems to have simplified this) and music requires you to master a
| DAW. Obviously narrative films and games require not only more
| effort but 99.99% of the time, a team to make.
| louky wrote:
| My Guitar->microphone->audio recording app model of music
| production doesn't even require knowing what a "DAW" is, yet
| works fine for me and others.
| shwaj wrote:
| Are you doing it professionally or as a hobby? I'd wager that
| >99% of artists who make a living from music use a DAW (or
| pay someone else to)
| trollied wrote:
| > The New York Times costs $7 for a hard copy
|
| This made me WTF. Crikey.
| ghaff wrote:
| I didn't know but I can't say I'm really shocked. It was at
| least a couple bucks years ago.
|
| And newsstand prices for most periodicals have long been
| multiples of the subscription price. I'm always a bit surprised
| there's a big enough market for magazines at grocery stores and
| airports but impulse purchases I guess.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Cheaper to print it yourself
| _delirium wrote:
| I think he may have been confused by looking at the NYT online
| store [1]. They will sell you back issues for $7 for a weekday
| paper, or $12 for a Sunday paper. But the back issue price is
| marked up from the cover price. The newsstand price if you're
| buying today's newspaper in person somewhere is currently $4
| for Mon-Sat and $6 on Sunday.
|
| [1] https://store.nytimes.com/products/print-
| newspapers?variant=...
| katzgrau wrote:
| I recently bought a local news org.
|
| One of the things I hate about the media industry is the constant
| "we're dying" or "this is going to die."
|
| Go to a local news conference that's supposedly about the future
| and it feels a lot like a funeral.
|
| Some other way of doing things will come along. Help figure it
| out or get the fuck out of the way and stop trying to spread your
| shitty dark version of the future - because you have no idea what
| happens next.
| costanzaDynasty wrote:
| As long as the quality of the content was good I would alway pay
| for an ad-free version. But the quality has greatly diminished
| across the board and Ive stopped paying for any subscription.
|
| New sites are the worst at this. They've pandered to their sub
| base at the expense of the average reader. I just find it funny
| that all the journalists finally got off Twitter and every story
| that's been hiding in plain site for the last decade is now in
| their Sunday edition ever week.
| h4l wrote:
| My intuition is that it's not possible to have an open platform
| like substack where the majority are making enough to live off.
| Imagine that was currently the case. People would see the
| platform as easy money and jump in. The quality of the median
| writer would drop, as would the median income, until the
| perception that it was easy money reduced enough to stop people
| joining.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| There are plenty of markets like that. YouTube and twitch are
| very popular. It's just that the top 0.0001% make a good living
| while the rest don't make any money
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| I think that percentage is a lot bigger if you only count the
| people who are posting regularly.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I like constraint based planning. What is the constraint here on
| making money through subs? Human beings/consumers? Time the
| humans have to spend reading? Talent of the writer?
| vjk800 wrote:
| As Nicholas Nassim Taleb would, maybe, speculatively, put it:
| highs school statistics teaching based on normal distributions
| claims another victim.
|
| The writers constantly writes about averages. Digital economies
| almost always follow heavy tailed power law distributions for
| which the mean is a completely worthless statistic.
|
| The top 100 or whatever creators in any market are clearly making
| it work nicely. The rest of the chumps are merely trying the
| market. How the game works is: you invest person time/money to
| try something. If it catches (which it almost surely will not),
| you will do very very well. If it doesn't, you go do something
| else. It's akin to playing the lottery, but maybe with a bit
| higher odds at succeeding.
|
| More people will never make a profitable career out of writing
| simply because there aren't any more readers to read all the
| stuff that's being written. If the top 1000 or so writers can
| approximately satisfy the reading needs of all the people in the
| world, the rest of the writers are not needed and they will not
| make any money no matter what monetization system is being
| utilized.
| grumblepeet wrote:
| Asks me to sign up for a subscription.
| danjc wrote:
| This
| pryelluw wrote:
| Says that it's coming, not that it's here. (-:
| ccooffee wrote:
| I'm reminded of the quote from Keynes:
|
| "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain
| solvent."
|
| While I think the author does a good job pointing out how
| unsustainable this business model is, predicting the end of the
| subscription model seems a large leap. Given that the author
| doesn't frame the discussion with a solid prediction, this
| article comes across as a "it doesn't make sense to me" rant with
| a little bit of embellishment to predict a downfall at some
| unstated time in the future.
| rotifer wrote:
| Somewhat tangentially, that quote seems likely to be from a
| financial advisor named Gary Shilling [1], rather than Keynes.
|
| [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/
| IshKebab wrote:
| Right. The fact that only a tiny few earn enough to live off
| hasn't stopped the music and book industries from existing well
| before subscriptions were a thing. The article is a collection
| of observations and numbers with no interesting conclusion.
| lapcat wrote:
| I don't think the comparison between the NYT and substacks or
| podcasts is apt, because the NYT is a NEWSpaper. Does it contain
| opinion columns? Yes, among countless other columns. But the
| fundamental purpose of the NYT is not just opinion. Whereas
| substacks and podcasts appear to be mostly opinion pieces. You
| don't often have _news_ broken on them.
|
| What substacks and podcasts have shown is that some "thought
| leaders" can make a massively lucrative living independent from
| the newspapers, and more than they could make with the
| newspapers. But none of this applies to writers of _news_. News
| writers still need the news organizations, and the subscribers of
| the newspapers, to support them.
|
| The author talks about "writers" in general without making that
| crucial distinction. Hard news writing is mostly a thankless job.
| It rarely provides the opportunity to build a "personal brand"
| like opinion writing does, unless you're Woodward and Bernstein
| breaking Watergate. Even someone like Glenn Greenwald, who has
| broken some huge stories like Snowden, makes most of his money
| from spouting his opinions online rather than from breaking hard
| news.
| taftster wrote:
| Ha ha ha ... as I get a popover / overlay for a subscription to
| Medium.
|
| Yeah, I'm thinking no, the era of the subscription is just
| getting started.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| And what does the author think the alternative is? He mentions
| the collapse of advertising, so they clearly don't think that ad-
| supported models are the way of the future.
|
| I am completely unconvinced. The fact that the "average/median"
| income from these models is low is completely unsurprisng. We
| should expect that the vast majority of the income would go to
| the very top performers. This is not an indication that
| subscription doesn't work, just that it's going to end up looking
| like acting, music, and professional sports. Those are all real
| careers that have persisted for a very long time where the
| "average" wage is extremely low.
|
| This article does a bad job clearly stating what the author
| thinks the problem is (just vaguely gesturing at average wages
| without explaining why that should matter), doesn't suggest an
| alternative _at all_ and instead seems to snidely be sniping at
| non-mainstream journalists and creators.
|
| I am deeply unimpressed.
| datatrashfire wrote:
| > It is an idyllic, almost utopian, perspective. There is an
| imagined logic at play, entirely divorced from reality. In the
| world where Substack were an expeditious route to "more people"
| being able to "make a good and profitable career out of
| writing", we would also live in a world where you bought your
| lamp chops from a butcher, your baguette from a bakery, your
| stilton from a cheesemonger and your wine from a vintner,
| rather than just everything from a supermarket.
| izzydata wrote:
| I doubt subscriptions will entirely go away, but maybe some of
| them will. Things like software as a service often don't make
| sense to me. It seems like companies who used to make software
| and sold it as a complete package realized that people aren't
| going to consistently buy their software again if what they
| have is working for their needs. So now instead of writing
| software and selling it they have to constantly justify their
| continued existence by making ever-increasingly niche changes
| and persuading people that they need the update. This seems
| unsustainable to me.
| burnished wrote:
| I think thats because you are looking at the poor performers;
| the real goal is finding a way to turn your product into a
| service (and thus ongoing purchases) because doing it well
| becomes a license to print money. Doing it poorly becomes
| more like wheedling or strong arming.
| jshen wrote:
| That leaves out a lot of the story. Those purchased packages
| often went out of date after a couple years, I remember being
| stuck on a different version of omnigraffle than other people
| I worked with because it was a pain to go through procurement
| to buy a new version. This was a giant headache.
|
| There are also new truly useful features that people have
| come to expect that doesn't work well with packaged software.
| Online collaboration, syncing across devices, etc.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > There are also new truly useful features that people have
| come to expect that doesn't work well with packaged
| software.
|
| Supports the latest iOS version...
| ghaff wrote:
| It really varies. (And obviously the dollar amounts matter.)
|
| Subscribe to software that is an ongoing part of my regular
| workflow(s) and is regularly being enhanced? I'm mostly OK
| with a subscription to that--see Lightroom/Photoshop for me.
|
| Subscribe to some utility I maybe pull out for a task once a
| year? Nope.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Most software was sold with annual maintenance/upgrades
| anyway.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| Software is never really finished and often has to be hosted
| and maintained on an ongoing basis.
|
| An ongoing stream of smaller payments just seems like a
| natural way of paying for an ongoing service, even if the
| benefits are weighted to the vendor.
| neuralRiot wrote:
| > Software is never really finished and often has to be
| hosted and maintained on an ongoing basis.
|
| I have no problem paying for updates, as long as the
| product would keep working without an active subscription
| (what happens if there's no connectivity, servers are down,
| the provider goes bakrupt or change its terms?)
| m463 wrote:
| even gym memberships persist, funded by the folks who signed up
| january 1st, went for a few weeks, then never returned.
| rvrs wrote:
| What's worse is that the author fails to acknowledge is that
| these writers have the opportunity to cater towards niches and
| global communities. There are vast, global audiences who would
| definitely pay for content and commentary from people who
| represent them and their interests.
|
| Moreover, online creators don't always have _one_ source of
| revenue. This practice is employed widely by YouTubers: they
| supplement their ad revenue with merch, patreon, Twitch
| streaming, and so on.
|
| The average earnings on a single platform mean absolutely
| nothing.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| I could see pay-as-you-go being an alternative.
|
| Some credits based system where you purchase hours or articles
| and if your account has a rebuy threshold, it auto charges you.
| The rebuy would be opt-in.
| aidos wrote:
| How is this not a thing yet? If I could pay a tiny amount per
| article on Medium that I currently can't read, I totally
| would. Surely there's a system for these micropayments? Why
| hasn't it taken off?
| landemva wrote:
| > there's a system for these micropayments?
|
| Brave content creators. https://creators.brave.com/
|
| > Why hasn't it taken off?
|
| I wish it would gain more website adoption because it works
| well to tip content creators and is convenient for me as a
| consumer.
| [deleted]
| midasuni wrote:
| Years ago I subscribed to a daily newspaper (still subscribe to
| a weekly news magazine), I subscribed to insurance for my car,
| home, etc - still do. I subscribed to cable tv, I subscribed to
| my phone line, I subscribed to my apartment by paying rent, I
| subscribed to a transport service by paying for a season
| ticket. As recently as 5 years ago I subscribed to a milk and
| bread service.
|
| Subscriptions are nothing new. Those subscriptions (short of
| cable tv) would be nothing unusual 100 years ago.
|
| His examples of beer and cinema are odd as I current consume
| both, neither through a subscription, however mail order wine
| clubs date back 100 years.
|
| What is new is the subscription to things you already own, the
| "heated seat" debacle for example.
| ghaff wrote:
| >What is new is the subscription to things you already own,
| the "heated seat" debacle for example.
|
| Enabling additional functionality (or limiting it) for
| hardware you've already purchased isn't unheard of in
| business products--including computers--where the unit
| margins support it. But consumer unit margins are usually
| thinner and most consumers don't really accept it as a "fair"
| practice.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's a very clear signal that the entire market is broken
| and there isn't competition there.
| wredue wrote:
| It's not a consumer unit problem.
|
| Heated seat subscriptions are bad because by not paying for
| them, the heated seats are objectively costing you. You are
| paying for extra weight, streets are paying for extra
| weight, materials are extra mined and produced so the
| environment is paying for extra weight. Etc.
|
| It is directly and indirectly objectively negative for you
| to have heated seats that you don't want and are not
| subscribed for.
| nprateem wrote:
| I doubt that's anyone's complaint. It's more likely
| they'd have been annoyed to have had crippled seats in a
| car they'd bought and have to pay an on-going fee for no
| reason beyond greed. There are no other on-costs for
| manufacturers unlike other subscription-based products.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yup and that's not something new either -- it's been pretty
| standard practice for many decades. But similarly
| "controversial" from the start for consumers (while
| basically a non-issue for corporate customers).
| ghaff wrote:
| I worked for a long ago minicomputer company that sold a
| scaled-down version of their first SMP system in 3
| flavors--and the only difference was microcode that
| throttled the performance of two of the models.
|
| And when I was an analyst, many people were always
| surprised to hear all the games that IBM played with
| mainframes (and to a lesser degree with POWER servers) to
| sell you the same compute capacity that was cheaper when
| only used for certain workloads (like Linux) or that was
| inaccessible until activated "on demand."
| glogla wrote:
| I just realized that by paying toll yearly, I subscribe to my
| country's motorways.
| ArekDymalski wrote:
| And by paying taxes you subscribe to several governmental
| services on both local and national level.
| glogla wrote:
| True, but it feels less like a subscription because it's
| not a flat amount per month or year.
| keenmaster wrote:
| > What is new is the subscription to things you already own,
| the "heated seat" debacle for example.
|
| Yep, and that is what's going away. BMW recently decided to
| stop offering heated seat subscriptions.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Right. Isn't this just the Pareto distribution at play, which
| seems to be in effect in all domains of creative human
| production? In any particular field, roughly 20% of individuals
| achieve 80% of the results or success in that field. The author
| hasn't demonstrated this is unique to writing. None of this is
| to say the author is incorrect about the current subscription
| model in writing being unsustainable (I don't know if it is or
| isn't, though I suspect it's not), just noting what I think is
| missing from their argument.
| pphysch wrote:
| Yeah, the idea that rent-seeking behavior will magically dry up
| requires an exceptional argument, which is not presented here.
| lumost wrote:
| A lot of software business models may have been overly
| influenced by interest rates the last few years.
|
| At a low interest rate, the time value of capital is low - a
| company can defer revenue almost indefinitely with minimal
| cost. Hence, a subscription business like SalesForce can spend
| handsomely on onboarding, and expect to make money back over
| the course of 5-10 years. To a certain extent, the same applies
| to ad supported business models.
|
| If interest rates are higher, then a lump sum upfront payment
| may be a better bet. This may effect _how_ software is written
| as well as _how_ it is purchased.
|
| Or we'll just see a steady increase in subscription costs.
| jabbawocky wrote:
| you just described 99% of internet writing. vague, stating of
| the obvious.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| Perhaps the subscription model for banal writing or news that
| doesn't affect you is coming to end and but not the subscription
| model.
|
| I mean, who needs to subscribe to a newspaper that is crammed
| with unactionable whitterings or the views of a single author?
|
| Maybe if it was PS1pa and the author managed to write something
| useful each month it might represent value for money, but the
| thought of paying any more for the opinion of a single person
| seems absurd.
| cole-k wrote:
| While the piece is thought-provoking, I think that the author
| would do well to substantiate their claims. Even an interview
| with some hypothetical "side hustlers" to understand their
| motivations would be better than guessing why they are on the
| site.
|
| It kind of seemed like they were saying "it is [or will soon be]
| unsustainable to try and make a living out of being a Substack
| writer," but I would want to know how many people enter the
| platform with that goal in the first place.
|
| Twitch, YouTube, Soundcloud, good-old-fashioned blogging, I'm
| sure you could name several other pursuits that are in a
| similarly unprofitable position for the average content creator.
| I would wager most people don't start out trying to make a living
| on these platforms.
|
| Maybe the point is that there are people who are just scraping by
| on these platforms who will soon have the rug pulled from under
| their feet when consumers wise up to how much money they're
| throwing away to subscriptions? That didn't come across too
| clearly to me, though.
| mst wrote:
| It seems possible that at some point you'll see a hybrid between
| the NYT and substack models - basically a pre-selected bundle of
| some subset of a bunch of authors' work where you -also- have an
| option to subscribe to a particular author directly. I'm sure
| such things are already possible but the thing I'm thinking of is
| the bundles not being exclusive, so a piece that's available in
| 1+ bundles is still also available as part of the full
| subscription.
|
| (possibly combined with some or all of the options operating on a
| token model rather than a 'get exactly all of this' one)
|
| Note that I'm only endorsing this so far as it seeming -possible-
| and not necessarily -good- or -successful-, and assuming somebody
| does try it your guess is at least as good as mine as to how
| it'll turn out.
| jon-wood wrote:
| Depending on who was curating this I'd be up for it, and will
| now be quite surprised if Substack don't make it happen at some
| point.
|
| I think there's a lot of value in being able to delegate to
| someone who knows a particular field the ability to say "hey,
| these are the people you should be paying attention to". I
| could totally see this being used both from a "here's people
| who think like I do" perspective, and others providing a more
| adversarial version with commentators from all sides of a
| field.
| mst wrote:
| They could pretty much do it by having things like the 'for
| paying subscribers of X' attribute that work as 'also free on
| B' and 'also for paying subscribers of B' and the bundle
| could (at least initially) be pretty much just the current
| substack UI.
|
| I'm sure if substack actually do something like this, they'll
| give it a little more thought than I just did, of course.
| cole-k wrote:
| https://setapp.com is one example of a service that does
| bundling, albeit by offering what seems to be the full features
| of many things for a single subscription price (instead of your
| thought of a subset of features). It's not clear to me whether
| all of the apps offered are subscription-based, though.
|
| It's a model I'd be more willing to try than subscriptions to
| individual apps, although its OS and app offerings do not align
| with my interests.
| mst wrote:
| My thought was to let you have e.g. a book review bundler
| that got only the review posts from mixed sources and say 1/3
| of the review posts from ones that are all reviews ... both
| because that sort of subsetting works better here than it
| would for apps and because it means that it can make sense to
| subscribe to both a bundle and a contributor thereto, so
| neither channel is risking cannibalisation by recommending
| the other.
| IAmPym wrote:
| This is absolutely not true for one simple reason:
|
| Subscriptions increase valuation of companies
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| There are so many different types of subscriptions that it's
| unhelpful to bunch them together. The monthly box subscription
| was always a gimmick people were bound to get sick of. Then
| there's stuff like a gym membership or Amazon prime or game pass.
| Some offer good value, some bad. I'd imagine the bad value ones -
| like monthly boxes of random crap you don't need will indeed die
| off
| Ekaros wrote:
| Those boxes work when there is some inefficiency to exploit so
| you get good enough of apparent value. Like there is enough
| massively discounted stock. But as more of it is eaten or more
| players enter it will fail. And then you don't likely have big
| enough scale to get good value specially when you need to do
| curation, collating and shipping.
|
| Amazon Prime is probably mostly workable model as long as you
| keep raisin price and making offering worse and including the
| actual costs in item costs. Or simply don't pay enough to where
| ever you get content.
| ipqk wrote:
| lol, on Medium which I get a 50% banner ad asking me subscribe.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Correction: It's the end of the [unlimited] subscription era.
| All-you-can-eat is no longer sustainable. Long live subscriptions
| with monthly tokens that do not roll-over. For example, binge
| watch all you want, you can but up to 6 a month but you'll pay
| for > 6. Payment will always be required for Premium content or
| content augmented with AI.
|
| Micropayments and tokens will gain more adoption but it'll be
| more like a Costco Membership.
|
| Companies still love the fact that subscriptions give them longer
| lead time insight into consumer behavior. That part isn't going
| away anytime soon as investors love that data.
| taurath wrote:
| It's a bit of an investor trick as recurring revenue is treated
| as orders of magnitude more important than moment to moment
| sales. This is for some good reasons but there's also reason to
| think it's overvalued as every industry has very different rates
| of subscriber churn.
| airstrike wrote:
| Unironically posted on Medium
| throwaway4PP wrote:
| this article reads like it was written by a LLM
|
| "Anyway, we all already know this because we all experience human
| life in 2023."
| cogs wrote:
| As an aside: Hardware as a service is annoying and feels
| horrible, but is probably the only way to achieve the long
| lifetimes we need for consumer goods in a world where reviews are
| unreliable and we need to stop wasting resources on planned
| obsolescence.
| leshokunin wrote:
| This is probably a victim of DHH posting about their Once
| business model. Literally everything is a subscription now.
| Video, music, games. Enterprise software. It's just like your
| pg&e.
|
| Consumers like it enough. This is just as fruitful as fighting a
| commodity.
| szundi wrote:
| You wish. I am in the GPS based fleet management/tracking
| industry. Running even the most simple system like this is
| unimaginable to be cheaper than a subscription for a service
| until you have like 1k vehicles and ok with basically a pickaxe.
| People take more and more complex and convenient stuff as
| granted, so we'll have subscriptions and big corporations giving
| these away for free just to bleed each other out (Thanks though).
| vonnik wrote:
| I love how the pop up I get from Medium for this piece is telling
| me to subscribe for $5/mo.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Maybe it's time for micropayments?
| rebolek wrote:
| I'm hearing about this for so long, yet never seen it anywhere.
| When financebros talk about micro-anything, they usually mean
| something like few hundred or thousand dollars. For me, micro
| means cents or even less.
| barrysteve wrote:
| There was a comment on HN a year or mor ago, someone was
| making good money selling cheap and cheerful $1 (ish) games
| on Steam.. Steam of course banned micropayments that low.
| Ekaros wrote:
| https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/
| d...
|
| Minimum normal price is 0.99 and minimum transaction price
| is 0.49. All things considered they are reasonable limits
| as those might be actual singular payment transactions.
| TylerE wrote:
| Literally no one actually wants micropayments. Having ever
| little event in your life become a payment is true dystopia.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yet tech people will insist it's a tech problem.
|
| Clay Shirky basically called it a couple decades ago that
| there's a mental transaction cost to buying things.
|
| I guess it's sufficiently indirect sometimes that it works.
| "Hmm. Is it worth it to turn on this light given that it's
| going to cost me $X cents to have light for the next hour?"
|
| But $1/song only lasted as long as that was the only legal
| model relative to buying a disc. And 5 cents for an article
| wouldn't work either.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >Having ever little event in your life become a payment is
| true dystopia.
|
| It's already here for decades; each time you use Google or
| Facebook, you are giving in your privacy for free use of
| those services. But casual users don't care about their
| privacy so the ad based business model for Web services will
| prevail for a very long time.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _each time you use Google or Facebook, you are giving in
| your privacy for free use of those services_
|
| You decide to use Google or Facebook once or infrequently.
| That's the transaction cost. After that, it's effortless.
|
| Micropayments involve constant transaction costs. They
| don't work. A defining pillar of luxury is freedom from
| transaction costs; excluding those who can pay from your
| market is garbage economics.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| I felt like this was a lot of water and not much substance
|
| combine that with +47% being "almost doubling" and graph having
| one axis going "from easy to hard", while the other "from hard to
| easy"... and I get totally lost
| psychoslave wrote:
| I opened the page and got a pop up thrown at my face, with some
| text I didn't bother to read ending with "$5/month subscription".
| arbuge wrote:
| "This piece exists thanks to the munificence of my paying
| newsletter subscribers"
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It does seem like a self-parody.
| rebolek wrote:
| Irony-meter goes really to maximum on this.
| cutler wrote:
| Please stop posting paywall articles.
| superhumanuser wrote:
| To prove the point?
| eatonphil wrote:
| HN is officially ok with it. From the FAQ: >
| Are paywalls ok? > > It's ok to post stories from
| sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Firefox with uBO and uMatrix - I didn't hit a paywall.
| passwordoops wrote:
| It's not a paywall, just a marginally less obnoxious demand to
| subscribe before seeing the content. At least Substack waits
| for you to get 3/4 through
| grishka wrote:
| At least Substack doesn't break if you disable JS for it.
| bilal4hmed wrote:
| Im not sure what the problem with a paywall is?
|
| Dont want to see ads, care about privacy but also dont want
| to pay for content ??
| rebolek wrote:
| If you need to pay for subscription to read about how
| subscription is ending, that's sort of amusing. Anyway,
| this article isn't paywalled and can be read without
| subscription.
| joshjob42 wrote:
| Ads are annoying, and virtually nothing is valuable
| enough to bother paying to read a single article for. I
| subscribe to a number of substacks by writers I know
| produce reliably good content all the time, but random
| articles on HN ain't it chief.
| grishka wrote:
| Implied contracts aren't a thing. If someone sends me
| some trash along with the content I requested, I'm
| absolutely free to configure my own device to ignore the
| trash and only display the useful content.
|
| I've never seen paywalls neither on Medium nor on
| Substack, but I've seen plenty of annoyances like
| Substack's "hey, did you know this is a mailing list,
| subscribe to it" in-your-face modal and Medium's "sign up
| blah blah" thing that takes up half my viewport area.
| foooorsyth wrote:
| In the context of software I'll unapologetically defend the
| subscription model. I'm not maintaining your software forever
| (when the platform it's on often has breaking changes version to
| version) without recurring revenue. If I have to only focus on
| B2B software to make that happen, so be it. Mobile platforms
| really forced the hands of developers here. Windows will happily
| run 30 year old software -- you could actually "finish" software
| and move on to the next project. iOS and Android won't run apps
| from 5 years ago. Their store policies constantly change and you
| have to frequently keep up with new agreements lest your store
| listing be removed. And of course your app will be downranked
| into oblivion on the store search if you're not charging a fee --
| why would the App Store promote apps that don't make money for
| the App Store owners, and why would they promote one-time payment
| apps over subscription apps?
| layer8 wrote:
| The issue is that iOS and Android require constant updates to
| apps in the first place. That's the insane state of affairs
| that needs to change.
|
| That aside, I'm fine with paying a yearly subscription that is
| roughly 10% of the price I would be willing to pay for a one-
| time purchase, based on my average personal operational
| lifetime for an unchanged piece of software. The issue is
| subscriptions whose prices exceed that.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > In the context of software I'll unapologetically defend the
| subscription model. I'm not maintaining your software forever
|
| So ... don't?
|
| It's just one model for selling software. Another one is once-
| off purchases.
|
| If you can find people to pay you a monthly fee for your
| application (whether phone, desktop or other), good on you!
| Someone else may decide to just charge that once-off fee, that
| you get over 12 months.
|
| After all, even with a subscription model, you aren't going to
| maintain something forever _unless a significant portion_ of
| your subscribers remain.
|
| Even if someone is paying you to maintain something forever, be
| honest, how long will you take their $1.99/m? You need a large
| enough number of someone's to pay you monthly to maintain that
| software.
|
| There's risks and trade-offs for both sales models. Charging a
| small monthly fee makes it easier to acquire users, but that
| ease means that someone else charging a small monthly fee is
| losing those users (and one day you'll be that someone else
| losing users too).
|
| Charging a once-off fee means that you get your money upfront,
| you have no further costs for that product, and the customer
| gets no additional value over and above the value they got on
| day 1. The downside is that you'll make less money off a good
| product than with a subscription model.
|
| > . Mobile platforms really forced the hands of developers
| here. Windows will happily run 30 year old software -- you
| could actually "finish" software and move on to the next
| project. iOS and Android won't run apps from 5 years ago. Their
| store policies constantly change and you have to frequently
| keep up with new agreements lest your store listing be removed.
| And of course your app will be downranked into oblivion on the
| store search if you're not charging a fee -- why would the App
| Store promote apps that don't make money for the App Store
| owners, and why would they promote one-time payment apps over
| subscription apps?
|
| It sounds to me like your biggest beef with once-off sales has
| to do with products that are mobile apps. Maybe you don't
| already know this, but mobile apps are the worst place to try
| to make money with creating software products. Mobile apps are
| complementary to some other product (your bank provides a free
| app, etc).
|
| If you want to sell software, mobile apps are not the product
| with which to make money, because you can't count on being the
| lottery winner that manages to get 10% of whales on your app.
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