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How many people would you say subscribe to something they pay for online? For example news? The pool of subscribers for magazines and news is an ever shrinking pie. I know of no one in the last three jobs that maintains a subscription that’s under under age 40.

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Netflix (and other similar platforms), Amazon Prime, Twitch subscriptions.

Those are only 3 examples a ton of people pay for.

If you provide a good service, you will get subscribers. News have been available for free for decades thanks to OTA TV broadcasts. That's why people don't pay for it.

Niche journalism needs to have subscriptions since they can have way less views and people looking for news on that niche are ready to pay.

They're also not exactly something a developer can launch and start making money off of.

Would you pay a subscription for Flappy Bird?

> Would you pay a subscription for Flappy Bird?

I don't do that on the app store either.

And software was sold way before app stores existed, so what's your point?

I happily pay for games and apps, including upgrades if they are valuable to me.

I refuse to pay monthly for stuff that shouldn't need backend services.

Flappy Bird didn’t make money from selling the app though. The example actually hurts your argument. Flappy Bird and many sites make money the same way - ads.

What makes you (and others) think that citing three (or even half a dozen) examples constitutes some kind of refutation of the general rule?

There are somewhere over a billion web sites, dude. The number of those that are profitable with a subscription model (as opposed to being supported by advertising, or not being profitable at all) is a rounding error -- in the fourth or fifth decimal place.

The number of apps in all app stores combined that are profitable from store sales is also likely a rounding error.

How many apps are profitable and of those how many are made by independent people?

More than one out of 50 million, you can bet.

Are you saying there’s only like 30 sites with a subscription model that are profitable?

This feels like kind of an aside - do those under 40s you know readily pay for news apps, but not for web subscriptions? If not it's not really related to the issue at hand.

Happy blendle user.

Love to be able to pay for quality content.

Same with Spotify.

Both models are OK with me.

What I don't wanna pay for is every newspaper wanting a monthly subscribtion either I read something or not.

Here are some of the online services that I subscribe to, delivered over the web: Github, AWS, pinboard.in, spotify, ancestry.com

Content/news is a terrible example since there is an oversupply of poor quality content driven by providers who believe content supports their advertising revenue rather than the other way round.

And all those magazines and newspapers also have apps, yet that hasn’t somehow led to floods of money pouring into their coffers.

News is free on the web and free as an app. You are not making a distinction. I paid nothing for my NPR and BBC apps.

The BBC is fully funded by the government (i.e. the taxpayer). NPR claims they are minimally funded by the government but sure does fight hard to keep that supposed 2%. But the main point is that someone else had to pay for what you espouse as free.

About a quarter of its revenue comes from BBC Worldwide selling BBC content to markets outside the UK.

Confidence in news is also an ever shrinking pie.

Not a great example.

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