You can't have it both ways. Either you pay for high quality content or you deal with intrusive ads.
A large percentage of people simply will not pay for website access, no matter how low the price. So you get your money from those who do, who value the service so highly that parting with it would be huge pain point for them, and, so Bloomberg assumes probably after extensive surveys, those who feel that way about their publication, will likely have 35$/month to spare for the privilege.
That said, increasing prices is hard; reducing is easy. If you're trying to figure out sweet spot for max revenue is it probably makes sense to start high and slowly reduce it until you find it. If you're on a rolling monthly payment and decrease everyones prices together, nobody will get upset.
Look at the App Store as an example and how hard it is to get people to pay $1.
Besides the people who are willing to pay are by definition people who are willing to spend money - the same demographic that advertisers covet the most. Meaning they can't target their best customers for advertising.
I'm not doubting that's tough; but it's significantly easier to get someone to pay $1/month than $35/month. People aren't completely stupid; they won't just blindly pay any amount just because they'd decided they'd pay something.
Like I said though; if I was making this decision, I'd start high.
I highly doubt it. Also, while it is possible that the people at bloomberg are so incompetent that they did not consider how to maximize their profits, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they did.
I never said it was likely, just possible. And I wouldn't question the incompetence of anyone these days; big companies make questionable decisions all the time ;-)
Just like most people wouldn't pay 2000 a month for access to their terminal software.
I’m looking at you, Wired Magazine.
I still hate adverts, but at least here its not a malware-fest. I still hate ads as they are parasitic in one of our most important resources: attention.
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.
One analog of this phenomenon are loss leader products in retail. Loss leaders in grocery stores (sometimes produce or in the case of Costco, hotdogs and soda for $1.50). Loss leaders have been responsible for putting lots of small businesses out of business.
When enormous companies offer products for free, that others charge for, it makes me wonder where it all ends. Many internet companies have been put out of business by free services offered by the bigger guys.
A similar issue is the endless supply of people or businesses willing to take a loss on their product, either because they have VC money, some other revenue source, or because they are just ignorant. Google was able to lose money on YouTube for the better part of a decade, for example.
I once had a thriving business buying items at US postal auctions for resale. But the get rich quick bloggers eventually found out about the auctions and then, for years, an endless supply of clueless suckers just kept showing up and paying above MSRP for things like MacBooks and other high end electronics. Ya, they would lose their shirts, and never come back, but there were always fresh meat each month to do the same thing. So most of us that were actually making money previously, had to move on to other things.
It seems like this phenomenon could become more proliferated as some of these core internet companies get larger and larger.
I can't for the life of me understand how the HN success story Dropbox has a long term future.
For the same $9.99 a month that you pay for Dropbox's 1TB Of storage, you can get....
- 2TB of storage from Apple for iCloud
- 1TB for each of 5 users on One Drive plus access to the entire MS Office Suite for 5 computers and 5 mobile devices
- 1 TB per user plus everything else you get from G Suite.
-Amazon Drive is 1TB for $60 a year.
Yes I know that Apple isn't aimed at businesses, but the rest are.
Google and to some extend Microsoft want/expect you to do everything in the cloud. Their sync clients are generally less reliable, do not support P2P sync, and do not do block-level sync. Google even syncs placeholders for Google Doc documents, rather than real local office files. Microsoft encourages people to create/open documents directly on/from the cloud (with its standard dialog boxes).
If you want to own your data and reliably sync them between your machines, Dropbox is the best choice. And probably they'll continue to be the best, because sync is their product and not some way to funnel people in other products.
1. Free chitchat
2. Links to content.
HN isn't much without the external content.
Is there any metric for people clicking the external link compared to unique commenters?
This misunderstanding is why the internet is gradually becoming more and more centralized. People don't want to pay money and they don't want to see ads. The only sites that can brave that reality are charities, sites that confer other benefits to the organization (like HN), and the few major services that people will pay for (like Netflix). Not much in between, and the sites in between were basically enabled by ads like the collaborative writing forum I grew up on.