Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

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The flip side of not bundling, is nickle-and-diming. Other bundling services, like Spotify, or Netflix, are way more cost effective than having to make micropayments to a bunch of separate services.

Consider Newspaper subscriptions. Would you rather separately pay $X/month to New York Times, WashingtonPost, The Atlantic, The Economist, etc just to read a few articles, or would you rather pay $X/mo to Texture or a Spotify-for-News, and then have access to every newspaper, friction and worry free?

I'm an Amazon Prime customer and I love it. Not just for the delivery, but also for the video, Amazon Fresh, and pretty much everything else.

When the price of the bundle exceeds greatly the price of everything else, I might start to be concerned.

But in general, I find unbundled stuff more expensive.

My issue with bundling of news specifically is that it becomes bland and generic. The bundler starts trying to guess what I want -- which defeats the purpose of why I read the news. I subscribe to the NY Times and the WSJ separately precisely because I want multiple angles on the same (and different) events.

Besides, bundling usually means someone down the pipeline -- usially the producers -- are getting royally screwed.

One of my favourite benefits about bundling services is that it can more closely align the platform operator's incentives with my interests.

For ad-driven sites, it becomes crucial to keep viewers engaged as often and as long as possible. Every second spent on Facebook is another shot at an ad impression, every video on YouTube another chance for a pre-roll ad. Cue Facebook's notification spam and YouTube's autoplay.

In a bundled service, the incentives shift. The provider's revenue will stay mostly constant, as long as they can demonstrate enough value for me to maintain the subscription. I might still get the good parts (next episode in a series autoplays), but I'll be spared the clickbaity follow-up video that autoplays because there wasn't any other related item.

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