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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

Does this guy know that before the internet most people paid money to subscribe to newspapers and magazines?

"The growth of the subscription model has been one of the biggest developments in online journalism in the past few years ... The subscription model makes a lot of sense for publishers. The advertising-based model that supported the industry for 100 years doesn’t work in a digital world where ..."

No, the subscription model has been the basis for the industry for the past 100 years.

He goes on:

"You can’t expect people to subscribe to their local paper (which is vital to democracy, we tell them) AND The New York Times and the Washington Post (because Democracy Dies in the Dark) AND Netflix AND Hulu AND HBO Go AND The Athletic AND ESPN Plus AND their favorite podcast on Patreon AND …"

Yet people were subscribed to a daily paper, 1 or 2 monthly magazines and a cable package with added charges for sports channels.

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You have a good point but I feel overwhelmed with subscriptions today. Between personal and business I have easily got 40 or more paid subscriptions. It's not just media but software too. Mac apps, iPhone apps, web apps. They're hard to cancel and easy to forget (until I check my bank statements). And they dip into my bank account with no renewal confirmation or approval. And they'll happily self-renew for the next year without being used once in the last year.

Of course I signed up to and pre-authorised all of this, and forgot to cancel when I stopped using them, so it's 100% my own fault. But something doesn't feel right about it.

I set a recurring calendar appointment to remind me to cancel things like this.

> But something doesn't feel right about it.

Why did you suscribe in the first place? The best way to avoid paying is to not register.

I think there's been a sea-change about what people think is a reasonable subscription cost.

I don't know how much my parents paid to get a physical newspaper delivered when I was growing up, but when I looked how much the Times costs to be delivered I was absolutely staggered that it would cost me nearly £500 a year.

I don't know if the price has changed, or my tolerance for subscription costs has changed, but as a millenial I can't even begin to justify spending that much money on a newspaper.

Having a physical paper printed and delivered seems to be much more difficult than serving a website, as the latter has marginal cost close to 0. I think people are more understanding of paying a few bucks to get a pound of paper than paying a few bucks to open a website in their browser.

The marginal cost is only zero within each size category you exist in. It scales as you grow readership in strange ways. An additional 1000 subscribers might mean you need to spin up an extra VM to handle small loads. That's fine, still have marginal costs close to zero. At 10.000 more subscribers you need to diversify your coverage. More content producers cost money. 100.000 more subscribers some critical infrastructure breaks unless you employ sysadmins to manage it. And so on and so forth.

The crazy thing is that the digital only subscription is still over £300.

Thankfully my employer pays for another newspaper subscription (but not one I'd personally chose to take, which is why I looked at the Times.)

Prices are determined by what they are worth to the customer, not by the cost of goods. That must mean that someone is willing to pay that much for it. (I'm not).

> Prices are determined by what they are worth to the customer, not by the cost of goods.

I know that. I never said anything about costs, so I'm not sure why you're telling me this.

> That must mean that someone is willing to pay that much for it.

I'm sure that's literally true. But they may be making a mistake and setting the price wrong for what the market could support and to maximise their income.

> But they may be making a mistake and setting the price wrong for what the market could support and to maximise their income.

What we here do not know is whether they have already done that calculation and determined, based upon whatever basis they used for estimating, that their maximum income is, in fact, at their present price point.

Having a physical paper printed and delivered seems to be much more difficult than serving a website, as the latter has marginal cost close to 0.

Presumably much of the cost of serious journalism is in the journalism, not the mechanics. It would make sense for the online version to be somewhat cheaper than the paper one with physical delivery, but it wouldn't surprise me if the real difference in production costs was only a few pence plus whatever postage costs them.

My first job was at a regional newspaper and I recall one of the directors responding to my enquiry about the difference in cost of our two main titles - it might have been offered hyperbolically, but he stated that they were entirely arbitrary - they could in fact offer them for free if they chose (they in fact had some free downmarket titles). It was the advertising that paid for the entire enterprise. The cover price was simply a bonus and mostly went to the retailer.

That's because with only the Guardian that I can think of offhand as exception, media seems to think the "right" price to pay for a web site subscription is about the same as you might pay for a paper delivered 365 days. Newspapers seem to have increased cost far in excess of inflation.

Seem to remember (this could be very fallible) I was paying around 50p for a Guardian or Telegraph in the 90s and early 00s. Tabloids might have been 25p or 30p. £1 and up feels far too much for a paper, even now.

Obviously we've all adjusted how we read as well. Instead of taking everything from one site we might graze half a dozen sites for news, and a full subscription might feel too much for any of them. The few lite subscriptions I've looked at didn't feel that light.

FYI 50p in 1990 is 94p today adjusted for inflation

Yet the actual papers are about £2 now.

The NYT (1EUR / week), WaPo (1.5-2.25 USD / week), Guardian (6-7 USD / week) are constantly updated, multiple times every day, how many actual papers does that equal?

In the old print days, subscriptions (or the cover price) only covered a small part of a publication’s costs. Perhaps just enough to cover printing and distribution, if that.

The majority of print revenue always came from advertising - a revenue stream that is apparantly drying up in the online era.

Yup, and it was much more benign. No tracking. Whole supplements you could skip if you weren't looking for a new car or holiday. Take more interest when you're thinking of decorating or kitchen replacement.

Actually for many newspapers in the US the classifieds were a major revenue contributor.

While you are right in that having subscriptions was much common last century. It is my understanding that the field of media studies accept advertising as a central force in the development of mass media.

"With a few exceptions – television in the United States and the free daily tabloid – there are no media which from their very beginning have not used advertising as a source of revenue [...] The influence of advertising on the media development started during the 19th century with the popular newspapers. It was the common interest among media owners and advertisers to reach the masses that connected advertising and media and made them mass media and mass advertising. The productions techniques that were introduced in that century allowed mass circulations but it was impossible to conquer a large audience with the contents of the contemporary elite papers, expensive to buy and hard to read. The contents were changed and the prices were reduced. In order to make them very low, advertising was accepted as a second source of revenue. The papers were sold on the streets or home delivered anything that would bring the papers closer to the readers. In order not to discourage subscription, weekly subscription was introduced."[0]

[0]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/16522354.2006.11...

> No, the subscription model has been the basis for the industry for the past 100 years.

Not in the UK, FWIW. I know the American magazine industry is subscription-based but the UK magazine industry has historically made most of its sales on the newsstand. UK publishers have been pushing to move readers to subscriptions for 20-plus years, though - not so much because of the advent of the internet, but because of the intermediaries who take their cut (wholesalers, distributors) and, most of all, the sheer avarice of WH Smith, historically the UK's biggest magazine vendors. Everyone I knew in publishing _hated_ Smiths with a vengeance.

(writing as a former UK magazine editor)

I always wish people when commenting on the Internet state where these basis are. This is the first time I heard subscription model were used before in US. Everywhere else I lived and travel operate similar to UK industry; Newsstand.

I think it goes with suburbia and sprawl. Newspapers and magazines were delivered to homes by "paper boys" or the mailman via monthly subscription. In this culture, the morning edition papers were the bulk of the news, followed closely by evening television.

There is no village street with newstands nor any other vending. Many going to work were driving their car from their suburban house to a factory with a giant parking lot. Even the suburban professionals who would commute into the city by train were likely to receive their paper at home and read it there with their morning coffee or carry it with them to the train station to mostly read before they even arrived in the city.

Yet people were subscribed to a daily paper, 1 or 2 monthly magazines and a cable package with added charges for sports channels.

I think true, but I also think it's likely that there's an upper limit to the number of subscriptions someone will accept. In the past having a newspaper, a couple of magazines, and a TV service meant you had to manage ~4 subs, but today people are being pushed towards having a music service, several TV services, a gaming service, some sports channels, maybe a pay-for podcast, a news website. That's a lot of cognitive load. If there's an upper limit people will hit it fast, and anything that provides minimal utility is going to get cancelled. If your service only provides a handful of TV shows (eg HBO) it's likely to lose out to, say, Netflix that provides hundreds. That raises the question of whether or not these smaller subscription services will ever work in today's world.

It's also true that people won't accept two things that provide similar services. No one is buying Apple Music and Spotify if they can help it. Once the market is saturated services are going to go hard on getting people to switch in order to grow, which is an expensive way to get new customers. It could be that the cost of getting someone to move from one to another is more than the lifetime value of that customer, and that throws a big spanner in the market economics of running such a service.

> No, the subscription model has been the basis for the industry for the past 100 years.

I had always been told that the subscription price was to cover the marginal cost of printing and delivery, but the majority of revenue for most publications was from advertising, which was meant to cover the cost of creating the content, whether it be entertainment or journalistic.

That having been said, you would see many things bundled together in the past, so your newspaper subscription would get you a weekly magazine, and as you mentioned with the split between basic and premium cable packages.

Depends hugely on the publication. Some magazines make their money from advertising, others from copy sales. The last publisher I worked for had three magazines in the same market: a freesheet entirely funded by advertising, a premium title entirely funded by the cover price, and a hybrid.

I think what changed with the internet is un-bundling. The newspaper used to provide a lot of functions, such as news, entertainment, puzzles, what's on tv, movie reviews, sports, etc. Now there are individual services that provide better individual components focused on our interests. For instance, a publication dedicated only to your sport will provide a better product that the newspaper's sports writer.

The reason people had all these subscriptions before is because they were covering all their bases of interest. Now you can shop around each individual component. Since you're not going to enjoy as many aspects of the newspaper anymore due to more specialized alternatives, you won't value the newspaper as much and may not be willing to pay for it.

I work in the news industry and I think you're completely underestimating the severity of this problem. It's not 3-5 subscriptions. It's 20+.

I get what you are saying, but if used everything I would like to use I'd spend maybe a quarter of my paycheck every month. On random subscription things. Everything is subscription based and feels like I have to pay separate subscriptions for every bus I take, you know

Budgeting is "being an adult 101"...

You cannot get "everything you would like", that's life.

In the ad-funded internet, you really can get everything you like; you can even block ads if you don't want the inconvenience. What this discussion is really about is whether and how long this will dry up the supply of good content or replace it with bad.

That just means subscriptions might usually be too expensive, not that the model has some intrinsic issues.

> most people paid money to subscribe to newspapers and magazines?

To a few. Many cities had multiple newspapers, but very few people subscribed to more than one or to any other city's. Now the industry seems to expect that people will shell out for many more separate subscriptions.

> people were subscribed to a daily paper, 1 or 2 monthly magazines

One difference is that broadcast news was most people's primary source of news for a long time, and it was free. Also, people could buy one issue of a newspaper or magazine, at any box or news stand or grocery-store checkout line. No need for a subscription. No need to pay that ongoing cost, either in terms of money or in terms of risk for personal-data compromise.

The subscription model as it commonly exists - separate, permanent, all or nothing - is going to kill its users. Shared subscriptions ("5 stories per month on any of these sites") are going to be an absolute must. Limited-duration subscriptions will probably be necessary too. A single story is too granular, but single-week or single-month might work.

I'm sure the papers have done their own analyses and concluded that those approaches would bring in less revenue. That might even be true, if they consider their own subscription in isolation and only in the present day. The problem is that "subscription fatigue" is a problem across many subscriptions and is going to become worse over time. If their models don't account for that, their models are broken.

I find it hard to take any "before the internet" sentiment seriously in 2019. It's been a while and things have changed, drastically, and we are not going back.

The thing about the internet is links. When I (theoretically) open a daily paper there is nothing for me to click on. The publisher has to make sure that the whole thing is self contained and can be consumed without any outside reference.

Websites, by design, are not self contained and that is because of links. Being able to reference other content through links is fundamental to how the internet works. The subscription/paywall model is anti-internet, because it breaks links.

While I do find some of the authors reasoning questionable, I concur: The classic subscription model, even though it may be the very thing that is keeping some publications afloat and very profitable, is deeply flawed for the internet.

It's been a while and things have changed, drastically, and we are not going back.

Unfortunately, those changes have also involved replacing a lot of the better quality journalism -- genuine investigative reporting, expert analysis, insightful commentary -- with the dominance of third-hand reporting, your mate from the pub's analysis, targeted propaganda and clickbait headlines.

Real, substantial journalism still takes time and hard work and resources, and all of that still costs real, substantial money. Maybe "we are not going back" is today's reality, but going forward we certainly need to improve on the economic models we have today or the race to the bottom will continue until good quality journalism ceases to be a viable occupation.

> targeted propaganda and clickbait headlines

The UK tabloids have been quite capable of doing this in print before the Internet.

Yes, but the broadsheets weren't tabloid quality in those days. The culture of linking and aggregation and snippets hurts them as much as the red tops.

The thing with newspapers is not outbound links but inbound ones. We can see that on this very website; how much of HN is inbound links to news sites? How often do people complain that the inbound links are GDPR-broken or paywalled?

This is where the recent EU copyright directive controversy came from, an attempt to assert copyright in inbound link titles and snippets.

What I think customers would find most convenient is paying the aggregators (HN, twitter, FB etc) who would then pay on towards the content creators. The second-order effects of that system would probably be destructive though: spamming and new forms of clickbait.

The Brave browser is an interesting approach but I'm not going to use it unless I have to, and so I suspect for most people.

At least when you cancel your magazine or newspaper subscription, they don't yank access to all the content you received while you were subscribed.

It isn't a new model, but I'm not sure it is a good model. A lot of these subscriptions are borderline abusive.

My family bought the Sunday paper (longer and more expensive than the weekday editions) at a newsstand. I wouldn't be so sure subscriptions were most of their revenues -- they were actually discounted wrt what you would pay at the newsstand. Yet newsstands existed.

He specifically says 'online journalism'. He also points out the reduction in advertising revenue which has also been 'the basis for the industry' for the past 100 years.

Also, think about the most successful subscription business ever: insurances. Hardly a new thing.

> No, the subscription model has been the basis for the industry for the past 100 years.

And that's the reason the industry is dead -- the model is unsustainable.

Here's what I'm willing to do:

* you commit to writing one interesting piece a day. I pay you a $1 a year.

I will probably be willing to do it for a hundred authors. I figure that's like 20 cappuccinos a year. I will probably be willing to do the same for 100 video producers ( i like cooking videos, video reviews of products and photography/video videos ) and probably a few other things. But there's no way I'm paying for Philadelphia Inquirer -- Will and Trudy spew the same kind of content I can read in the Opinion section of New York Times or SFC and I am not paying for it twice.

* you commit to writing one interesting piece a day. I pay you a $1 a year.

One a day? Nothing researched or investigative then.

For $1 a year? Only the worst of the "anything for a click" would seem likely to survive that model.

Yes. You have 300k readers? Hello $300k. You have a million readers? Hello, a million a year! Half of the United States reads you? Well, hello 160 million.

You have 30 readers total? Well, you should probably get a job washing gas station floors - because your writing is just not that good.

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