Edit: I'll admit I'll gladly drop $40 on an ebook from the same creators I feel weird about funding monthly. I'm allergic to monthlies.
Well, I say "quality". It seems like every time I look at it, their catalog's dropped something else I wanted to see. My hit rate on searches there has to be hovering around 2%.
Niches like theirs will always exist.
Not that he's not a bit of a drunk uncle, but it turns out you can learn a lot from one of those. And there's really nothing that's not funny about the occasional 18650 accidentally eating a hacksaw, so long as you're not in the room when it happens.
$5 month gets you a group of creators in a given field. Hell, I would happily pay that for a whole group of 3D printer/Blender gurus doing their thing and showing me how...
Besides, when was the last time you could get a magazine for $5 a month? They were already well past that when I was still a little kid, and these days a physical magazine is both too costly to produce, and too much of a status symbol, for any such low price to seem very likely.
I just renewed my subscription to "Sound on Sound" - an _incredibly_ high quality recording industry magazine - for $58.50 for the year, which includes both the print edition and digital edition, so that works out just under $5/mo...
Right now I can go out and get Wired for $20 a year and Time for $30 a year with only a couple seconds of searching, and those are probably not the best offers available.
Private Eye is £34 a year, so $3.72 a month. And it comes every two weeks.
But that's not really a great world for individual agency or the creative arts. A writer with 1,000 readers can only write so much per month -- and $5 doesn't (or only barely) makes it possible. People who want a world which HAS niche content are going to have to cough up more -- I'd like to think most people here are in that camp.
There are lots of products and media that is niche/boutique/artisanal or whatever your preferred term is. And people are willing to pay much more for that.
Me too. The way I look at it, if I'm going to live off 4% of my assets a year in retirement, I need an extra $1500 to fund a $5 a month recurring charge.
So it's a matter of looking at how long it would take to save that $1500 and asking if I would commit to working that much longer before I retire in order to afford the recurring payment.
If "that much longer" is measured in days/weeks/months instead of minutes or hours, the answer is almost certainly going to be no.