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Comment by docdeek | Hacker News Reader

> The same applies to Twitter and Substack, where signing up to just four writers’ output at $5 a month each is already more than the cost of a $17 New York Times subscription, which gives you a greater breadth of coverage.

Imagine I really like hamburgers. I might choose to $5 each week on a burger and be happy with the quality of a burger made by people who only make burgers.

The alternative is spending $4 a week so I could access a buffet with lower quality burgers (after all, it’s not their speciality) but also hot dogs, sandwiches, poke bowls and sushi.

Trying to convince me that the buffet is a better deal just because I have access to a wider range of foods when all I really want is a burger is not a winning argument for me.

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It's questionable whether a lot of substack writers give you more quality access than the entire newsroom at the NYT, WSJ, or similar newspapers, where a lot of substack writers still contribute.

I think the high fees on substack, like on patreon have another reason. It creates a weird parasocial relationship between the creator and the reader that gives the reader the feeling that they have contributed to a cause, or has some personal relationship with the author they support, and so on.

In that way it seems to me more similar to twitch streamers who often extract huge sums of money from their donors, when objectively the viewer gets more content out of a 10$ streaming subscription.

I would pay more for a subset of the current NYT. The website is full of imo prominently displayed clickbait that I consider negative value.

I'm a previous subscriber of NYT and Bloomberg online. I've kept my WSJ subscription partly because its easier to consume only the useful content.

I also subscribe to a couple of email lists where the author absolutely provides value in their niche over and above the larger newsrooms. They are usually great complements to each other and it tells you something that the journalists are also reading the newsletters.

I feel the same way. I stopped my NYT subscription because of "native ads"... Aka, paid advertising content posing as a news story by the outlet. I will not support deceitful ad placement. Subscriptions or ads. Pick one. No native ads.

> The website is full of imo prominently displayed clickbait that I consider negative value.

When checking the New York Times, I prefer to look at the "Today's Paper" list of headlines, it's much easier to parse and less clickbaity: https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper

Same for the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/todays_paper/updates/

It is also questionable whether the newsroom @ NYT, WSJ give much quality to begin with.

That being said, there is value depending on what topics you're interested in. The value of NYT for me is the Arts & culture section. But I'd happily pay for Matt Stoller's content,Taibbi, Siskin or Gwern if he had one.

There is risk that's been highlighted of creating bubbles but seeing how news media has reinvented itself over the last decade, I can't see how that can be avoided, except this bubble is self-curated and more specific, which one can argue is better.

[Edit: clarification on last line]

Gwern has a Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/gwern

And a Substack for his newsletter: https://gwern.substack.com/ (AFAIK this is free though)

It also depends on the subject. For instance, there's an ex journalist in my country pulling in €20K/month on Patreon by making videos on corruption in the country. It resonates well with the audience which doesn't seem to be able to get similar content from the newspapers/TV channels. There are some random writings on Substack,but there are also those that aren't covered much in more popular media, which leaves a gap and some writers are happy to fill it.

They get different content.

Nowhere on that streaming content is someone explaining the intricacies of speedrunning The Legend Of Zelda (as a simple example.) It turns out there may only be a couple thousand people in the world really that interested in that content, and only a few hundred willing to pay for it. The economy of scale thee changes the calculus of how much you are willing to pay.

Good example.

> t turns out there may only be a couple thousand people in the world really that interested in that content,

As evidenced by the success of SummoningSalt's youtube channel

> It creates a weird parasocial relationship between the creator and the reader

This is honestly a troubling trend in my opinion. These parasocial relationship are sort of emergent based on these new creator->fan direct channels that are popping up.

I'm concerned that now these platforms are going to lean into this even more, encouraging this sort of thing instead of it just happening organically.

These relationships are really not healthy for people. Not for the creator (even though they profit from it) and absolutely not for the fans who are likely missing out on forming real relationships with real people in favor of this parasocial thing that will ultimately not be fulfilling (and expensive) for them.

I wouldn't worry too much about it. A mailing list is usually a means to an end. Most people writing on Substack are also writing a book manuscript behind the scenes, because that's a reliable way to monetize one's following.

It's a different type of relationship if you're a 'personality' on Twitch or IG, and your audiovisual presence is what gets people to follow you. Books don't monetize nearly as well, and a lot of the people in this area don't really have anything to write about. So they pitch what they can: energy drinks, mattresses, Audible subscriptions.

One of the big things that strikes me about these journalists who leave their papers or start a side gig on Substack is the marked decrease in the quality of their writing. The role of the copy-editor is extremely important.

Which is why it's so frustrating that the NYT laid off most of theirs.

They're also managing the business side of things directly, which can be very time consuming when you're getting started.

Like the music industry a decade or so ago, the news industry is now in a position where, rather than try and compete, they are going to blame their customers and their competitors for their own failings, and try and secure a special status whereby they get paid in perpetuity for doing nothing because of their supposed great importance to society.

This varies a lot - legacy media, sure. But the New York Times is doing extremely well!

> Back in 2006, the New York Times charged readers an average of $534 for a subscription, while it brought in a further $1,064 per subscriber from ads.

Wait, what? Is this the yearly figure? A subscription to the NYT cost >$500/year? Who the hell pays that much for a newspaper?

Printing Paper and transporting it every day to you is costly. And back then, content was generally more expensive, because there was no elaborated online-crowd who delivered you half of your content for free. Today you have wikipedia, reddit, google, twitter, e-mail and many more which allow you to research many stuff from home. Back in the days you were forced to go around physically, talk to people face to face, visit libraries, maintain your own library. That was far more expensive than what you can do today.

At the same time, because of the high quality free knowledge we have today, you can externalize knowledge and let people research it themself if they wanne know, and get away with lower quality of writing, meaning you can do it faster and need less people to pay. Meaning you can offer a lower price, because it's neccessary to compete in a world of massivly free information.

> Printing Paper and transporting it every day to you is costly.

The whole "technology tree" for newspapers like the New York Times was actually really fascinating. Paper and Ink by the trainload and delivery trucks making their way across the nation in the wee hours of the night.

do papers even have print editions anymore?

Uh, yes? NYT, LA Times, WSJ are examples of some that have running print editions. Even more common in the old world.

> A subscription to the NYT cost >$500/year? Who the hell pays that much for a newspaper?

Eh? That's less than $1.50 a day?

That's how much it used to cost to get it delivered to your door daily.

But it's a daily Newspaper, that's a bit less than 1.50$ per day for a lot of written paper. (Some online magazines charge that per article...) I would go for that if I just read daily news from one source. Instead I have a varying number of subscriptions, nowadays mostly digital.

It used to be that print newspaper subscriptions were quite expensive. Now that news is so heavily devalued subscriptions are a lot cheaper but even in the early 2000s a premium daily newspaper subscription could easily be $50 a month.

I pay £33 per month for the digital version of the Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/products

If you're into that niche, it's great value for money. But even with those prices, FT still runs ads on their pages.

Unfortunately in today's world, where people get their news "for free" from fb.com or twitter.com or news.google.com, it seems like a huge price to pay.

FT is a great newspaper.

I’ve been a long time reader - My only complaint is that I feel like the number of puns has declined considerably since the Nikkei acquisition.

One favorite was a headline to the effect “Boat builders weather the storm.” I had come to expect multiple puns per article towards the back of the paper. Today I feel lucky if I pick up one or two per paper.

If you like puns, the Economist is the way to go.

$1.50 a day? It’s about what you’d spend on a physical newspaper.

Yes, those are yearly figures for an all-in subscription (no paywalls on their site, daily paper, weekend edition, access to all apps). And they are in range of what you'd expect. I just checked the current subscription price for the NYT. Where I live, it would set me back EUR 715 yearly. I compared that to one of the big newspapers in my country, a similar all-in would cost me EUR 480 (that's USD 580) yearly.

You'd think that's expensive, until you start to dig into the economics of running a modern newspaper. The operational side is massive and complex. There's the newsfloor (NYT employed 1.300 staff writers in 2016), digital infrastructure to maintain and evolve and logistics for actually printing and distributing of paper, and so on and so on.

I pay €2 a week for a digital NYT subscription.

The problem with buying the NYT subscription is that you still get the ads. If not overtly, then they are still buried in the content in some sponsored form or another, because this is a large part of how the newspaper makes money. And the newspaper has other agendas too - political, commercial, etc. The Substack model, on the other hand (at least so far) lets you cut out most of the crap - the signal to noise ratio is just so much higher.

> The problem with buying the NYT subscription is that you still get the ads

It is annoying when a paid subscription doesn't eliminate ads.

From their perspective if you bought a physical edition you'd still get the ads so there's no difference. And I guess by showing a willingness to pay and the presence of a disposable income, you may be proving yourself to be of more value to the advertisers - paying makes you more of a target not less (however unfairly).

Newspapers have some level of editorial oversight, governance and fact-checking. Substack writers don't offer any of that. I understand that that's part of the appeal, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that Substack writers don't have their own agenda or biases.

They definitely do, but I think they are easier to spot. The problem with bigger publications it that they have overarching biases blended throughout, subtle ads and so on, rather than individual authors being overly opinionated. In the substack model, you probably know about the author's biases when you sign up.

And yet Substack was featured on HN top for running ads in their email newsletters....

Substack bundling is inevitable as subscription-based blogging matures. It's just a matter of time until we start seeing offers "Subscribe to top authors A, B, and C, for only $X/mo".

Medium.com all over again.

You can't survive on a burger a week and you will eat other food too between your $5 burgers. So maybe it's worth spending the $4 / week covering "most of the other food" you gotta eat anyway.

It’s not an exact analogy, that’s for sure.

Maybe I could save it by asking where am I likely to get a better quality burger: the place that charges me $5 a week just for burgers, or the one that charges me only $4 a week AND I get a whole lot of other stuff I don’t like but could still consume

Paying for news has become something of a "luxury" product.

In these conditions, quality and satisfaction of a niche is more important than quantity (though quantity has a quality of its own)

It always has been.

Source: I'm over the hill. now get off my lawn.

And, to strain the metaphor further, most of the $5 burger makers are just repackaging the $4 burgers since the $4 burger makers are the ones who gather the ingredients.

Depends on the size of the burger I guess :D

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