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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this is basically correct. The key issue is that people don't want to pay $2/month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20/month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a "newspaper".

The logic is simple: an individual writer is always relatively niche. Niche means small audience. Small audience means you have to charge more per person to cover your costs.

Maybe Substack will go the Medium way and try to aggregate, or encourage its writers to aggregate. If so, then it could succeed, but it'll succeed by becoming a newspaper. The problem is that the NYT, Guardian, Mail etc. have a lot of experience at doing aggregation well. (Each day has an appropriate mix of home, foreign, finance, and sports. The day's editorial chimes with what the front page journalists wrote about. Long run investigations are funded in the hope of big payoffs. Et cetera.) Medium hasn't really broken through, I think Substack would struggle.

An alternative is the status quo: Substack is a perfectly viable blogging tool, where aspiring journalists and writers like me [1] give away content for free, in the hope of breaking through to the next level, and where a few people make a good living. But if so Substack will fit into the existing landscape, rather than disrupting it.

[1] https://wyclif.substack.com

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> The key issue is that people don't want to pay $2/month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20/month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a "newspaper".

...actually, I'd *VASTLY* rather pay a small monthly fee to a small number of writers I care about, than a larger fee for a collection of writers that I don't.

More to the point, I am doing that, and a fair number of other people are too. If baffles me to see someone advancing the argument that "people don't want to..." and then listing something which people are very much currently choosing to do. Many people want to do exactly that! (Although I think we agree that the number of people is unlikely to be enough to be truly disruptive.)

> Maybe Substack will go the Medium way and try to aggregate

Very possibly, but if so, I expect the people enjoying their current business model will simply migrate to a competitor. $5/month for a writer I truly love is a reasonable ask. $5/month split across six writers, only one of whom I particular care for is in many ways less attractive; I may be getting more writing but the writer is getting less.

Aggregation is not obviously the only business model that makes sense here, and I think Medium - and come to that, the news industry as a whole - shows off its weaknesses very clearly.

I think the real weakness of Substack is not that "nobody wants what they're selling", but that they have very little moat. Substack doesn't need to worry that Yglesias will realise that actually he hates making more money than the entire NYT editorial board combined and quits blogging to go back to the traditional media; Substack needs to worry that he'll jump to his own platform and avoid their fairly hefty monthly cut.

>...actually, I'd VASTLY rather pay a small monthly fee to a small number of writers I care about, than a larger fee for a collection of writers that I don't.

This is the norm, I think. Surprise surprise nobody really wants the shopping channel or the landline that comes with their broadband either.

Newspapers are well aware of the threats of unbundling. It's one of the reasons why the Economist doesn't have bylines, for instance: writers have to remain a commodity.

The Economist doesn't have bylines because that wasn't really the norm at the time when they started out. Your point--that reporting shouldn't be primarily about individual credibility--does apply though.

While, in theory, picking and choosing for opinion/analysis (as opposed to news) is valid, in practice there are limits. It basically works for me with video streaming because I'm fine with having a limited number of streaming sources. I'm not sure I would be with $1/month for newsletters much less pay-per-article.

The model works for you for streaming, and the same logic will apply here.

I can easily get “the news” like you have access to TV or YouTube with similar content to streaming sites. But if you want niche subjects or specific voices, then sub stack subscriptions for the niches you care about makes sense

Historically, there were (and to some degree are) a ton of physical magazines and sometimes newsletters catering to sometimes very niche content. I subscribed to a folding kayak newsletter at one point as well as various cooking/backpacking/etc. magazines.

But Substack content seems to be much more about "voices" as you put it and that I'm far less interested in.

>The Economist doesn't have bylines because that wasn't really the norm at the time when they started out.

A position they held steadfast to when newspapers unionized and it became the norm. Their reliance on surprisingly young journalists (kind of like consultancy bodyshops that recruit out of uni) is one reason they were able to avoid them.

Newspapers have often been threatened by their more popular contributors leaving and taking subscribers with them.

They'd therefore never introduce bylines if they had the leverage relative to their journalists to avoid it just as McDonalds wouldnt offer free daycare if it werent struggling to hire and tech wouldnt offer free food and lavish comps.

>Your point--that reporting shouldn't be primarily about individual credibility

That doesnt seem like a point I would ever make.

I mean, you can justify it "in principle" however you like, the economics boil down to the relative leverage of management and journalists. Bylines function as an asset (reputation) that journalists can, in a sense, capitalize and gives them the leverage to take subscribers elsewhere allowing them to negotiate a greater share of the newspaper revenue (lowering profits).

How many people can name a single hard news reporter (as opposed to opinion writer or editor) at the New York Times? I couldn't and I subscribe.

Interestingly they've been shrinking their byline font size throughout the years.

I can't say I've made a study of the New York Times specifically. But there was definitely a period in the mid-2000s when it was trendy to play up the individual personalities and work of journalists, analysts, etc. At some point, organizations came to realize this wasn't mostly doing the organization any favors and this sort of thing was mostly pulled back.

They always "knew" that it hit them in the profit margin but the journalistic talent had more leverage back then, newspaper margins weren't as thin and growth prospects werent as meager.

If tech has a bad decade no doubt theyll suddenly "realize" that free breakfasts arent doing them any favors and scale them back.

> It's one of the reasons why the Economist doesn't have bylines, for instance: writers have to remain a commodity.

Do you have any evidence to support this claim? I don’t think this is true.

Except the way this is shaking out is that paying a small fee for the unbundled channels (or writers, etc) you _do_ want ends up costing more than the bundle did. Not to mention the overhead of managing a million subscriptions to different companies.

The model only really works if there are 1 or 3 writers that you really want for whatever reason. But it doesn't really scale beyond that.

This reminds me of the market for DVDs, which found a big disconnect between the shows with big ratings on live TV and the shows that sold a ton of DVDs. The former tended to be anodyne comedies, the latter were niche shows with a harder edge.

When there's only three channels or a single local newspaper, you get content that is appealing or at least acceptable to the mass market. The smaller the market, the more extreme the content. When you get to the level of individual writers, I think there's an inevitable radicalization when people only pay for content that really really targets their idiosyncratic interests.

6 writers you care about okay but where can investigative pieces that take months or years to create fit into that?

We’d need 10x that number, pay like 60 writers if we want to read articles that have actual research on a weekly basis, not a daily basis.

> where can investigative pieces that take months or years to create fit into that?

They don't. The problem is, they don't fit in ANYWHERE. Nobody wants to pay for that, and in fact, nobody ever has. As has been documented ad infinitum at this point, serious, long form, investigative journalism has always been cross-subsidised from other revenue streams, because at no point has their been an audience willing to pay the actual cost of investigative journalism.

Traditionally the funds came from advertising, particularly classified ads, but classified ad revenue died...what, over two decades ago now? Print advertisement revenue followed, the weird shift so many newspapers tried into video was an embarrassing disaster, and here we are, 20+ years of flailing later and no replacements visible.

Will Substack solve this? Absolutely not. Hell, by continuing the great unbundling it might make it worse by undermining the revenue stream for the 2-3 newspapers still trying to make a go of it.

Which is, ultimately, my point: Your argument seems to be "unbundling will fail, because it won't pay for the high quality journalism people want". My argument is "unbundling will succeed, because people don't want to pay for high quality journalism".

No my argument isn’t that substack will fail, my point is that if it succeeds it will be deleterious to society by further defunding real journalism, which is barely funded. Like you say, very few newspapers are doing real, long term investigate reporting. Usually they win pulitzers when they actually do.

And substack is just another platform for people with grudges and conspiracy theories to promote themselves on.

Substack has 250,000 paying subscribers and its top 10 writers bring in $7m total per year, according to Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/falonfatemi/2021/01/20/the-rise...). We might guess that each subscriber pays $10/month, which would add up to $30m annual revenue.

The New York Times alone has 7m paying subscribers (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/business/media/new-york-t...). The cheapest subscription is 50c per week, so that's at least $182m revenue per year (in fact that's an introductory offer and the standard rate is four times that).

But Substack is growing! Yes, but so is NYT. In fact it signed up half a million new subscribers, double Substack's total, in the first quarter of 2020 alone (https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/the-new-york-times-success...).

Maybe the NYT is too ambitious a target. OK: the LA Times, which is "in crisis", has 356,000 digital subscribers (https://www.thewrap.com/los-angeles-times-crisis-stalled-sub...).

So, I'd say your argument is not proven yet. Wanna take a bet on when Substack total subscriptions will overtake the NYT?

You're assuming that people care about the output of 20 writers though. Probably they don't.

You need dozens or hundreds of substitutable writers under a single roof if you're reporting factual updates about a concrete situation as quickly as possible. Natural disasters, elections, sports, law changes, etc. Substack is for analysis and commentary. Traditional newspapers also bundle a handful of "superstar" writers along with their news, but many of those writers aren't very good and especially in the past 8 years many of the better ones have been purged because the best analysis requires free thinking, but free thinking is incompatible with a hard left takeover of an institution. It's no coincidence that Substack's top earning writers like Greenwald, Taibbi, Scott Alexander have all been purged from other media outlets for their un-woke writing: there is demand for such analysis but newspapers are trying to extinguish it. In Taibbi's case he was pushed out of the media outlet he himself founded! Substack is now monetizing this demand, apparently, very successfully (the deals they cut with those writers have supposedly all been very profitable for Substack).

I get it why readers can't pay individual writers in the newspaper world. That's because it only makes sense to print and deliver one kind of identical newspaper and deliver that to everyone. The printing is done with plates. You make one plate per page (well a few pages at a time) and you use that plate to print thousands of copies of the page. The page contains an assortment of articles. The newspaper is physically delivered to homes and news stands.

Now we're in the internet. There are no such constraints. Why not just pay directly per article?

Spotify for example collects money but distributes it to artists, per-listen. Spotify has basically almost all the music in the world. And other services have it too. Anybody can upload to Spotify or Apple Music or Tidal or what you have. So Spotify is not really doing curating or having a quality standards or an editor anything, like a newspaper, it's just a way to collect and distribute money.

There is the still-unloved problem of curation. You could use humans for good curation but discoverability is quite bad.

(Edit: yes in the newspaper world there is the syndication, Reuters, AFP etc, too, and staff writers etc, it's a bit more complicated.)

I'm sure a columnist would find a way to make this work, but the typical journalist adapting a report from AP or Reuters won't.

No, that's the problem.

If I want to listen to Lady Gaga, I can do that from any of the music services. The artist gets a cut from my monthly payment to whichever service I use.

If I want to read an article about traveling to Iceland during Covid times and it's in Washington Post while I subscribe to the New York Times, I can't, unless I subscribe to the Washington Post.

Maybe a writer writing to NYT does get money according to the amount of clicks to their article. Some articles can even be free and the money comes from ad revenue. But it's still a small walled garden. People just don't get to see many well written articles because they are locked behind this small garden paywall and most people don't want to pay the entrance fee.

How about a "Writer Money Distribution service". People could subscribe to it. You could build a curated edited newspaper out of such articles, if you wanted. But a user could also read any article, and they would know that their monthly money would be distributed to the writers according to the what they did read. There could be even multiple services and the same writer could publish to multiple with no exclusivity clause.

Edit: Hell, Hacker News is one excellent article curation service that has supplanted the place of a newspaper. But there's no revenue feedback mechanism. What does the writer benefit from being linked to from HN? Many people use some go-around-the-paywall service since they don't want to subscribe, which indeed would be irrational for only a few articles every now and then.

The problem in your analogy is you don’t think Lady Gaga is worth paying close attention to. Substack’s proposition is that an individual writer has an audience willing to pay to read much or all of what the writer publishes. It’s not a business model seeking dabblers on either side of the transaction.

Good way of putting it. Substack, as currently positioned, is for people who are sufficiently motivated to pay the equivalent of a traditional magazine subscription for maybe a few writers who produce engaging content, presumably on a frequent basis, that they find worth paying for relative to free alternatives.

I assume Substack payouts are very power law.

Pandora.com, which launched in 2000, predating Spotify by 6 years, did a really good with discoverability. That was actually their primary feature - customizable radio stations, that you'd seed with a specific suggestion, and then further curate with a thumbs up/thumbs down. If you put in some time and effort, the stations would get really good at knowing what you liked, and would introduce new music. Spotify's radio feature is a poor shadow of this feature. (Soundcloud's is even worse.)

Because it's music, and not written text, and thus on in the background, having an 80/20 (or whatever) split for old/new music was really great for discovering new music that's similar.

TikTok solved discoverability for brief video clips, but they demand full attention. Basically the opposite of music.

Discoverability for the written word is a bit more complex, especially for long form articles.

(Pandora's backend implementation irrelevant here. Pandora predates the popularity of ML, so I presume there was a lot of human effort going on behind the scenes to make it work so well.)

pandora used the music genome project to get so good:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project

I think it mostly comes down to having way too much cognitive overhead. All the options I've seen presented just require far too many value decisions too frequently. Once nice bundle I can be quite sure of is just requires so much less thinking. It's even better because I can frame it in my head as exchanging money for a physical thing, and then I can do whatever I want with that physical thing - including ignore it.

Micropayments really suffer from this constantly. So much so that I think the value of the content goes negative once you factor in the costs to decide if you want to pay for it and then the costs of paying for it (mostly not monetary costs). Individual subscriptions (aka Patreon) bulk them all together at once and will just keep happening so you better keep on top of them.

The main alternative that doesn't quite suffer from this is the model of a single payment that gets smeared automatically across everything. I chuck in $X/month and it gets automatically distributed to all the sites I've visted somehow. I think this suffers from different problems. Namely that I probably don't want to pay in proportion to time spent or pages viewed but value. My money would probably end up largely going to the big companies and not so much to the little guys, while I'd probably personally choose the opposite proportions. And other times there are websites you've visited that you definitely don't want to give money to, because they managed to SEO their utterly useless page into your search results, or whatever. So now you have to go deal with that, or else pay them for troubling you.

And then before long you've gotten so deep into engineering how this payment gets distributed that you're practically at the level of micropayments anyway.

And then you start considering things like privacy, or issues with payment processors caring about content and... it all just gets far too messy.

At least you could have reputable aggregators or "raters" for these kind of articles.

Absolutely! You could have a single aggregator which selects different articles and publishes them. It would stake its reputation on the quality of its journalism. Writers would compete to get into the best aggregator. This is a great idea. Needs a name. How about "newspaper"?

You probably would need to get to some sort of aggregator with either a fixed or max monthly fee. The problem at that point is that no one who can attract a significant number of subscribers on their own will participate. Imagine a newspaper/magazine subscription that the NYT, WSJ, Post, New Yorker, Bloomberg, Atlantic, etc. don't participate in.

And then you have the streaming video issue. Aggregator A has this writer but not that writer, etc.

The writer could just say that in addition to this article being published in NYT, I will retain the right to publish it on aggregator A and B. I don't expect the newspapers to participate.

What's different about news and music is that there's not so much interest in the back catalog in news. So publishers could have less power than record companies.

Regarding streaming, again, that's only a problem if there is exclusivity.

>The writer could just say that in addition to this article being published in NYT, I will retain the right to publish it on aggregator A and B. I don't expect the newspapers to participate.

You do have that with syndicated columns, cartoons, wire service copy, etc. Although the NYT uses less of that sort of content than many papers do.

Yes, but not from a consumer point of view. If I want to read those AFP and Reuters stories, I still have to go to a select small paywalled garden, ie I can't get all of them with one monthly payment.

It's a different topology from Spotify and Apple Music.

I would like a "Build your own magazine" type deal. Let me configure a list of the writers I want to read and give me a sizable discount on the subscription or a bundled deal. I don't want to pay 10 dollars a month to each of 20 writers, but I would pay 20 dollars a month to read and support 20 writers.

The writers you're most likely to want to read – the top-earning writers – have already demonstrated (through Substack) that they can easily acquire an audience of tens of thousands of subscribers by charging $5-10 dollars per month for themselves. Why would they participate in the bundle you're suggesting?

Advertising? Have some articles be part of the bundle as a "preview", and most articles behind an individual subscription?

This idea of building your own newspaper sounds kind of interesting actually: a mix of authors you've picked and an automatically curated content from other authors to help you find new authors.

The problem with this type of thing (channel unbundling has the same problem), is the finance doesn't work out.

After someone has written something / produced a TV channel, sending it to one more person costs basically nothing.

So, if (making up some simple numbers) there are 100 writers who want paying $10 each, and 100 customers who want to pay $10 each, you can:

* Charge each customer $10 and let them read every writer (most of which they won't want)

* Charge each customer $1 a writer, then they get to read 10 writers.

* Charge each customer $10 a writer, then they get to read 1 writer.

People often say they want to pay a smaller amount for a subset of content, not realising that if everyone does that, you just end up spending the same amount as you started, on a subset of content.

This is what excites me about the proposed W3 Web Monetization standard. I don't want to establish a billing relationship with every creator whose content I value.

Have a wallet that's loaded with value, send out payments for every second you spend with a creator's work.

https://coil.com and https://WebMonetization.org

The idea is quite old, Flattr has been doing something similar for 11 years now. The UI is a bit less polished though. https://flattr.com/

Thank you! I'm in the same boat and think that it's a great potential way forward, with very little friction - it can work on any random blog without me having to trust them with my payment details. I hope more people pick up on it ( and tried to help with an article that somehow got to #1 on HN, but the comments were mostly negative)

> for every second you spend with a creator's work

Time spend is a really bad metric since it can easily be gamed. For non-entertainment content time spent could oven correlate negatively with value.

Totally agree with this. We'll just end up with more waffling long form content packed with videos and distractions to encourage users to spend more time trying to find what they were originally looking for.

And if you're charged by time spent on a page it makes sense to use a bot to download the pages you want to read and then render them locally.

If I'm paying per second I can download something that would take me 5 minutes to read in 5 seconds, saving me 59/60ths of the cost.

That's if you assume a static set of readers and writers and fixed prices.

If every reader gets to choose which writers get their money, the least popular writers will get nothing and the most popular ones will get much more than they expected.

Then the writers who got nothing will presumably give up, thus increasing the average attractiveness of content on the platform. Meanwhile, the most popular writers can adjust their expected compensation upward but still lower the price per reader, thus increasing their readership even more.

On the other hand, if you're paying a flat fee to read anything you want, you'll be subsidizing a whole lot of crap you don't want, without a feedback channel to correct that.

The problem is with fixing the prices on the sellers end. You’re leaving money on the table by not allowing for price negotiation. A set price essentially tells everyone below that price point that your store is closed so don’t even bother. It also gives away your content at a discount to those who would gladly pay more.

Which is the case for 99% of things that are sold whether physically or digitally. Because, in general, at least in the West, most people don't want their days to be endless successions of bargaining where only the best and most persistent negotiators get good deals.

I certainly don't want to negotiate every time I want to read an article. Heck, I don't want to decide to pay a fixed amount every time I want to read an article.

I wasn’t touting haggling, I meant a name your price model.

We basically have channel unbundling now though don’t we? Netflix, Hulu, Prime, Disney+, HBOMax, etc. It works for the most part. And it’s cheaper than what Comcast charges for cable.

It probably is cheaper if you ditch live TV (like I did)--or can get it over the air. If you add a $60-ish live TV subscription, without sport adders, it isn't especially.

I wonder how much of that is currently being heavily subsidized, and prices will rise. One significant difference is access to old content -- we might just not need anywhere near as much new content, which will makes things cheaper in the future.

> The logic is simple: an individual writer is always relatively niche. Niche means small audience. Small audience means you have to charge more per person to cover your costs.

I guess the question is does that model work? Rather than catering to a generalist audience focus on a niche and charge more to people who can't get that content anywhere else.

Free content then plays to the more generalist audience and helps attract people who are more seriously interested in your niche.

I started doing this with my substack, which is aimed at the relatively narrow niche of sequencing technologies (biotech). The information I provide, isn't really available elsewhere and requires an industry background, and significant research. This information can play into investment decisions, so I've priced it to reflect that (~$50/m).

I don't have enough paid subscribers to justify the effort yet. But every paid subscriber provides some meaningful amount of money...

I could see this working in other areas too. I'm not sure the niche even needs to be super small. For example, English language reporting on Japan is generally pretty bad. Could you find at least 200 people worldwide willing to pay $50/m for detailed well sourced reporting on Japan? It seems likely to me...

It doesn't even matter if those 200 people republish your work in some form. They're paying privilege of getting that information first.

Just to play devil’s advocate: anytime a new idea comes along there will always be someone advocating for the status quo, and that the status quo is inevitable.

I am reminded of the financial commentator on the radio in the early 2000’s predicting that Amazon would fail because it had stopped offering free shipping.

Time will tell. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I’m rooting for substack.

In fairness free shipping with Prime is a cornerstone of Amazon's business model these days.

Rather importantly it's not free shipping, you're merely paying a discounted rate for shipping. You get cheaper shipping, Amazon gets increased customer retention by getting you to make an upfront financial outlay for future shipping use (which the customer then feels compelled to try to get the most out of).

If Amazon made Prime free for everyone and kept their retail prices unchanged, there'd be a good argument for saying it's free shipping.

"The key issue is that people don't want to pay $2/month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20/month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a "newspaper"."

That is not my experience at all. Buying a newspaper where you are only interested in 15 % of the content is like buying an entire CD with perhaps two really good songs. This model used to be the norm, but consumers hated it and it is becoming obsolete.

The winning model is all-you-can-eat subscriptions. Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Video, Disney+ don't offer subscriptions by singer, by actor, by screenwriter, or by director.

> They want to pay $20/month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a "newspaper".

I think the demise of the publishing industry proves this point comically incorrect!

Basically most people don't want to pay period. Very few are paying $2/month for individuals either.

ADDED: Of course, very few is not no one. "Very few" people in the scheme of things buy a lot of books either but some authors make a lot of money. But if you're betting on how much money a book will bring in, don't give up your day job. And, with respect to journalism, the bar is even higher if you're talking investigative journalism that may not produce results for many months if ever.

I'd say only because there haven't been any good options yet.

I happily paid for Blendle as long as they had my best interest in mind (refundable) and only didn't pay more because there wasn't more relevant articles for me.

I'll happily pay for substack etc as well if there is something really interesting, but it either needs to be very interesting, small amounts or someone needs to come along with a real all-you-can-read-model like Spotify.

Ideally I want the option to pay pr piece, or pay a bit more for all todays posts from a channel (newspaper).

Free is preferable, but if required to pay, I want to pay as little as possible and only for what I want.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/the-new-york-times-success...

A very similar argument could have been applied to travel agents a generation+ ago. There was a single bill to pay instead of booking your own hotel, flights, cruise, rental car, etc, etc.

It turns out that many (not all) people are willing, able, and actively want to make the choices to curate their experience and see what happens. Yes, it's more work but it's probably closer to what they want.. OR if they miss, it's on them with few others to blame.

We've reached the point where there is SO much noise and the algorithms are optimized to feed you more noise that people suffer. In some cases, it manifests as the constant anxiety and stress of "omg this thing happened!" while in others, it's just the constant interruptions.

Regardless, I suspect we're going to see the pendulum swing back and we'll see strategic disconnection to filter out the noise, chaos, and BS. If that's correct, Substack nailed the timing and should do well for quite a while to come.

> The problem is that the NYT, Guardian, Mail etc. have a lot of experience at doing aggregation well.

Depending on what you mean by "well". I haven't "read" the newspaper in any traditional sense - i.e. reading it as a whole product, not picking a single article - in decades. I haven't subscribed to a traditional newspaper (I exclude special interest magazines) for even longer. I know for a fact that the work of real journalists (investigative, etc.) is being routinely suppressed or restricted by their major newspaper employees because of reasons having nothing to do with reporting. I am getting much more high-quality content from independent journalists (including Substack ones, but not only) and writers than I could ever have found in any newspaper. I struggle to find anything that traditional newspapers like NYT do "well" for me. They have a variety of topics? Who cares. If I'm interested in what a certain author has to say or in a certain topic - which rarely happens with NYT nowdays, but nevertheless - I don't care who pays the salary to the writer. I know that there's no chance a single subscription - or even several of them - would cover even part of my interests, I'd be needing my hundreds-strong RSS feed anyway. So what's the point? What exactly is being done well there?

“ The logic is simple: an individual writer is always relatively niche. Niche means small audience. Small audience means you have to charge more per person to cover your costs.”

Except, with the Internet you don’t have physical/geographical constraints for distribution and suddenly a niche audience, at a global level, is not so niche. And it makes it a viable model, a thousand people paying $5/mo and all of a sudden you are making more than most journalists AND with much greater freedom of expression

> The key issue is that people don't want to pay $2/month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20/month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a "newspaper".

My experience is the opposite. I get the Boston Globe delivered every Sunday. It's fine. I flip through it. Occasionally there's a story I care a lot about. Some weeks there's nothing. I read it mostly because I feel loosely obligated to try to keep up with current events.

On the other hand, I subscribe to Matthew Yglesias's Substack and the hit rate is like 85%. Nearly every article perfectly aligns with one or more of my interests. His policy focus almost exactly overlaps my policy interests. It's kind of uncanny.

If I had to cancel one or the other it's really not even close.

Also, the psychology of most people's internet browsing is that of a casual, enjoyable activity undertaken to escape from whatever else they're doing, with only a few moments spent reading a typical article.

Insert a purchase decision into that flowful sesh (even for as little as a penny) and most will find it more relaxing to just instead go and click on one of the many free articles at their disposal being served up by free aggregators (like this one).

These debates always pop up here with little awareness that the newspaper industry tried micropayments 20 years ago and it didn't work. Paywalls were discovered in 2011 or so, they worked, and that's pretty much been that.

Source: I founded a micropayments company in 2002 and worked at a newspaper 2009-2013.

The problem with aggregation is that there is a regression to clickbait. If I charge 20 dollars per month to access the work of 1k writers and pay the writers based on views/production. Then I will pay the most prolific/clickable writers at the expense of quality.

Paying more for a smaller collection of writers may provide me more value.

A bundle deal would be cool. But I'd prefer to pay the $20/month to read x articles regardless of who writes them.

Agree. That way you can discover new writers that you will come to like.

Or even better $10 for n tokens, $20 for n * 2,5 tokens, $30 for n*3 tokens or something to that effect.

Charge me monthly to to up but not if I have more than m unspent tokens.

I pay for some subscriptions on Substack. I get access to writing I will not find elsewhere. I think the article is missing one important point. Specifically, all journalists read and reprint each other. Strong independent authors on Substack influence rest of media. Kind of surprising that the author(an insider) fails to see this

I’m not so sure. Substack is clearly not blogging as I can’t remember the last time I paid for a blog.

And the financial returns are real. I vaguely recall someone, Glenn maybe, who shared they had 6,000 subscribers at $60 per year or $360,000 in income. Clearly more than enough to sustain a writer.

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