Isn't this the same as "I'll listen to the song, why buy the album"?

NatGeo was basically a middle-brow collection of interesting stuff. Not every article was interesting to you, maybe you like animals, maybe you liked maps, maybe you liked pictures of some tribe. You'd read the article that excited you and perhaps squeeze a bit of juice out of the rest of it.

Nowadays I have HN. There's a whole bunch of stuff, I can never read it all, there's pictures in all the links, and there's a few interesting articles each day that keep me coming back.

And it's free.

What's the point in buying a content aggregator when I can see a variety of stuff from Aeon/Quanta/bunch of blogs for nothing at all?