Re:Condé Nast to Put All Titles Behind Paywalls by Year End
by klingebeil on Thursday January 24, 2019 @08:36AM
(#18988489)
News media does not operate at the scale of Netflix or Spotify, etc. Spotify has about 87 million paying users, Netflix around 150 million. The New York Times has around 4 million. That‘s a huge difference in scale alone. And the NYT is the exception, not the rule.
Journalism is expensive. Really expensive, if you want quality. More so, if you want some great investigative reporting.
So, yes subscriptions are mostly structured around the needs of the media company, not the needs of the consumer. No one is assuming, the "internet" is different. The economics of journalism just don‘t care.
You're completely right - business needs revenue.
What I'm pointing to here is that the way subscriptions are structured and priced doesn't match the way media is consumed. It's like if beer was only available in kegs or in free samples, because nobody had hit on any other approach. It's a sign that the assumptions about user behavior no longer hold.
I mean, I understand that newspapers with print editions often rely on those regular subscribers to the dead-tree ones. But it seems weird to base your business model around assuming that the internet is not different.