Re:The subscription-pocalypse
by onion2k on Monday January 28, 2019 @06:25AM
(#19016625)
Yet people were subscribed to a daily paper, 1 or 2 monthly magazines and a cable package with added charges for sports channels.
I think true, but I also think it's likely that there's an upper limit to the number of subscriptions someone will accept. In the past having a newspaper, a couple of magazines, and a TV service meant you had to manage ~4 subs, but today people are being pushed towards having a music service, several TV services, a gaming service, some sports channels, maybe a pay-for podcast, a news website. That's a lot of cognitive load. If there's an upper limit people will hit it fast, and anything that provides minimal utility is going to get cancelled. If your service only provides a handful of TV shows (eg HBO) it's likely to lose out to, say, Netflix that provides hundreds. That raises the question of whether or not these smaller subscription services will ever work in today's world.
It's also true that people won't accept two things that provide similar services. No one is buying Apple Music and Spotify if they can help it. Once the market is saturated services are going to go hard on getting people to switch in order to grow, which is an expensive way to get new customers. It could be that the cost of getting someone to move from one to another is more than the lifetime value of that customer, and that throws a big spanner in the market economics of running such a service.
I think true, but I also think it's likely that there's an upper limit to the number of subscriptions someone will accept. In the past having a newspaper, a couple of magazines, and a TV service meant you had to manage ~4 subs, but today people are being pushed towards having a music service, several TV services, a gaming service, some sports channels, maybe a pay-for podcast, a news website. That's a lot of cognitive load. If there's an upper limit people will hit it fast, and anything that provides minimal utility is going to get cancelled. If your service only provides a handful of TV shows (eg HBO) it's likely to lose out to, say, Netflix that provides hundreds. That raises the question of whether or not these smaller subscription services will ever work in today's world.
It's also true that people won't accept two things that provide similar services. No one is buying Apple Music and Spotify if they can help it. Once the market is saturated services are going to go hard on getting people to switch in order to grow, which is an expensive way to get new customers. It could be that the cost of getting someone to move from one to another is more than the lifetime value of that customer, and that throws a big spanner in the market economics of running such a service.