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'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.
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/
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]
And a Substack for his newsletter: https://gwern.substack.com/ (AFAIK this is free though)
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.
> 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
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.
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.
Wait, what? Is this the yearly figure? A subscription to the NYT cost >$500/year? Who the hell pays that much for a newspaper?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
In these conditions, quality and satisfaction of a niche is more important than quantity (though quantity has a quality of its own)
Source: I'm over the hill. now get off my lawn.
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.