The model of Spotify in particular - paid tier alongside a free tier with ads - seems like the simplest sustainable solution I see. Having paid features is the most obvious way to make money, but you want to enable adoption as much as you can. It's the same idea as companies dangling "free trial" in front of you at every turn - in a competitive environment, you want to remove barriers for users to try your product or service. This is essentially the idea of a "loss leader" for a grocery store, or any business really.

Around 1941, Barzun took on a larger classroom, becoming the moderator of the CBS radio program “Invitation to Learning,” which aired on Sunday mornings and featured four or five intellectual lights discussing books. From commenting on books, it was, apparently, a short step to selling them. In 1951, Barzun, Trilling, and W. H. Auden started up the Readers’ Subscription Book Club, writing monthly appreciations of books that they thought the public would benefit from reading. The club lasted for eleven years, partly on the strength of the recommended books, which ranged from Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows” to Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition,” and partly on the strength of the editors’ reputations.

Substack has now sold 1 million subscriptions to mostly individual publishers.

Inclusion however is a concept in OPML: I can add a list as a new branch in another list. If you do that once you only clone a list, and go your own seperate way again. You could also do it dynamically, where you always re-import the other list into your own. Doing it dynamically is a de-facto subscription. For both however, changes in the imported list are non-obvious.

“paying for the regular delivery of well-defined value” — are so important. I defined every part of that phrase: Paying: A subscription is an ongoing commitment to the production of content, not a one-off payment for one piece of content that catches the eye. Regular Delivery: A subscriber does not need to depend on the random discovery of content; said content can be delivered to to the subscriber directly, whether that be email, a bookmark, or an app. Well-defined Value: A subscriber needs to know what they are paying for, and it needs to be worth it.

It is very important to clearly define what a subscriptions means. First, it’s not a donation: it is asking a customer to pay money for a product. What, then, is the product? It is not, in fact, any one article (a point that is missed by the misguided focus on micro-transactions). Rather, a subscriber is paying for the regular delivery of well-defined value. The importance of this distinction stems directly from the economics involved: the marginal cost of any one Stratechery article is $0. After all, it is simply text on a screen, a few bits flipped in a costless arrangement. It makes about as much sense to sell those bit-flipping configurations as it does to sell, say, an MP3, costlessly copied. So you need to sell something different. In the case of MP3s, what the music industry finally learned — after years of kicking and screaming about how terribly unfair it was that people “stole” their music, which didn’t actually make sense because digital goods are non-rivalrous — is that they should sell convenience. If streaming music is free on a marginal cost basis, why not deliver all of the music to all of the customers for a monthly fee? This is the same idea behind nearly every large consumer-facing web service: Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, Google, etc. are all predicated on the idea that content is free to deliver, and consumers should have access to as much as possible. Of course how they monetize that convenience differs: Netflix has subscriptions, while Google, YouTube, and Facebook deliver ads (the latter two also leverage the fact that content is free to create). None of them, though, sell discrete digital goods. It just doesn’t make sense.

he Reading Fee is pric

shared mobility, connectivity services, and feature upgrades, new business models could expand automotive revenue pools by about 30 percent, adding up to $1.5 trillion.

In the front row, an older lady was reading Summer's End by Danielle Steele.

A Dream in the Dark is a collection of twelve digital live albums spanning two decades – from Okkervil River’s earliest shows up to the present day. It presents a comprehensive history of the band through the lens of concerts instead of studio albums, and it draws from a massive archive of recordings catalogued by Will Sheff and by fans throughout the years.