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How much money should someone need to spend online to have full access to creator content?
In Freddie daBoer's recent interesting post contrasting the intrusive ad model with paid content model I find myself nodding along mostly but I didn't come away completely convinced. This post is mostly my unorganized thoughts after reading this piece. I understand and am sympathetic to the need of professional writers to earn an actually living if we want them to be able to write full time, and a good one at that given their importance as sense makers. And I do think the ad model is quite toxic.
What I mainly have problems with is the extremeness of each option. If this cnbc report is to be believed online advertisers spend around $140 billion dollars a year, divided naively and entirely among the 250 million American adults gives us the very rough estimate of $560 per year. The number feels intuitively close but I think the point stands even if it is off by quite a bit. So if I decide to pay the rate the advertisers were paying for my access to various sites how far does $560/year get me. We can start at a premium daBoer substack subscription at a seemingly reasonable $50/year, Scott Alexander is asking for $100/year and we're already at nearly a fourth of our budget!
The difference is conversion rate. DaBoer, Scott and the NYT are all aware that the vast majority of their ad based readers are not going to fork over for the premium model, the ones that do seem able to easily make up the difference for many writers and content creators but I'm less convinced than daBoer that this is a sustainable solution. I do subscribe to some writers and content creators that I like but I like far too many such that if each put up a $5/month paywall, even with a generous software engineer salary I'd have to start picking and choosing very quickly.
It's more than reasonable for writers to optimize for the total amount of dollars flowing into their wallet each month but we should be aware that this is actually quite bad for readers and the open internet in general. Some of the magic of the internet is that we're able to plug into a global conversation and as more and more paywalls go up that conversation becomes more fragment and trying to follow a thread can become increasingly frustrating. This probably doesn't matter much for pure entertainment content but for sense makers and political writers who at least purport to trying to educate and persuade the general population this could exacerbate the process of creating echo chambers and keeping good arguments away from who most needs to read them.
Think of the children! I still remember a time when I was young on the internet with no credit card. It's all good and well to expect adults to pay their way but much like the poor kids don't have income at all, disposable or otherwise. The internet kids are going to come up in under Freddies paradigm is very unlike the open and free internet I grew up with. I think in many ways for the worse.
Freddie only really touches on the phenomenon from the perspective of someone who is also writing a blog,
Makes some sense from the perspective of someone who floats around and comments on things but works less well for communities like this one where we come together and discuss articles. It's one thing to as a writer choose not to comment on something paywalled to save the money but being locked out of these secondary discussions is a larger cost.
This is perhaps the thing that most frustrates me. I'm the type of person who would rather buy a piece of media I'm only going to consume once than rent it just in case I ever want to return to it. I actually quite dislike the model where I pay someone for temporary access to something.
A potential solution is ads plus a paid membership to remove them, something like how the basic attention token works where you can decide how intrusive to make ads and get paid in the token from the advertiser to be used to forward on to some content creator. You can either endure enough ads to afford access or turn off ads and load your BAT wallet occasionally with real $. Perhaps another option is bundling in the direction the TV networks go. Maybe I should be able to subscribe to the rationalist diaspora a la cart or get them all for $40/month distributed according to how much some central entity thinks they draw new subscribers.
What does the motte think about paywalls and potential alternatives.
At the risk of taking made-up numbers too far, it may be worth looking at this the other directions. 560 USD/year means an individual content creator could get 80K annual income from 145 full-paying members, from 8000 1-USD/year members, or from 16000 5-USD/year members. A person putting forward 5 USD/year per creator would have 112 separate subscriptions. And 80k USD is actually almost twice the average journalist pay, albeit with the recognition that it's a Pareto field on pay as well as on consumption.
((For sanity check, Fek is getting something around 1100 subscribers averaging 10 USD/month despite largely having put his main project on the backburner for a few years now. Although his main project is a furry bondage simulator.))
I don't want to put too much weight on Dunbar numbers, but I'm pretty skeptical that most people could (or would want) to keep up with that level of pay-worthy output at length. Yes, there are people who religiously read every column in a newspaper, or who finish full books on a weekly basis, but if you're not doing that now, I'm skeptical that Substack will be the change you need in the world to get there.
I think there's an underlying tension between "entertainment" and "sense-makers", not solely relevant to this discussion, and "sense-makers" don't really make sense within the business model he's proposing. Not because you're incapable of paying 500 USD/year for a hundred experts: because I'm not going to pay 5 USD/year for someone I don't already trust to some extent. "Sense-making" in the sense of attracting large communities talking about first responses to random people aren't really compatible with that -- indeed, you'll often find that 'sense-making' often benefits a lot from responding to people who aren't worth paying.
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To me, the top of your post seems like you're just describing the equilibrium we've achieved, and it's not the worst one - advertisers pay to have their ads displayed alongside creators' content. Of course, perverse incentives take their toll, but the moment you start crafting content to advertise to advertisers, you're playing against the house. Sure, it might work for a quarter or two, but that's you trading on your good name, and you'll be eaten by the next generation of creators that don't need to beg for ad money - until they do the same as you, and get eaten by gen3.
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I feel already overstuffed with opinions and uneasy with my online think piece consumption rate, and if this article were behind a paywall I would immediately forget it existed. Freddie and the NYT are, of course, entitled to charge for their content, but I will then simply ignore it and feel mildly annoyed when it comes up in a search.
There's a tipping point somewhere. Lately I've noticed having to wade through five page essays interspersed with huge photos and video ads to view recipes online. This freezes up my phone, which is a problem sine I'm mostly looking recipes up at the store to see what to buy. There's likely some level of inconvenience at which I will actually start buying physical printed cookbooks again. Physical cookbooks would come up as a solution before subscribing to a food substack, though I could imagine someone else doing that and it making sense for them. I subscribed to New Masters Academy videos for a couple months, and didn't feel cheated.
There are enjoyable and useful ways to deliver advertising content. Unboxing videos are surprisingly popular. I like to read subscription box review sites, which are full of affiliate links and paid content. This seems fine, since I'm considering getting a curated selection of cocktail mixers or whatever, and the site will inform me of which ones are on offer that month and if there are any specials or not. Often I prefer these articles to those written by the NYT.
Facebook ads seem about right -- they're clearly ads, but are for things I would actually consider buying, and occasionally do buy, and do not feel tricked. Youtube ads are worse, and seem to be getting worse every year or so; I'm not sure if there's a point at which I would pay for Youtube premium, but it's probably good that they provide the option.
If I had to choose between an internet hiding behind paywalls, and an internet full of obnoxious ads, I would probably choose the ads. There was one website where I was trying to read an article about Roundup, and the text kept moving when the ads changed shape, jumping around erratically, and I would lose my place. Eventually I saved it to PDF, which solved the problem. I would certainly not have paid money for the article, and very certainly wouldn't have subscribed to anything for it. I would rather see Freddie's Substack marred by even shady lottery animation than not be able to see it at all without subscribing (which I wouldn't do, because of the automatic renewal and having to remember to cancel aspect of that). But can certainly see how he would prefer subscriptions.
Apropos of cook books:
If you haven't already, all the Kimball produced books and magazines are excellent. Not full of room for expression, but reliable recipes that don't ask you to do a bunch of silly horse shit for no reason, and also don't talk down to you like a child vis. making idiot substitutions or lazy technical choices.
Dude is equally not afraid to say "You must get this weird expensive fungus or don't even bother" and "This sacred cow is dumb, slaughter it".
Refreshing.
old Cooks illustrated and current Milk Street recommended highly.
Thanks, I'll check them out!
My father had several James Beard cookbooks that I remember fondly.
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We need a good micropayment system. I would gladly pay 5c for NYT article , per article (probably 1$ for one really heavy hitting piece of journalism - watergate, Snowden etc) but no more. And I think that advertisers know that this is the real price of the article.
I feel like this might run into issues with friction, where people don't consciously want to go through the effort of paying for content they don't yet know if they'll like. An alternative would be some sort of bundled subscription service like Netflix/Hulu/Etc. If you could just pay a fixed rate for access to most premium content on the internet, then people could just sign up for one thing and not worry about it.
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If only there were some way in which one could pay a monthly fee to read the NYT. Perhaps, if the price is right, one might even get it at the doorstep...
The NYT is kind of like Netflix, a number of writers under one subscription. I'm not a huge fan of that either but agree it's better than subscribing to each author individually.
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It really bugs me when you don't know what your subscription will actually be getting you in a given month.
I don't mind paying monthly for an internet connection, since that's a very predictable service that I use regularly and from my perspective it is exactly the same thing, which I use for mostly the same purpose, month in and month out.
But paying a content creator monthly seems to entail a little altruism in the sense that there may be a month, or several, during which their production is lower than average or they put out subpar content or content that just doesn't appeal to me.
Obviously I can comment on this or directly message the creator and have a reasonable expectation they'll notice and respond, and possibly adjust course. OBVIOUSLY I'm free to stop paying and move my funds to a different creator.
But once that is admitted, it does starkly ask why am I paying on a monthly basis for this uncertainty? It seems, to me, to come down to an abstract "I like this creator generally and want to ensure they are able to afford to keep putting out content on the regular, so I will tolerate a drought every now and again since the cost to me is so low."
It is seemingly just the best solution that has been converged on by almost every single form of entertainment and media at every level.
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Re: the Compact article and paywalls for news sites, I can accept the idea of paying a subscription to an individual writer (like Freddie or Scott), but an article on some publication I may not have heard of, let alone read a physical issue of? No fucking thanks, and I probably will be fine reading a pirated/de-paywalled version of it.
Anyways, the subscription model is more equitable for the content creators, but at the same time...how much money should one make writing the kind of stuff that Freddie deBoer writes? As you get at, writing Discourse and making money are at cross-purposes. I think, at best, something like what Freddie does should be paid out of a broad or universal fund instead of him having to see how many people subscribe, in exchange for no paywalls.
There's also different kinds of content creators: YouTubers rely on a combination of ad money (less reliable these days), sponsorship deals (product placement), and patronage services (this is probably where the bulk of their money comes from today). Creators of certain types of content (art in particular) use patronage-type services and "fansites" (which means that, if you have the desire and ability to save the content to your computer, you can effectively get a lot of value out of one month's subscription). You don't have to support a creator for a whole year or even more than one month, though you are cutting yourself off from their work for a time (which can bite if their content is offered with a time restriction), and limiting the social access you have to said creator (a big aspect of subscribing).
As I hinted at earlier, I think the ideal system would be either some sort of UBI for creators, or some sort of BAT-style micropayments-per-access like you've mentioned.
Nothing new under the sun! After the printing press, there was a multi-century effort to re-centralize, and here we are! But before Rupert Murdoch (or perhaps contemporaniously), there were a fair share of (financially oriented, but hey, bullshit walks) writers that had newsletters one could subscribe to. I mostly get this from Arthur Hayley novels, but I feel like his success is at least in part due to capturing the zeitgeist of the time.
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This was an angle I was considering going, what sounds right to me for the upper echelon writers was something like $350k+/year or so sounds fair to me if compared to white collar intellectuals, they're at the top of their pareto distributions. If you compare them to rock stars or other entertainers then you could justify much higher. It does seem like one thing the internet has definitely done is make potential audiences wide enough to elevate what once might have been a cushy newspaper columnist job to heights that before were once in a generation levels.
350k/yr?! Christ, no wonder we have a glut of shitty writers! Why on earth would anyone pay that much for their thoughts?
Twain, Asimov, etc didn't command such a price. Are these people the defining voices of culture? No. Unequivocally no. So what, de Boer writes a half-decent thinkpiece twice a year - and what difference does it make? Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars should require at least a little impact. The same amount for preaching to the choir (which it seems like he's doing, given that I only find his sticks through the Motte, under the "omg look at this semi-outgroup fellow using our talking points" section) seems quite excessive.
Eh, this is like saying "Why should someone be paid millions of dollars a year for being good at throwing a ball?" Why does the lady who turned her shitty fanfic into Fifty Shades of Gray deserve to be rich? For that matter, how much is the average software engineer working on new and better ways to serve you monetized content actually contributing to society?
People are worth what someone is willing to pay them.
Well, yes, people are worth whatever the market will bear. But the prices talked about are a little absurd, aren't they? The fact that you can make this much money from putting pen to paper means that there a demand that is unmet, clearly - I'm just questioning the quality of the product. And (myself obviously excepted), we've seen better writing even here. How much is great writing worth? I'll grant that it's worth a living, perhaps, depending on market conditions, but why should wannabe authors not be subject to the same economic pressures as the rest of the world?
Why?
Point at any of my examples, or any other career, and explain to me the objective measurement of how much their work "should" be worth.
I don't understand where you're getting the idea that they're not. Do you think anyone who starts a substack is making Scott or Freddie numbers? Even if they are actually good writers? The vast majority are not.
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The Internet wasn't built to facilitate profit-taking. It was built by a combination of academic and military interests--both cultural cost-centers dedicated (at least ostensibly) to advancing the public good. Early on, the Internet functioned to connect a diaspora of high-trust intellectual communities, most of whose contributions to the furtherance of the project went unremunerated.
This is why people keep wanting to re-invent the Internet, in whole or in part: to maximize their own profits. To make it possible for them to make a better living. But if you think that clickbait is bad now, imagine the incentives for producing effective clickbait on any blockchain ledger that executes access contracts instantaneously using ubiquitous crypto tokens as a medium of data exchange! This is not to suggest that something like a basic attention token isn't an interesting idea, but I have a hard time imagining any such system that doesn't immediately get gamed to death. Even Bitcoin itself only continues to exist by accident--it has failed, almost completely, in its original mission to become a decentralized, anonymous digital currency. More than 90% of Bitcoin transactions are pure, unadulterated market speculation.
The primary value proposition of the Internet, because this is how it was built, is in its ubiquitous semi-automated bisexual luxury virtual anarcho-libertarianism. People doing stuff for free and other people benefiting from it for free, while the government and some well-heeled NGOs pick up the tab. The profitable bits are tacked on. Writing for a living is tough, not because we haven't figured out how to properly monetize the Internet, but because there are lots and lots of good-to-great writers who are still willing to do that for cheap-to-free. The choice is not between ubiquitous ads and paywalls; you can also just choose to not traffic in professional material--like playing a free-to-play game and never once dipping into microtransactions or gacha mechanics, fully prepared to quit the moment you hit a hard paywall, because there are other games to play.
Stated a little differently: ad-blockers aren't Freddie's problem--I'm Freddie's problem.
s/is/was
From a technology perspective, the reason people keep trying to recreate arpanet is because normies are awful. The internet in its first iteration was excellent and full of excellent people - look at how all the still used and resilient protocols (HTTP, SMTP, and ffs there was a time when everyone's credentials were stored in a plaintext /etc/passwd) were designed for nonabusive actors. And then, as Ilforte would say, "it got worse". We can have gay space luxury communism or whatever, at least fiscally. But the problem is, just like actual communism, the system has to deal with real people - the 'net had a technical barrier, and we enjoyed the fruits of its creators' labor. And then it got worse.
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I understand how vivid this as a problem is, I have the edge case seeking programmer brain as well. But this really isn't much of a problem, trivial safeties like a difficult to skip dialogue when your browser/wallet software detects an unusually large uptick in new subscriptions and an escrow period effectively deal with this problem.
I'd rather not let my comment get too derailed into another crypto war front, but I'll flag I object to this framing.
This is easier said than done if most of the people you most want to talk to discuss are posting behind paywalls. If the money is good it doesn't take a lot of the more prolific quality posters here to become economic migrants to substackistan before the brain drain sinks us.
My original list of beats I wanted to had this hit this point(yes the OP had actual thought put into it's content, that's how poor my ability to organize my thoughts is). I do think there is a pretty big difference between the blog and the forum that is coming out in how daBoer considers the problem and it's related to your previous point about most people doing this posting thing are making the same wage as the despised jannie for much the same inexplicable reason. If the stats I've heard to to be believed there is still another group separate from me, you and daBoer as people who passively consume our ramblings. These people are likely as much of a blind spot to me as I am to daBoer.
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