[Frank2312]

Netflix (and other similar platforms), Amazon Prime, Twitch subscriptions.

Those are only 3 examples a ton of people pay for.

If you provide a good service, you will get subscribers. News have been available for free for decades thanks to OTA TV broadcasts. That's why people don't pay for it.

Niche journalism needs to have subscriptions since they can have way less views and people looking for news on that niche are ready to pay.

[pavel_lishin]

They're also not exactly something a developer can launch and start making money off of.

Would you pay a subscription for Flappy Bird?

[klez]

> Would you pay a subscription for Flappy Bird?

I don't do that on the app store either.

And software was sold way before app stores existed, so what's your point?

[eitland]

I happily pay for games and apps, including upgrades if they are valuable to me.

I refuse to pay monthly for stuff that shouldn't need backend services.

[skinnymuch]

Flappy Bird didn’t make money from selling the app though. The example actually hurts your argument. Flappy Bird and many sites make money the same way - ads.

[Turing_Machine]

What makes you (and others) think that citing three (or even half a dozen) examples constitutes some kind of refutation of the general rule?

There are somewhere over a billion web sites, dude. The number of those that are profitable with a subscription model (as opposed to being supported by advertising, or not being profitable at all) is a rounding error -- in the fourth or fifth decimal place.

[vonmoltke]

The number of apps in all app stores combined that are profitable from store sales is also likely a rounding error.

[skinnymuch]

How many apps are profitable and of those how many are made by independent people?

[Turing_Machine]

More than one out of 50 million, you can bet.

[skinnymuch]

Are you saying there’s only like 30 sites with a subscription model that are profitable?