[abalone]

My take (just the first five):

1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom.

Spotify & Apple Music. Pay $10/mo for unlimited access to most music. Took the wind out of music piracy. (TV & film are undergoing a similar transition to subscription models, more slowly.)

2. Simplified browsing...Grandparents and small children don't want the full web...

Apps. Remember this list is from just one year after the iPhone launched, so everything was still "the web". It was almost unthinkable that native, installed apps would have such a resurgence. But the iPad is exactly this, a simplified computer that young kids and grandparents love to use.

3. New news.

Still in flux. Nobody has figured out a business model. Over the past century consumers were trained to expect free, ad-supported news. Surprisingly, online ads have not worked out well for publishers.

4. Outsourced IT. & 5. Enterprise software 2.0.

AWS. There's a lot of higher-level SaaS packaged services too and it sounds like that's what pg was envisioning. But the real hero here is AWS and its "primitives"-based, bottom-up approach to outsourcing all computing.

[reza_n]

> 3. New news.

NY Times topped $1 billion in subscription revenue last year. Quite a feat and definitely an indication that money is to be made in digital news.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/new-york-times-c...

[blueyes]

There's a lot of evidence that a large part of the NYTimes revenue surge is a "Trump bump", and that, more broadly, there are way too many media outlets offering free content for the same limited number of eyeballs, and they're burning a lot of VC dollars in the process:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-media-...

[taurath]

My take is it costs a lot of money to become worth any money in the space. The story breakers matter a lot more than the story regurgitators, and people see the value enough to pay for it. If you want to shoestring and cost cut your news room, your core value goes to none.

Biggest problem I find is the local news space. There’s nowhere for funded investigative reporting at the local level - I feel like some type of local club or community organization needs to start growing to get it back.

[ethbro]

The question is whether that's zero-sum consolidation (as competitors close) or sustainable.

[jacobr1]

It can be both. Indy bookstores seemed to have reached an equilibrium point after the onslaught of both the big boxes and Amazon. There are many fewer stores, but those that remain are often profitable with loyal followings. They had to innovate to branch into things like becoming half-coffee/half-bookstores, or become better big-boxes themselves, or focus on community events and authors.

Perhaps we'll see a collapse of local news (which really has already happened) and the resurgence of quality national news on a smaller, less competitive, but sustainable basis?

[soniman]

Impressive but digital only subs were $340mm.

[mikeyouse]

That only counts digital-only subscribers (people like my parents still get the Sunday paper with their digital subscription) and if you add in digital advertising, their online-only business is nearly $600M. That's pretty substantial.

[m3rc]

Number 3 isn't just in flux, I'd argue it got worse. Companies like Facebook trying to act as definitive platforms while trying to keep their hands clean of being sources or generators means that we have even more fragmented news sources, but significantly more centralized distribution. This means that not only does the quality and veracity of news articles decrease, but the likelihood of someone believing something from a "trusted" platform increases. It's the worst of both worlds.

[WikipediasBad]

I'm particularly interested in #23 since it is clear that Wikipedia is even more dominant now than it was in 2008: More open alternatives to Wikipedia. Deletionists rule Wikipedia. Ironically, they're constrained by print-era thinking. What harm does it do if an online reference has a long tail of articles that are only interesting to a few people, so long as everyone can still find whatever they're looking for? There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica.

[tlb]

The advantage of deletionism is that users can have some confidence that anything they find on Wikipedia has received some attention from editors. Without deletion there'd be an unlimited number of pages, (100-𝜀)% being crap.

If you search and don't find it on Wikipedia, you can look elsewhere. That's a better experience than finding unmaintained crap.

[skgoa]

But with deletionism an unknown (yet significant) number of pages are still crap. One of the sad aspects of wikipedia is that their idea of "maintenance" enshrines crap and their idea of "sources" makes it incredibly difficult for experts in a (sub)field to improve an deficient article. That's orthogonal to the number of pages, though.

[smsm42]

wikia.com sites? There are non-wikipedia wikis for tons of stuff there, mostly entertainment-related, but nobody would also prevent one from making something like that for everything else. Also, Wikidata is much more permissive than Wikipedia I think, but this one is mostly for data, not narrative descriptions.

[nwatson]

"Spotify & Apple Music" --> Rhapsody/Napster already had this in 2001. I was a subscriber soon after. So many thought music subscriptions were a strange concept, from mainstream media to TWiT, and that it would never work. I think Rhapsody/Napster was too far ahead of its time, and faced too many technical obstacles, especially when they switched their DRM too many times (they eventually used one from Microsoft, forget the name, which Microsoft discontinued in favor of their own Zune service, and Rhapsody/Napster had to scramble). When Apple and Google jumped in, and Netflix showed the possibilities on the video side, Rhapsody/Napster already was stretched too thin to compete.

(Of course, the incarnation of Napster referenced here is very different from the original Napster concept.)

EDIT: Windows pre-Zune DRM was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PlaysForSure (PlaysForSure) -- it was "anything but". So many synchronization problems with devices, it was painful.

[dchuk]

""Spotify & Apple Music" --> Rhapsody/Napster already had this in 2001"

Yeah but neither of those had a billion+ smart phones to deliver their subscription service to. Not really their fault, but clearly mobile streaming was what really made this type of product skyrocket in popularity.

[analyst74]

I don't know how much spotify & apple disrupts label's biz model, they still have to pay enormous amount of money to the labels for songs being played.

They supplement record label's core business more than they disrupt.

[smsm42]

> (TV & film are undergoing a similar transition to subscription models, more slowly

Lately seems to be going into an opposite direction. I.e. I have TV subscription, Netflix subscription, Amazon Prime subscription... but what I have to do to see Start Trek Discovery? Get yet another monthly subscription. Not exactly "one umbrella $10 subscription covers all" but rather "everybody has its own $10 subscription in which you probably are only interested in one thing ever, but you have to get the whole thing anyway". That, or just download it from torrents...

> to expect free, ad-supported news

Same problem here, btw. I wouldn't mind another $10 subscription, but I am surely not going to subscribe to 50 different news sources of which I read 2 articles a month from each, and I am surely not going to buy subscription to only one and trust it to actually give me full, deep, unbiased and untainted picture of the world, not sure if such unicorns ever existed but for sure they are extinct now. So again, 50 subscriptions or... other ways.

[twic]

Indeed, film and TV are very much not in any sort of "pay $10/mo for unlimited access to most music" situation, due to fragmentation. That said, they could be undergoing a transition towards it - the current models are clearly frustrating for some users, so there is an opportunity for a company that can make the supply chain work to clean up.

But, as with news, i would much rather have an à la carte model. I don't watch enough movies for a subscription to be worthwhile, but i'd pay 2 or 3 pounds to watch an old Bob Hope movie every now and then.

[BerislavLopac]

> 3. New news.

For this one, I would definitely say Twitter. As an example, my first info about the recent school shooting in Florida was a tweet by a scared student. Anything that happens anywhere in the world will spread on Twitter literally in an instant, and the same goes for non-realtime content published elsewhere.

[smsm42]

I am not sure Twitter is "new news". It's like saying "everybody screaming at once about everything they want is the new opera". Surely, among that screaming there would be opera singers, and among Twitter noise there would be news. But Twitter is not news. Maybe something that could be used as raw source for "new news". There are several projects aimed at that, but mostly very National-Enquirer-like kind of news (more looking to shock and entertain than to deliver information).

[m3rc]

And yet from a business perspective, Twitter is doing terribly. The news platforms we seem to gravitate to don't end up being profitable.

[sebleon]

Twitter is profitable with revenues of $732M. What’s your definition of a business failure?

[GuiA]

Twitter is profitable as of 2 weeks ago, and with just $91M in profits. Let's wait and see where this ship goes over the next 2-3 years before claiming victory.

[gdilla]

Twitter has wracked up 2.5B in losses over like 11 years. Only now have they turned a profit. That is a failure in the time frame of its existence. http://time.com/4241716/twitter-losses-twtr/

[shaki-dora]

Twitter is almost certainly worth more today than their historical losses, making them a success.

[gdilla]

Is it? The opportunity cost of that $2.5B is what to compare to. You could have acquired instagram for half that, for example.

[m3rc]

Is Twitter now profitable? It was my understanding that throughout all of 2016 and 207 they were operating at a loss. And for a long time before that. If they're profitable this year it could be a turning point and I'd be wrong, at least going forward. But do we have enough data to support it at this point?

[PKop]

Let me Google that for you...

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/08/twitter-q4-2017-earnings-rev...

[m3rc]

So... a simple yes would have sufficed. They were not profitable, now they are. They may not be later, we'll find out.

[BoiledCabbage]

Fundamentally, we refuse to pay for content. As long as we continue to do so, they won't be profitable.

The issue is that we also complain about the dumbing down of online info, and decry the lack of quality content.

The advertising model does not work for valuable content creation. Period. Until someone figures out what its replacement is, news (and all non mass-produced content) will continue to slowly die online.

[m3rc]

Some people, myself included, pay for some online news content. But just by virtue of being paid doesn't make news content creators more valuable. I had a NYT subscription until their OpEd board started churning out Nazi apoliga like it was their job. The world of paid content is still pretty terrible and stuck carrying water for their corporate overlords just as much as ad-supported groups. Maybe that's the future, but if all it took for quality to go up was for paid subscriptions to exist and people to want to buy them, it would have happened by now.

[throwaway613834]

Do you happen to know what Quartz's business model is (qz.com)? They seem to have no subscription model to pay for even if you want to, nor do they seem to serve ads (as far as I've noticed, but maybe they serve a few), and yet they seem to have decent quality content.

[mikeyouse]

They are a subsidiary of Atlantic Media Group that are explicitly advertised as no pay walls, no registration, and no app downloads:

https://www.atlanticmedia.com/brands/quartz/

Atlantic Media is owned by David Bradley and Laurene Powell Jobs invested in The Atlantic recently (but I think all of the subsidiaries are still owned solely by Bradley).

Before he was in media, he founded and sold a few advisory companies that went public, where he made a few hundred million dollars. So I guess Quartz's business model is live off the largesse of very wealthy benefactors?

[throwaway613834]

Oh wow, thank you! It very much did remind me of The Atlantic -- makes sense now!

[hueving]

>But the real hero here is AWS and its "primitives"-based, bottom-up approach to outsourcing all computing.

I'm not sure 'hero' is the right word. AWS has created culture of lock-in and closed source products being acceptable in many otherwise open source pipelines. Additionally, people funnel significantly more of their money into AWS than they would with dedicated hardware.

AWS is a plague on infrastructure and a black spot in open computing history on the level of Microsoft. Kubernetes is showing promise to fix some of this.

[chii]

aws has made infrastructure easily accessible to many without large outlay of capital, but with capabilities comparable (or even exceed) to any physical infrastructure you can buy.

this has made software services much easier to sell. in a world without AWS, only monied interests can hope to bring a service in any scale. even in the face of vendor login, AWS has increased the democracy of starting a new business.

[aorloff]

In my experience, its actually at real scale (tens of millions of concurrents) that you want to move off of AWS, and at smaller scales where it makes the most sense.

[lucideer]

> 1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom.

> Spotify & Apple Music. Pay $10/mo for unlimited access to most music. Took the wind out of music piracy. (TV & film are undergoing a similar transition to subscription models, more slowly.)

The disease that the RIAA is a symptom of is not piracy. Piracy doesn't have a negative impact on music sales. The disease is an industry that makes success (i.e. financial sustainability) inaccessible to most, and excessive (lucrative beyond need) to few. Spotify/Apple Music do precisely nothing to change this.

Beats and Google Play Music are closer to the mark, but still a good bit off.

[mcny]

Winner take all is something freakonomics talks about: why do workers for drug dealers work for low pay and high risk knowing there's a higher chance of dying than getting on top? Why do so many high schoolers aspire to become NFL players knowing the chances are so slim?

[lucideer]

It's a problem that occurs in a lot of industries, but one that's definitely significantly more severe in some than the average.

I wonder if there are common cross-industry causes, or more specific contextual reasons this occurs. I suspect the latter.

[throwaway613834]

> Spotify & Apple Music. Pay $10/mo for unlimited access to most music. Took the wind out of music piracy.

Did artists make more money as a result?

[hakanito]

> 3. New news

I think this is where blockchain tech will prosper. Integrated wallet in you browser and nano payments to purchase access to articles. I don't want to subscribe to FT or New York Times, because I only read one or two articles per week. But I would happily pay 50c per article to get a few days access

[ghaff]

Micropayments as an idea have been around for maybe 20 years. The technology isn’t really the problem and you don’t need blockchain. You just need a centralized frictionless payment system that everyone uses. Clay Shirky wrote off the problem to transaction costs. It’s too much mental energy to decide whether to pay 10 cents to read an article.

I don’t disagree it would be nice. $100 per year subscriptions are a pretty high bar for me. But the evidence that people will consume digital news and other articles transactionally just isn’t there.

[shaki-dora]

This a-la-carte model is quite dangerous, because there's a difference between readers' willingness to spend money, and both the amount of work and the importance for society an article has.

These sorts of decision are currently in the hands of editors who, despite all the growling, are still inclined to allow vast, expensive, investigative goose-chases.

If you introduce per-article payments, it becomes just too easy for the business department to explicitly see which articles bring in more than they cost. But you want the cross-subsidies that are necessary for a well-rounded publication.

[GuiA]

+1.

The sad thing is that this is what Ted Nelson has been advocating for since the late 1960s (amongst with many other things that made his vision of a worldwide web much more compelling than the one we have now, but technologically unfeasible until very recently). If it ever materializes, it'll just be half a century+ late :)

[hkmurakami]

We should consider how this would incentive editorializing and reporting by the news organizations.