[simplecomplex]

This isn’t a new business model and plenty of people and organizations already charge money for newsletters or subscriptions for content.

There’s been plenty of academic papers from economists focusing on journalism detailing the issues, but put simply: There’s two ways to monetize, 1) Ads where businesses are the customer, 2) Pay per use (one time or subscriptions) where the reader is the customer.

The problem with subscriptions is that it disfavors the poor and massively reduces audience, which in the case of journalism and news the poor are arguably in most need and end up disenfranchised by editors and journalists because the need to write articles to please their upper and middle class customers (think the Economist for example).

The problem with ads on the Internet is that content can be copied and exfiltrated at no cost, so it’s difficult to prevent syndication of the content elsewhere (why RSS is not more successful, for example)

Substack doesn’t fundamentally fix anything with the problems of a subscription-based business model, even though it looks like a good product.

[bill_rr]

I like your analysis of the "problems" from an industry perspective. Here's the user perspective:

(1) The problem with subscriptions is that it's unfathomable to subscribe all over the place. I live in New Jersey, so I'm not going to subscribe to the LA Times even if they have some great coverage of a particular topic.

(2) The problem with ads is that they are INSANELY annoying to see all the time. Period.

My company, reallyread.it, is going to be uniquely positioned to make "pay per use" (aka just reading something) a reality. It's the Holy Grail for all of us: Spotify for News - one premium subscription that unlocks everything, everywhere. We're on it. ;)