[lordnacho]

Isn't this the same as "I'll listen to the song, why buy the album"?

NatGeo was basically a middle-brow collection of interesting stuff. Not every article was interesting to you, maybe you like animals, maybe you liked maps, maybe you liked pictures of some tribe. You'd read the article that excited you and perhaps squeeze a bit of juice out of the rest of it.

Nowadays I have HN. There's a whole bunch of stuff, I can never read it all, there's pictures in all the links, and there's a few interesting articles each day that keep me coming back.

And it's free.

What's the point in buying a content aggregator when I can see a variety of stuff from Aeon/Quanta/bunch of blogs for nothing at all?

[edavison1]

The ‘content aggregator’ supported fantastic original reporting, increasing the share of knowledge in the world.

Generally speaking, the free content you love then uses the original reporting from these kinds of outlets and delivers poorly written nth degree xeroxes of that novel info.

At the end of the day, someone has to actually go out onto the polar ice or the remote research station and generate the story. So that’s the point imo.

[dylan604]

>What's the point in buying a content aggregator when I can see a variety of stuff from Aeon/Quanta/bunch of blogs for nothing at all?

It used to be that the content was much much better than any of the things you mentioned. When the content quality became the same as the things you mentioned, this is what happens.

[gaoshan]

Content creator, not aggregator. National Geographic generated the stories itself and provided some of the best photography obtainable in the history of the medium.

[lordnacho]

True but it was still a hodgepodge of interesting stuff. They funded different people to make various content so to the consumer you saw a bunch of varied articles and pictures.