Do news consumers want to pay for an ad-free experience?

The affluent, early-adopter users who are mostly likely to pay $ᵤ are also those users with highest $ₐ, as advertising to them commands a premium. Unless you enforced discriminatory subscription pricing to users, based on the counterfactual of their potential ad revenue, you’d still be better off advertising to the people willing to drop $10/month ... See more

Subscriptions are unbelievable. You have recurring revenue that, ideally, compounds month after month. Nothing else matters because you have growing subscriptions. And then it stops. Suddenly, you report a loss in subscribers. And panic ensues. Suddenly, you ask: should I have been so anti-ad all these years?

Independent internet-native creators leverage the internet’s frictionless content creation and distribution, but they’re still trapped by traditional business models like subscriptions and advertising.

A subscription model is based on the promise of the production of future gated content. A publication or creator is paid to continue production, not ... See more

Unfortunately, advertising has been ingrained into the internet as the basic model for so long and to such an extent that it’s hard to envision online life without the systematic manipulation of attention and all its evils. So we’re bound to wind up here, at the bitter end of “content.” Which is a good excuse to withdraw deeper into books, movies,

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