Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

by Nadia Asparouhova

Ben Thompson, suggesting that subscriptions could be the future of local news, defines subscriptions as such: First, it’s not a donation: it is asking a customer to pay money for a product. What, then, is the product? It is not, in fact, any one article (a point that is missed by the misguided focus on micro-transactions). Rather, a subscriber is paying for the regular delivery of well-defined value. Each of those words is meaningful: Paying: A subscription is an ongoing commitment to the production of content, not a one-off payment for one piece of content that catches the eye. Regular Delivery: A subscriber does not need to depend on the random discovery of content; said content can be delivered to to [sic] the subscriber directly, whether that be email, a bookmark, or an app. Well-defined Value: A subscriber needs to know what they are paying for, and it needs to be worth it.319 Thompson notes that subscriptions only work when the content is differentiated: “After all, it’s not like it is hard to find content to read on the Internet: what people will pay for is quality content about things they care about.” But who provides the content is a form of differentiation in itself. Subscriptions are uniquely suited to monetizing “the regular delivery of well-defined value.” Because subscriptions are recurring, they help solve for the shortcomings of prior funding models. Patents and royalties have long existed to incentivize the creation of intellectual property, but IP is jus...

Source: https://stratechery.com/2017/the-local-news-business-model/