This does not look sustainable to me. OTOH, magazines are a) mostly overhead not writer comp b) reliant on high circulation. Average entry level staff writer salary for magazines is apparently ~45k. You can make as much solo with <1000 subscribers at $5/mohttps://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/staff-writer-salary-SRCH_KO0,12.htm …
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Macro view, what’s happening is simply that readers are doing all the work of bundling and curation as shadow labor and writers are getting a bigger share of pie of actual $ changing hands. I think overall pie is shrinking by about 50% at least.
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If there are 1000 writers with 1000 subscribers each making 45k, market is worth 50 million (assuming 10% for substack type platforms). If there is zero overlap, that’s a million unique readers. A magazine of that would probably be 100m, maybe 20m from readers 80m from ads?
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Basically ads are getting cut out of the equation for now, and that’s the big change in unit economics. Writers make more, readers pay more, but overall pie shrinks. Ads will come back in somewhere somehow.
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Let the bundling begin
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pay for # articles? Then you can make your own magazine out of the feed.
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So you deposit a pool of money; the publisher makes good previews of labeled, indexed, cross-linked articles. Single price per article—don’t get fancy with pricing. The occasional free “loyalty” article. Easy way to make lists/save articles/etc.
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ie. Medium at $50/year. For thousands of writers at the other end of the scale.
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But eg
@ByrneHobart writes, what, 3-4 pages of content per day? So you're getting ~20-ish pages of content a week, which is maybe 1/3 or 1/4 of what you get in the Economist -
Also, (some) people subscribe several magazines, but not read cover to cover. With The Diff, Stratechery, etc, probably higher % read cover to cover, and content more specialized/relevant to their interest than mag: avg price for super-relevant-content-for-you probably decrease.
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