(2018-04-04) The Rationalization Of Publishing Ev Williams

The rationalization of publishing – Evan Williams

Now that the WebAd-only experiment has decidedly failed, quality information providers will be able to build strong businesses, and consumers will be better served than ever. (End Of Free)

It was not a dumb idea. It may be even been the right idea at the time. Getting money from consumers over the internet wasn’t easy back then

It was an okay trade-off for access to great content (most of which was paid for by print ad money anyway).

The only thing that went wrong was the inevitable.

That story has played out. It will continue to play out for years — free, cheaply produced content isn’t disappearing. It will just get worse. But there will also be an abundance of non-free, non-cheaply produced content that an increasingly large and discerning audience is hungry for.

The reason quality — of content and experience — has gone down in publishing, not up, despite the power of competition and technology, is because publishers are competing for advertiser dollars, not audience dollars.

The average thinking, reading person reads from dozens of sources per month. Even if they were very cheap, there will be subscription fatigue.

Outlets that are very big in terms of content volume/frequency or that have superfans will be able to make subscriptions work — see NYT and The New Yorker. Or that have very low costs and a niche audience — see Stratechery.

That leaves out the vast majority of publishers in the world.

There won’t be a Spotify of publishing — with literally everything you want. But there will be a Netflix and Hulu and Amazon, etc. — each with a substantial amount of things you want.

Who will offer these bundles? Well, Apple just bought one. So far, Google and Facebook are talking about helping publishers charge subscriptions individually, but I’d expect a bundle down the road as publishers get comfortable with it. Startups like Blendle are developing alternatives. And of course, Medium has a growing bundle of thousands of independent writers and publishers.