Tuesday, November 23, 2021
Why is this so rare?
The smartest thing about Substack is quite simple but rare. Monthly subscriptions.
Example: I'd read some interesting pieces by Darryl Cooper, who does a good job of understanding and empathizing with the working class. He has a newsletter on Substack, and I couldn't hear his pieces without subscribing. So I paid the $5 for a MONTH and listened to one piece. Whoops! He may be empathetic but he's not smart. Like many other realists, he's into digital anti-solutions like DAO and Bitcoin. He's also a fan of James Poulos, who is the OPPOSITE of empathetic.
So I turned off the subscription 10 minutes after starting it. Five dollars is like one copy of a magazine. A reasonable amount to pay for a proper sample of the material.
Why is retail sale so rare? The digital world is all-or-nothing. It's unnecessarily binary. Open source software is either free for limited use or millions for full use. Most subscriptions require you to enroll for a full year.
Customers SHOULD expect to pay for every valuable item. Free means you're the product. But outside the digital world customers DON'T have to choose between a lifetime supply or nothing. You can buy one tomato or one book or one magazine.
Labels: Equipoise
¶ 8:57 AM
