Kindle Unlimited, Texture, Zinio, Magzter, and Readly are attempts to sell "all you can eat" magazine subscriptions. "Spotify for X, with magazines as X. Reality: Average US household spending on reading is $118 annually according to the BLS 2016 Survey. This is awful, but real.
"Well people pay for Netflix" might be tempting to argue, but a stressed consumer can cut the cable TV cord and pay less for video with NFLX. That consumers will subscribe to many subscription video services is a triumph of hope over experience. People have limited wallet share.
That spending of $118 *per household* a year is on books, newspapers and magazines. That you spend more isn't relevant since we are not the mass market. My blog post on the microeconomics of writing a book describes an author's awful reality. It sucks. google.com/amp/s/25iq.com…
4/ Leaving aside addressable market issues, the unit economics of magazine subscriptions are brutal. Customer acquisition cost is potentially deadly when combined with churn. Publishers must consider whether their own existing subscribers will churn to the all you can eat offer.
5/ To control their gross margin the magazine subscription platforms like Texture and Kindle Unlimited offer publishers rates "per-page read" like, for example, $0.00449. Is that worth the cannibalization risk? The answer is in the unit economics math. google.com/amp/s/25iq.com…
6/ Publishers like NYT are likely to see a more attractive market in $35 a month from 10M affluent customers than a per page rate sold to the mass market. Steve Jobs: "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't [pay much to] read anymore."
7/ Even in the top decile of income before taxes, the average spending on reading is only $300 per year in a household. bls.gov/opub/reports/c… 
