My free idea for Substack: Allow people to pay for emails they’ve read and enjoyed, rather than forcing them to only pay for emails that haven’t even been written yet.
A subscription is a big commitment. But when I read a great email like @CaseyNewton’s yesterday, I would love to pay him a buck or two to say “thank you for doing that reporting, this was great.”
An ex-post payment system has other advantages. For one thing, it encourages broader distribution, rather than paywalls. For another, it’s a great real-time indicator of what your audience loves and values and wants to read more of.
Micropayments are logistically difficult, but that’s where Substack’s scale comes in. Over the course of a month, readers might rack up enough payments to make the processing fee more manageable. And writers could be paid monthly too.
The risk of course is that micropayments will cannibalize subscriptions. But Substack could use them as a driver of subs, too. “You paid Casey $15 last month. Would you like a $100/yr subscription instead?”
Micropayments also encourage and monetize high-quality occasional newsletters from people who don’t have the time to make them a full-time job.
The central insight here is that newsletter subscriptions are already a way to pay an individual more than they are a way of accessing specific information. So, make those payments easier!
Here’s @andrewrsorkin on Friedman and stakeholder capitalism. His choice of words here — “making” stedda “growing” — is an important sleight of hand that often undergirds my debates with @Three_Guineas on this subject. nytimes.com/2020/09/11/bus…
Hotels are some of the longest-running businesses in the world. So let’s consider a hotel that has been run by the same family for 250 years. Its owners need to *make* money, sure. They’re rich capitalists. But they don’t need to *increase* their profits every year.
Since 1972, the idea of “shareholder capitalism” has morphed from “companies need to make enough money to be able to pay their dividend every quarter” into “companies need profit *growth* that will cause their share price to rise indefinitely.”
@nathanielpopper If you’re dividing revenue by average account size, then obviously mostly what you’re measuring is the number of accounts, not revenue per account or per dollar.
This doesn’t make sense either. What is it supposed to mean that Robinhood trades 25,840 options contracts “for every dollar in the average customer’s account”? It’s a nonsensical metric.
I really don't think I'm exaggerating when I said that today, more than any other day, marks the end of the world as we knew it. (thread)
I was in Piccadilly Circus at 11pm London time, when the UK officially left the EU. The big billboard was a huge sign saying "London is Open". But who were they trying to kid.
It was just hours after the Trump administration announced that the entire USA was closed to any foreigner who had travelled to China of late. (Citizens can come back, but only if they can find a flight, and they face 14 days' quarantine if they've been in certain areas.)
My theory about the Teen Vogue / Facebook fiasco is that it was a classic corporate cock-up on both sides. (1/5)
On the FB side, one part of the company decided to sponsor the Teen Vogue conference, and buys a package that includes website sponcon. So they say "here, write an article about these women," make the necessary introductions, and are then promptly forgotten. (2/5)
FB dutifully trots out the women for Teen Vogue, which equally dutifully writes the puff piece, which then gets dropped into the CMS and inadvertently published without the necessary #sponcon disclaimers. When Conde realizes the error, they put a disclaimer at the top. (3/5)