The End of the Subscription Era is Coming | Nick Hilton

Interesting take on two trends:

1. The steady and rapid rise of subscription offerings. Mostly the article is focusing on Substack newsletters and OnlyFans because there is data for that. But I would suggest this applies to any content subscriptions.
2. The extreme distribution of all subscription profits being at the top 10-20 of content providers on any of these platforms. The average author makes next to nothing. The top few take the vast majority of all the revenue.

It is an idyllic, almost utopian, perspective. There is an imagined logic at play, entirely divorced from reality. In the world where Substack were an expeditious route to “more people” being able to “make a good and profitable career out of writing”, we would also live in a world where you bought your lamp chops from a butcher, your baguette from a bakery, your stilton from a cheesemonger and your wine from a vintner, rather than just everything from a supermarket. The fact that there was a period, in the 90s and 00s, when consumers seemed to repudiate newspapers — the supermarkets of journalism — did not mean that the idea was wrong, but that the sale mechanic was at fault. Just as supermarkets have iterated, in the same period, to introduce self-service and home delivery, so too should the more endangered business of journalism. To think that long term stability is in returning to individual shopkeepers, and raising prices for consumers, is regression masking as progress.

He doesn't talk about the insane number of streaming platforms out there, but that is another subscription situation and it is hitting the same logic. I cut the cord on cable two decades ago, but now my multitude of streaming solutions cost me nearly as much, and the user experience is frustrating since I now have to use a dozen solutions all with different user experiences.