It Could Be Said #59 Subscriptions Are Nothing New Nor Bad
Come for the defence of subscription services, stay for the comic book history
It’s inevitable that a website built as a refuge from Elon Musk’s X would be prone to bellyaching about the attempts of capital to monetize social media. A few weeks ago,
’s latest article on the lamentable spread and the impending death of the subscription service model was the latest to go viral on BluSky.Hilton’s is a classic example of the big mistake that people make when they talk about modern subscription services; people are massively undervaluing what they used to spend on media. Hilton repeatedly returns to Jeremy Normalbloke to illustrate the pain that subscriptions are causing the ordinary person.
Monthly costs: Netflix (£17.99), Amazon Prime (£8.99), Disney+ (£12.99), Spotify (£11.99), Audible (£7.99), New York Times online (£8), Financial Times (£39), Substacks (3 x £5), Playstation Plus Premium (£13.49), Fortnite Crew (£9.99), OnlyFans (2 x £7). Total spend: £159.43. (please help me budget this. my family is dying).
Let’s compare Normalbloke to my Dad, who still picks up two daily newspapers (a morning national newspaper and evening local one) plus an ultra-local weekly and a Sunday newspaper. Just this gets my Dad to spending over £100 on newspapers every month, and I believe he still picks up the odd gardening and trade magazine on top of that.
And Hilton clearly has put his thumb on the scale to get to his figure of £160. Firstly, he has Normalbloke subscribe to the only newspaper that charges an online subscription price which actually covers the cost of its journalism! Given he explicitly describes his Normalbloke as not a news obsessive then it seems highly unlikely he would be willing to pay this premium for UK news, especially as he is already subscribing to The New York Times. Far more likely he would be sated by visits to the non-subscription BBC and Guardian websites for the latest British news. Likewise why does he have both Spotify and Audible accounts, when the former has plenty of audiobooks for its premium subscribers to enjoy on dog walks? And as someone with a son and cousin who are obsessed with Fortnite I’ve never heard of the Fortnite Crew subscription service, as both are much more likely to plead for V-Bucks they can spend on specific items. Strip those three expenditure items out and Mr Normalbloke’s monthly spending is if anything less than my Dad’s.
But of course that’s not a fair comparison because me and my siblings have all left the parental home. When my parents still had a full household they had the then biggest Sky package to cover my and my siblings’s demands for movies and cartoons that so much of Normalbloke’s spending is actually covering. Likewise whilst genuinely smooth online multiplayer on consoles seemed like something out of science fiction as recently as ten years ago, my parents would be forever policing how much we spent going online or even playing games through the television, after one or more of us wracked up huge telephone bills.
And this gives the game away. Just like superheroes dominating the box office didn’t begin with Iron Man, we’ve been living with subscription services for a lot longer than most realise.
Direct Market Killed The Grocery Store Star
In the dim recesses of a mind that is rapidly approaching forty, I believe that this year represents the thirtieth anniversary of my first subscription; asking the corner shop round the corner from my Nan’s to save me a copy of 2000AD and Judge Dredd The Megazine after the unthinkable had happened and one of them sold out before I could buy it. Of course in return for never again having to miss the latest exploits of the future’s greatest lawman, I was sacrificing my ability to skip a week or pick it up from another shop I happened to be passing elsewhere in town. But then again the shop was sacrificing the ability to sell to the first available customer in the hope they were cultivating regular business.
It would only be several years later I would enter my first paid subscription for a digital service. Well, more accurately bullied my Dad to add to his already extensive Sky package by subscribing to the initial premium version of FilmFour that had Mark Kermode solemnly introing a lot of sexy, violent movies. Around this time I would also purchase a year’s supply of The Salisbury Review, a hard-right periodical that would come across as quite mainstream in today’s Tory Party. It was also around this time that my and my brother’s social lives (yes, even teenage Salisbury Readers have social lives) were picking up enough that my Dad could no longer rely on us to be around in the evening to walk over to the corner shop and pick up his beloved Leicester Mercury. So he finally started paying for home delivery of his newspapers and magazines, discovering that the newsagents charged a lot less than he was paying us in sweets and pop.
Then in 2004 I would become part of a culture that was since the year of my birth had become every more entwinned with subscriptions as a business model; American comics. Much derided, the American Direct Market is the ur-example of why an industry finds itself reduced to relying on a subscribers where it had previously been able to thrive in mainstream outlets. Comics had long been resented as cheap and nasty products, that took up too much space in general stores for what was a fairly meagre profit margin for everyone involved. Even when the system was working well it placed significant pressures on the comic companies because a title could legitimately be selling in the hundreds of thousands and still be in danger of losing money, because stores had to be reimbursed for any unsold titles. And stores became more and more stingy about what comics they would carry as they sought to prioritise more of their physical space for higher value, higher margin products. DC and Marvel were effectively being asked to only deliver blockbuster hits because the stores would increasingly refuse to carry anything else, only to be penalised if their blockbusters fell short of expectations as they paid for all the unsold issues the stores returned.
The Direct Market solved both these problems. The deal was that the comic book companies would work with distributors that served speciality shops primarily focused on comic books and other aspects of nerd culture. Obviously these shops wouldn’t have the reach of the general stores but they would take on their shoulders the risk of any unsold titles. They managed this risk by ordering far fewer copies than the old general stores, instead encouraging (or for lower selling titles, demanding) customers pre-order comics in advance, lest they miss out. This evolved into a de facto subscription service model, with the core of the comics sold being reserved by hardcore consumers through their “pull list”.
What happened next is very much in the eye of the beholder. We had a genuine upsurge in the quality of comics, with production values having came on leaps and bounds from the embarrassingly rudimentary comics of the early 80s. But this has obviously came at the cost of each individual issue being sold at a higher price. Likewise, given the freedom to sell fewer than six figures a month, American comics have become more mature and diverse, as they’ve learnt to thrive as a niche product. But this is a nice way of saying they’ve gone from mass entertainment to a boutique product.
Sound familiar?
This Is Hardcore! Are You?
The thing that people always forget about subscription services is that they are designed to get the most money out of hardcore fans. Back in 2004, my pull list at Forbidden Planet soon ran in excess of £40 a week. In an echo of the consumer-creators on Instagram or Tic Tok that raise such hackles today, I justified the extravagant expense because I was busily establishing myself as an online writer.
In many ways what we have seen is not the growth of subscription services, but their vertical integration as the internet allows distribution to collapse. To again use the example of comics, my pull list had a variety of firms involved:
Forbidden Planet as the comic book shop my pull list was with
Diamond UK who supplied Forbidden Planet with the comics
The various printing presses that physically made the comics
The various comic book companies who published the comics
The creatives who actually wrote/drew/coloured/lettered/edited each comic
Today, you can get more comics than you could ever read from Marvel for just $9.99 a month, so reducing that five-step model to just two. Some creators have gone one better and are independently producing comics that people subscribe to them directly to read. But particular in that latter case its important to remember that nothing much has actually change for the reader - they would have had to pre-commit to the project through their pull list to have any hope of getting the average comic book store to order in an independent title.
When you realise that what we see as a growth of subscription services is just them integrating vertically, it makes more sense which work economically, and which don’t. Newspapers are a good example. The shift to an online subscription model was resisted by every newspaper until they realised they had no choice. Even a title like the Daily Mail, which had achieved genuine success online by becoming National Enquirer with a web address and a British accent is now trying to hawk Mail+ subscriptions with increasing vehemence. The one holdout is The Guardian, which is so desperate for cash, that its literally selling a seventh of its print business to give its owners another cash injection to stave off the inevitable.
This was not blind luddism; newspaper publishers know their business. Yes moving online would cut the costs of printing physical editions, but that is negated by the fact that newspapers were cheaply produced and that print adverts pay far more than online adverts. Likewise whilst they no longer have to leave money aside for the general store that physically sells the newspaper, they do have to pay for their website to be hosted and their products to be purchased through the key digital marketplaces. That there was no fat to trim makes sense; after all newspapers had the business model that American comics abandoned in the 1980s! Only general stores tolerated dedicating so much of their floorspace to newspaper because they knew it would encourage people to come in every day, or take out delivery subscriptions. Either way, the newspaper helped general stores sell other products, products that often had a higher margin for the shop. This mutually beneficial relationship is destroyed by moving online, which means online-first publications need to replace the implicit subsidy newspapers received from general stores treating them as almost a loss-leader.
In an ideal world newspapers would continue being sold primarily in physical stores, but that world is literally dying with each passing day. In the next best word, there would be a thriving advertising market, but what passes for digital advertising not only pays poorly but is actively hostile to hard news. Likewise, attempts to get people to buy individual e-editions of publications repeatedly failed to the point that many magazines make more money by being part of Apple News+ subscription. Newspapers knew that a shift to online subscriptions would reduce the reach of their work but there really was no alternative. A subscription model was the best way to monetize their core readership, and give them the type of steady income that they could start to rebuild a sustainable product around.
And if return to Nick Hilton’s Normalbloke, you see that the problem with subscription services is not one of failure but success.
But two things happened in the past couple of years to disrupt Jeremy’s cashflow. The first is that more publications and journalists introduced hard paywalls for their content. This meant that Jeremy’s readers were now having to make an active choice about what they subscribe to. Could they afford to spend £10 on The Normalbloke Manifesto, a bi-weekly email, when they also had to spend $25 a month for the New York Times? Plus, when Jeremy launched TNM, his subscribers, on average, signed-up to 2.5 Substacks. Now, that average has risen to 10…And so, as 2025 looms, Jeremy is worried that making an income solely from The Normalbloke Manifesto is no longer sustainable.
What is happening here is that the market is growing not shrinking; not only are mainstream outlets building their own subscriptions services but the number of writers selling independent newsletters through Substack has grown exponentially. That absolutely calls into question whether Normalbloke’s newsletter would be a viable business; one would assume a non-superstar writer would fail to gain traction if they tried to launch a newsletter in today’s more competitive marketplace. But noughties blogosphere showed that some people who succeeded due to first-mover advantage were able to convert that into viable careers either by ultimately signing for mainstream outlets or building their own paywalled website.
Because digital newsletters are not the new newspapers, something we can tell by the fact that no newspaper has remade itself as a daily Substack. It is not a coincidence that the most successful subscription newspaper is the one that has built a bundle that entices people other than hardcore news consumers, with The New York Times enticing normies with games, recipes, and shlocky narrative podcasts.
What newsletters are, are the new magazines! They are secondary publications for people that want more content on their favourite topic, writer or perspective. In rare occasions you get multi-writer publications that replace the magazine on a like-for-like basis; in another world its very easy to imagine
or as physical magazines in another era. But single publications play the same role, substituting what a staff writer would have gotten as a salary from one publication or a freelancer would have gotten from writing for several.Obviously for the same reasons why newspapers tried to resist becoming online subscription publications, this represents a contraction in the professional writing industry, not because its unreasonable to expect hardcore customers to spend literally hundreds of pounds on written content each month; that’s what many still do with magazines. The problem is that magazines had ancillary income streams, and weren’t being asked by so much audio and video content. But as the leanest, meanest product and business model, subscription services are the solution to this problem, not the cause.
Cooling Content Consumption Collation Corner
Before I talk about the content I consumed, make sure to read my latest article in City AM about how Joe Biden is a warning for Sir Keir Starmer. This past fortnight I…
…played EA Sports 24. Just for fun I had another go at winning Euro 2024 with England. Setting up my side really underscored how 4-3-3 was the correct formation for England. What was weird, is that I finally broke through my usual mental block, easily winning the final on the hardest difficult because my shooting was on point.
…watched Civil War. For all the talk of it being a big budget movie for A24, it wears the limitations of its relatively small budget on its sleeve. For a war movie the number of actors involved is remarkably small, and so many of the set pieces are built around the type of trickery that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Cannon film from the 1980s. The film is clearly not about an actual civil war in America but the mentality of war journalists, and whether their thirst for getting the scoop actually fulfils any worthwhile purpose. The movie clearly believes the answer is no, but is too in love with Kirsten Dunst’s character to clearly make that case. Incidentally, Nick Hoffman seems to be having the time of his life as the evil American President in the brief scenes he appears.
…read Christopher Alan Bracey’s Saviors or Sellouts: The Promise and Peril of Black Conservatism from Booker T. Washington to Condoleezza Rice. Published in 2008, this is a brisk look at the history of Black conservative thought in the states, and how it is has waxed and waned as the position of African-Americans changed in American society . A history of the survival strategies Black community leaders advocated in the face of White people’s racism through the ages gradually gives way to a story of how various individual thinkers broke with what had become their community’s overwhelming liberal lean and were increasingly rewarded by a right that was focused on recruiting talented Black advocates for their ideology. Whilst it doesn’t go as far as to call them sellouts, it clearly feels that modern Black conservatives lack of organised support within the broader African American community dooms them on an almost spiritual level.
…read Wolfgang Munchau’s Kaput: The End of The German Miracle. I’ve been a regular reader of Wolfgang Munchau’s columns for years and sigh at my inability to justify purchasing a subscription to his Eurobriefing newsletter service. He has however lost me a bit in recent years given his baffling advocacy for cryptocurrency and constant sanewashing of Donald Trump. This however is him on him top form as he gives a rollicking good tour of what has gone wrong with the Germany economy from undercapitalisation, overreliance on cheap energy and plentiful exports, and distrust of digital innovation. His chapter on German attitudes to immigration was particularly eye-opening.
…watched The Elephant Man. Incredible film that managed to keep the attention of both a 16 year old, and a nine year old. Obviously John Hurt does a very difficult job incredibly well, as under heavy makeup he brings real pathos to a character that has such limited facial expressions through his voice and physicality. Likewise, Anthony Hopkins perfectly strikes the balance between selling Treves as a kindly doctor but highlighting the troubling ambiguity in his motivations towards John Merrick. And of course the late David Lynch’s direction is superb, with moments of ugliness, tenderness and surrealism all vividly brought to life.
…read Dan Davies’ The Unaccountability Machine. I loved this book! Made me want to storm out of the house and go finally do that masters in management studies that deep down I know I need to do for my professional development. As often with a polemic the weakest part of the book are the recommendation but Davies does a great job explaining the history and theory of cybernetics, and why this is a better way of understanding organisations than contemporary economics. I literally bought a friend a copy because I want a fellow NHS manager to have read it, so I can talk to him about it. A genuine must-read!