The rich niche

I was recently a rep for the office&#x27;s annual charity drive. At the end of it our office (west coast) was compared to offices in other parts of the country. While we had lots of one-time donations, literally nobody signed up for &quot;workplace giving&quot;, to have money regularly taken off their paychecks. It is about fear an uncertainty. When people are stretched thin they will still give money when they can. But <i>when</i> is key. They will give money out of their pockets when asked but will not commit to future giving because they are unsure of that future. Subscriptions are for people who are confident in their month-to-month financial position. If you want to sell to the normal people, those who live from paycheck to paycheck, then you need to stick to single payment schemes.

Author&#x27;s argument seems to be that the only profitable publishers are subscription-based, and therefore cater to the rich, because only the rich can afford subscriptions.<p>That seems to ignore...the entire history of publishing. Like how a newspaper used to cost a quarter and everyone read it.

I’ve been a subscriber to the print edition of Wired for about 4 or 5 years now. Lately the ads and articles targeted at the absurdly-affluent have got on my nerves, and I don’t think I’ll renew again. I can’t say whether this is because the ads are now more pervasive, or because I’ve become more class-conscious over time.<p>As a side note, does anyone find it ridiculous that a combined household income of $100k is supposedly “affluent?” When my partner and I broke that barrier, we were living in a shitty apartment with a roommate. Didn’t feel affluent

You can argue that this is a feedback loop, though.<p>I can survive on minimum wage in the UK, therefore if I earn min wage + 1,000 (after tax), I can afford these subscriptions.<p>The question is whether I prefer that over other things.<p>I prioritised learning materials, computers, etc in my youth when I had a hilariously low budget and it paid dividends.<p>The questions IMO are:<p>1) to what extent is the economy zero sum, e.g. can everyone avoid being a retail worker<p>and<p>2) if we satisfy 1, how do we expand critical thinking such that people invest in themselves

The author mentions that they&#x27;ve contributed to Puck, which is a comical example of this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;puck.news&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;puck.news&#x2F;</a><p>Open up the side menu and you&#x27;ll see you can select each of Puck&#x27;s area of interest:<p>- Hollywood<p>- Wall Street<p>- Silicon Valley<p>- Washington<p>It would be easier to describe these as &quot;bubbles&quot;.

&quot;one valid criticism often leveled at them is that they are catering to rich and influential people&quot;<p>It&#x27;s not actually a valid criticism, and it is also not a problem.<p>Anybody who worries about that is free to launch another publication targeted at whomever they fancy.<p>What IS a problem is that people really think that kind of thinking has merit.

That&#x27;s how capitalist societies centered on maximizing profit have always worked. When someone tells someone else to &quot;pick themselves up by their bootstraps&quot;, really what they&#x27;re saying is &quot;sell someone to someone else with money willing to pay for your service&quot;. Homeless people and poor people are basically invisible to the economy, and serving them literally contributes nothing to the economy (directly at least) since GDP by definition only includes monetary transactions.<p>Even as a white collar worker, you&#x27;ll quickly realize that the executives calling the shots are generally already rich themselves, and their bosses the investors are even richer. Money dictates everything we do down to the mission of our companies and the role of our jobs. Sure you can opt out, but then you&#x27;re essentially taking a vow of poverty, and unless you&#x27;re rich already that&#x27;s a pretty big risk. It&#x27;s no surprise that workers realizing that they are effectively servants of the rich have backlashed and opted out.<p>This phenomenon of serving rich people exists not just within our labor market, but also in politics. In theory a democracy should reflect the will of the people, but in practice the rich own the media&#x2F;advertising, and the poor are too busy working to make ends meet to be politically active.

&gt; One of the more cringeworthy cliches is “riches in niches.”<p>cliches, riches, niches. (Proounced clee-shays, ritches, nee-shiz.)<p>Hooray English!

&gt; Credible information shouldn’t be a luxury good.<p>Shockingly, a good substack article.

I think this is also why some writers are making so much from substack. There is a huge market for affluent readers with disposable income. People will pay to support their favorite creators.

High quality news is paid for by people who want to read high quality, sophisticated news. There is ample free news out there - I would call it buzz feed, instagram, local media websites, and on and on. These are more bite-sized and ad-driven. Most people don&#x27;t want to read their news in novella format, but for those that do, they are more willing to pay the fees necessary to produce it for the limited audience that reads it.

It&#x27;s far from just writing though, isn&#x27;t it? With the massive shift in the percentage of GDP that flows to capital rather than labor, the motivation for almost <i>all</i> economic activity to focus on the desires and whims of the rich gets stronger and stronger. Luxury spas, housing, boats, clothing, resorts, processed foods, even popular entertainment: cater to the whims of the rich, and you seem to have more of a chance of making a living than catering to the needs of the less-rich and poor.<p>Of course, this is more or less precisely the opposite of what an economy is supposed to do, but is simultaneously obviously the inevitable behavior of an economy structured and run by the assumptions of 21st century US capitalism.

&gt;Jonah Peretti was right in 2017 when he warned that paywalls are “bad for democracy.”<p>Haven&#x27;t we also come to the conclusion that ad-supported clickbait journalism is bad for democracy?

Most of this article seems to be one anecdote about how someone made the author a bad job offer once.<p>Couldn&#x27;t care less.