A Starbucks Theory Of Publishing
Before Starbucks, you went into a coffee shop and asked for a coffee, and the coffee shop might pretty much give you anything.
On your personal scale of ten your coffee might score anywhere between zero and ten. You had no recourse. You’d asked for coffee, and they gave it to you.
Starbucks invented consistency. Theirs might not be the best coffee in the world, but it was always good enough — maybe 7.5 on most people’s scale of ten — and you knew exactly what you were going to get.
It turned out that buyers were willing to pay an amazing premium for consistency. The $1 cup of coffee became a $5 cup of coffee.
How does that map to reading? This far: We may yet amaze ourselves by how much we are willing to pay for good writing, so long as we are confident of the pleasure that it will bring us. The expectation becomes part of the transaction.
But wait, you may reasonably object. There are already publications which offer guaranteed pleasure. The New Yorker, for example.
An excellent example.
The New Yorker is better at publishing fine writing than Starbucks is at brewing fine coffee. And yet a copy of the New Yorker is one of the most underpriced articles in the universe, at $7.99 per single issue, barely more than a Venti Skinny Peppermint Mocha from Starbucks at $6.48.
The coffee gives you ten minutes of pleasure. The New Yorker gives you hours of pleasure.
What is the New Yorker doing wrong?
The New Yorker is wilfully driving down the price of its content by turning away perhaps 90% of its prospective customers — those readers who want to buy an occasional article online without committing to a subscription.
If the New Yorker were to sell its articles individually online, it could easily ask $5 for a longish article. A latte-equivalent. The price of two New York City bus tickets.
There would be some marketing work to be done — but are we seriously contending that a 10,000-word essay by Susan Orlean is worth less than two crosstown bus rides?
If the price of a single article from the New Yorker was $5, the price of the New Yorker’s subscription bundles and newsstand copies would have to rise correspondingly, causing those markets to shrink and perhaps collapse.
One can imagine the New Yorker blenching at the disruption. But the economics of selling one article for $5, instead of 20 articles for $7.99, are scarcely open to argument.
If the New Yorker declined to sell single articles by Susan Orlean to people who wanted to read single articles by Susan Orlean, then other publishers would do so, or Susan Orlean would do so herself.
One way or another the online subscription model that has been ubiquitous in paid content for the past five years or so is going to be unbundled; and then we will discover what fine journalism is really worth to us. Probably a lot more than we now imagine — once we allow readers to buy digital content the same way that they buy anything else.
To return to the Starbucks analogy. Suppose you went into Starbucks for a latte, and the barista said: “We only sell lattes on one-year contracts”. How many lattes do you think Starbucks would sell? That’s where the publishing industry is now.
(And yes, since you ask, I am a partner in a new single-article sales platform. You can check it out here: 1pass.me/about)
