Consumer Subscriptions

A natural question given the number of subscription businesses that are out there is “have we hit peak subscription?”

The Internet, though, has enabled the bundling of services into broad subscriptions, as well as the unbundling of services into niche subscriptions, possible for a wide variety of businesses to offer.

When you look beneath the surface at where the average person spends their money, you see the many opportunities for subscriptions, as well as the existing subscription characteristics of a lot of spend. Housing is effectively already a “subscription” via mortgages or rent for most people. For those who lease vehicles, the bulk of Transportation sp... See more

One way to segment subscription businesses is to divide them between purely digital subscriptions and subscriptions with physical products

According to an analysis earlier this year by Mint.com for the New York Times, each of us in the U.S. spent on average $640 on digital subscriptions in 2019, up from $598 in 2017.

The “subscription economy”, by definition, presumes that the overall “economy” – from products, to services, content, transportation, labor and more – is shifting over to “subscriptions”. Thus, to claim that consumers have “subscription fatigue” is to say that they have “spending fatigue”.