Bundles, One of the Futures of Newsletters

Bundling reacts to differentiated desires by creating a less differentiated publication that’s fairly valuable to everyone. But as the cost of the reader’s time rises, focus pays off. And the subscription newsletter model makes it easier than it’s ever been to profitably focus on exactly one topic, and build a one-person monopoly.

A bundle essentially lets a group of newsletter-writers dynamically price-discriminate: most readers are subscribing because one or two components of the bundle are great and the rest are nice-to-have, so Everything’s $20/month sticker price is implicitly charging something like $15 for one newsletter in the bundle, $1 for another, $0 for another—b... See more