The Diff | Byrne Hobart | Substack

“There are only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is to unbundle.” — Jim Barksdale

There is a widespread belief in technology circles that bundling of cable TV, newspaper, magazine and other information goods will go away now that those products can be distributed à la carte on the internet. The assumption seems to be that bundling is an artifact of another era when distribution was physical. But this reasoning misses the economi... See more

Yet, some rebundling is already underway. It’s exhausting for a single creator to maintain a Twitch channel or Substack newsletter at scale. As their audience grows, creators might recruit a small team to edit their content and moderate their community. They might also own a live channel or newsletter with other creators to split the work.

Perhaps I’m spending too much time thinking of my subscriber numbers (very likely) or perhaps I’m overthinking it (also likely) but one of the big hurdles to the bundle idea, in my view, is the size of audience for each title. For it to be a group price and to know how to split, you need to have either similar audiences sizes, a formula for how to ... See more

Jarrod Dicker of the Washington Post had a great insight about the rise of “expensable media” (think Stratechery, The Information, 2PM) and its positive impact on the creator ecosystem. This same effect could fuel a massive expansion in the consumer subscription software market that is compounded by a shift away from the office and its bundled amen... See more