I read new fiction, as I knew writers must, but the stuff that everyone was talking about back then was written by men - Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, John Updike, Philip Roth. I read them dutifully, and admired them, but I couldn’t see any way into that world.
A subscription-based business requires an active fandom. And an ad-supported business requires a much bigger, and thus, usually more passive fandom. Due to the mechanics of the scale required to make money from digital advertising, you have to go broad.
It’s been endlessly argued that algorithms influence too much of what we watch, listen to, read, and even think. Personal taste erodes while decision-making is outsourced to the platform.
The company pioneered the consumer mobile app and the business — “Starbucks as a bank” — is so lucrative that Starbucks management might ignore the hard work of revamping the in-store experience.