Yeah, but the market effect is very different when readers view articles individually verse having to buy the entire paper.
If you are trying to sell a whole paper, you need a mix of content to attract all the readers. Once you have all the sports fans in your area buying your paper, you aren't going to get more by adding more sports articles. You need to make sure all the areas are covered.
With individual articles being the unit of currency, you need every single article to generate as many clicks as possible. You can keep adding more of the same and getting more clicks.
This is the flaw that people ignore in all "unbundling" efforts. When things are unbundled, people will only make things that have huge audiences. Bundling allows niche things to be made.
> If you are trying to sell a whole paper, you need a mix of content to attract all the readers. Once you have all the sports fans in your area buying your paper, you aren't going to get more by adding more sports articles. You need to make sure all the areas are covered.
This also depends on how much competition you have. If there are maybe half a dozen competing newspapers, outrageous gossipy headlines and perhaps the promise of a nude woman on page 3 will sell an entire newspaper to a specific target market towards which you can tailor your advertising. Another newspaper can make lots of money by targeting a different market segment.
This is how clickbait works, too. Buzzfeed, Huffpo, Brietbart, and the Daily Mail could have all been paper newspapers that someone would buy in a competitive enough newspaper market. One of them is!
I'm torn because unbundling also allows for niche publications to get the readers who are interested in reading a few articles but not enough to pay for a full subscription to a publication they may or may not like. I guess another solution to that would be the heavily-discounted "intro" period offer or x-free articles per month. For me there are a few magazines I enjoy reading the occasional article from but don't want to pay for a subscription because the costs would quickly get out of hand.
But I acknowledge that paying per article could hurt the "subsidies" within a paper, for example the revenue from sports section readers helping pay for investigative journalism, leading to a race to the bottom as you point out.
The San Jose Mercury-News used to be hugely profitable for exactly this reason. They had the biggest classified section of any paper in the country. The Monday edition was maybe 4X as thick as its modern equivalent.
