I’ve been in subscription publishing for about 30 years. Back when I started I never heard anyone talk about “personalization.” I don’t think it was a word yet. The ability to customize content to the audience was pretty limited. Subscribers might be able to select which state tabs they got in the back of their binders, or whether they got this or that edition of the newsletter — among only a few choices — but that was about it.

Customized publishing has come a long way since. Printers can run several different editions of a magazine and include specific content by region and by other demographic criteria. Email marketers can insert content that is unique to the individual recipient, based on whatever demographic or other data the sender has in his database. And we all know how flexible content can be on the web, provided you can match the visitor to your database.

There are lots of other things going on as well. I can get Google alerts on the topics I select, and email newsletters from the organizations I want to hear from. I can create custom RSS feeds, or use apps that pull articles from a range of sources on the topics I want to know about.

Content can be fine-tuned pretty well these days, but I think it still has a long way to go.

For example, there’s a particular dress shirt that I buy. Joseph A Banks’ fitted, pinpoint Oxford, button down, no iron shirt in 15 x 33. That’s what I buy, and nothing else. When that shirt is on sale I want to hear about it. Otherwise I don’t care.

As things stand today, in order to know about that shirt I need to get all the Joseph A Banks emails, which I don’t want. I don’t care about sweaters and I have enough suits.

I also want to know what’s going on in the world, which is why I get The Week’s daily “10 things you need to know” email. It’s a decent summary of top stories and keeps me from being that guy who’s living under a rock.

There are also columnists I follow, and bloggers, YouTube channels, authors, musicians, actors and tv shows. But each of those things is tied to a different brand, or service, or website. The publisher or creator cares about that for their own business reasons. I don’t.

Facebook covers some of these things. Google alerts can cover others. But nothing does it all, and part of the reason is that each of these brands isn’t looking out for me and what I want. They’re looking out for how they can squeeze me and what I want into their universe.

It doesn’t matter to me what Google thinks of my TV shows, or whether they’ve been able to work out a business deal with that network. I don’t want to be limited to what they offer in their walled garden. Or Amazon’s. Or Apple’s.

Each of these brands thinks they can have their fingers in everything — news, movies, TV, music, books, etc. — so you can get everything you want in their platform. But no matter how hard they try, they’re not going to get everything I’m interested in, and I don’t want to be stuck in their system.

I’ll want to watch a Netflix original that isn’t on Amazon prime, or I’ll read blogs from several different platforms, or I’ll want a type of tea they don’t sell, or I’ll own a very particular type of whatsit that’s only available from a custom shop.

There is simply no way that the big players are going to be able to cover everything I’m interested in, and this creates an opportunity for someone who’s willing to do a little leg work.

All the stuff that I’ve mentioned is available online, but it’s available in different services. On Amazon, on Google Play, on Blogspot, at Joseph A Banks, etc., and there’s no one place where you can get it all. Nobody’s going to solve that, but somebody might be able to put information about all those things into one service.

Imagine a browser plugin that allowed you to select things no matter where you found them, and allowed you to customize alerts for when something has changed.

• “Tell me when this shirt is on sale.”
• “Let me know when Lutheran Satire posts a new YouTube video.”
• “I want to read everything anybody says about Wooster and Jeeves.”
• “Send me a note when a new review is posted on this product — in any store or on any site.”

Now imagine that all this stuff was organized into a daily email.

That, my friends, would be custom publishing.