May be out for the next few days
And a quandary with respect to subscribers.
I hope you all are having a great day so far, and hopefully enjoying the warmer weather if the weather stays warm in your area.
A friend is visiting so I may not be able to post as frequently for the next few days so I wanted to give a heads up to readers.
In the meantime, I wanted to talk a bit about paid subscribers and wading the waters of Substack. More specifically, it’s with respect to the cost of annual subscriptions.
As of now monthly subscriptions are set to $5 as it’s the lowest option Substack allows. For annual subscriptions I set the price at $50 as it appeared to be common to just do 10x what the monthly cost was.
However, with inflation and everything going on it’s understandably become more difficult for readers to pay for subscriptions, especially with the number of Substacks out there. Some people may also find that COVID hysteria dying down may be the right time to move on.
In any given case, I’m trying to find the best approach to encourage people to convert over to paid members.
For the most part a lot of my more critical and useful pieces have been free- especially those pertaining to COVID. Most of my paid content have been looking at additional information in some of my anthology series, examining random studies I come across, or just providing a bit more information or resources.
But because my free posts take up a lot of my time I generally can’t get to making more paid content.
Since all of this work is being done by one person I’m spending several days, sometimes weeks collecting papers, reading through them and trying to find the pertinent information to post especially because I try to look for primary sources. It’s one of the reasons I’ve slowed down on writing my anthology series because I would get burned out by the end of them.
This is mostly because a lot of what I cover are things that I lack foundational knowledge of, and so one study may require looking at 4 or 5 different literature reviews which then require looking at maybe another 5 or 10 papers. It’s not uncommon for me to be skimming through at least 20 papers to try to get a basic understanding of whatever I am looking at even if I don’t cover them all in my posts (which I tried to do a lot of at the beginning).
But because a lot of this work is being done by one person it can become rather tedious.
However, this isn’t intended to be a rant, but more that I hope people understand that I do try to put in a lot of effort into my Substack. I’m the only one working on this Substack (I don’t have a team and I certainly can’t afford a team) so a lot of the work comes from me, including all of the grammatical mistakes and the use of “it’s” when I mean “its”.
Because of this I’ve tried to figure out what model of monetization works best.
One option that I’ve seen many people take to is reducing their annual subscription fees to $30 which is Substack’s minimal amount.
This is one I would consider greatly. I think making it more affordable may help out many readers. At the same time, I don’t want it to seem disrespectful to annual subscribers who have already paid $50 and for those who may have recently renewed or upgraded to an annual status. A smaller issue, and this isn’t one that pertains to me in particular, is that lowering the annual subscription may be seen as “cheapening” one’s own work. I’ve seen a few comments in other Substacks of readers making that comment.
Hopefully cheaper subscriptions aren’t seen as being correlated with the level of work one puts out, but you never know. I’m pretty convinced that the “badgers” that Substack uses plays a big role in influencing readers in regards to who they subscribe to.
I’ve also included a ko-fi which I tend to prefer since you don’t have to commit to a monthly payment option. Hopefully Substack initiates some sort of “allowance” feature in which people can allocate a monthly allowance and from there give out money for articles they enjoy, like tossing one or two dollars.
Aside from that, I’ve considered what other topics may be considered additional value for paid members. I originally was considered a monthly topic in which people ask for coverage of a topic and the one most people vote on would be one I covered. That didn’t seem to get off the ground much as most people tend to read Substack more passively (i.e. they read but usually don’t comment).
It also alerted me to the idea that many readers would like to see topics covered not because they were curious about a topic, but more because they may like to seek out confirmation for their own biases. In that regard, I’d rather not cover topics if they are done to lean into people’s biases. I certainly wouldn’t be genuine if I started writing about viruses not being real/pathogenic even if it may mean more subscribers.
So as of now I’m figuring out the best approach for this Substack moving forward. I would like to cover a ton of different topics (I still need to cover my Spring-related stuff) that would hopefully interest readers, especially if it falls outside of COVID-related stuff as I’m sure a lot of people are feeling COVID fatigue in some way.
But with that being said, I’d like to know your thoughts and opinions. I’d be interested to hear what you seek out when becoming a paid subscriber, including if cost is a big player.
Also, please be aware that I am appreciate of any support, including likes and comments! I am encouraged when I see people engaging with any of my posts since I would hope they encourage some type of discussion!
And if not mine, I hope people consider other smaller Substacks out there. There are plenty of people who are putting a lot of good work out there but may not get recognized. The machinations of Substack seem to work against smaller writers now, so please always take into consideration those smaller Substacks.
And more importantly, make sure to take some time to go out and view the world. See real people, go outside, and live a life that isn’t entirely online. It’s easy to get wrapped up in what we see on the internet and mistake it for how the real world operates. There’s more to the world than what we see on our screens.
Substack is my main source of income and all support helps to support me in my daily life. If you enjoyed this post and other works please consider supporting me through a paid Substack subscription or through my Ko-fi. Any bit helps, and it encourages independent creators and journalists such as myself to provide work outside of the mainstream narrative.
My quandary is this. I read about 30 substacks. I certainly can’t pay for all of them so I end up paying for none. If I was going to subscribe to 2 or 3, how do I choose which ones? I like your idea of a substack pool that I could choose to give to articles as a one off and I guess ko-fi is the nearest to that. I will give this more thought.
If you come up with the secret sauce, please share!
I have the same struggle. It takes time to assemble the data for even a simple analysis of the Fed's interest rate fiasco, and I am constantly torn between what should be free and what should be "premium" paid content.
One thing I am testing currently is setting my paid articles to unlock after a week's time. I figure that by then the paid subscribers will have read it, and so the benefit of a paid subscription has been realized. Time will tell if I'm right or wrong.
Unlocking the premium content also makes it easier to reference them later on, which helps building a foundation for future articles.
But I am always looking to refine the model. While I do not plan to tailor my articles simply to work the crowd, I do want to have the crowd as regular subscribers.