The Paradox of Paywalls: Finding Balance Between Exclusive and Accessible Content
Also: introducing Substack's new Referral Program
As real-time social media properties like Facebook and Twitter slowly melt down, the return of The Blog gains steam, mostly through such outlets as Substack and Medium. And while this is wonderful, it presents some specific problems for amateur writers like myself. Where more established writers can easily convert their social media followers into Substack subscriptions, the rest of us have to try and get around the various algorithms in order to consistently put our work in front of our readers.
This leads to a very specific problem, which I’ll explain in a minute.
But first, a little bit about my readership:
I have approximately 95 subscribers - that is, people who have entered their email in a Substack prompt and, as a result, either receive my posts as emails to their inbox or directly to the Substack app on their portable devices. (Apple & Android)
I consistently have a 35-40% open rate, which is something I’m really proud of - open rates for many email subscription services are often in the 20% range, so I feel like I’m producing content that my readers want to read.
I have 9 paid subscribers - these are folks who pay a monthly or yearly fee to access my paywalled material, which includes the Peter, What Are You Reading series, detailed chapter-by-chapter book reviews of books like The Right to Sex, and The Case for Christian Nationalism, and other more personal essays like “I Can’t Stop Picking My Head.”
In marketing circles, it is well-known that exclusivity breeds engagement, and with engagement comes sales. It is also well-known, however, that folks won’t pay for a service or a product if they think they can get the same item, or some approximation of it, for free.
With less than 10% of my readership paying for content, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to put content behind a paywall - even if all 9 individuals are thrilled with the content, they can’t share it with others in a meaningful way. This is a serious disincentive to producing paywalled content, as I presumably want my work to be widely read, especially if I want it to make a difference in the world I live in.
Of course, if I don’t produce very much exclusive paywalled content, there is no incentive for people to become paid subscribers, since most of the content is available for free. As a result, the few paid subscribers I do have don’t renew their subscription at the end of the year, and folks don’t see much reason in signing up in the first place.
It should go without saying that I am not producing Substacks with the goal of making money. There may be content creators out there with thousands of paid subscribers, but that’s not me, and I don’t want that to be me; I’m not so sure I want the hassle of that many subscribers, each with their own expectations of what constitutes good content.
But at the same time, the kind of curatorial journalism that I do with my Dinner Table Digest series and the additional writing I have done on weighty topics like Medical Aid in Dying and Christian Nationalism takes a lot of time and effort. It feels nice to see a few bucks flow into my bank account every month, a tangible reward for the hard work of the previous month. It may only be enough to buy a coffee and a donut on the way to class, but it’s something.
The Substack Leaderboard
Recently introduced by Substack and found in the Leaderboard section, is a new referral program that provides for complementary access to paywall content based on sucessful referrals of Dinner Table Don’ts. While this doesn’t solve the paywall paradox, it does go a long way to providing some kind of external incentives to share content with others, in the hope that a few months of complimentary access will ultimately convert to a paid subscription.
If you find value in the content that I produce, please do me a solid and share it with your friends and family!
I think the tricky part about the Leaderboard is that the reason I pay for a subscription is because I value the content and want to support it -- so complementary access isn't much of an incentive from my perspective. Your comment about how paid subscribers "are thrilled with the content [but] they can’t share it with others in a meaningful way" resonated with me. One idea could be to try a "community unlock" approach, where the more paid subscribers you have, the more content gets released from behind the paywall, so the paid subscriptions have the effect of making more of the content sharable.
You summed up much of what I have been thinking around 'to paywall or not to paywall'!