Hi Amanda, thank you for offering sanity today! I'm losing my mind (well, just a little bit) over how to encourage more paid subscribers to [B]old Age. I'm freely offering a lot of good content (essays, Q&As, etc.) so I'm satisfying that piece of the puzzle. My readers are engaging (over 100 comments on a recent essay about "identity" as a writer), so that's good. Right now, some of my more personal essays are "paid only," as is a series I've started called "Ask Debbie," to answer readers' practical and existential questions about [b]old age). The question is, am I offering too much for free, so there is not enough incentive to upgrade to paid? What do you suggest to help me figure this out?
My curiosity naturally goes to what you know about your readers and their motivations. Have you done much intentional work around readers? In my experience, paywalls need a clear tangibility to them. Personal essays or answering reader questions might not be the clearest selling point for new readers, if only because they're not very tangible for a person who knows nothing about you. My hunch is it would take a long time for someone to build a relationship with you to see those paid offerings as valuable enough to upgrade. So it could be a slow drip of upgrades if that's the offering. What do you think you could offer that's more tangible?
This is great food for thought. By tangible do you mean "access" to something I offer only for [b]old women, for example? How would you suggest I do "intentional" work to find out more about my readers? I do know anecdotally that my readers are other older women, wanting to share their experiences, because I can see who is subscribing and who leaves comments.
Hi Debbie - By tangible I mean, this thing is readily valuable to me even if I don't know who you, Debbie Weil, are. Is it something that a free reader can see and be intrigued? Is it something a paid reader can cumulatively add up in their minds when their monthly or yearly renewal is on the line and go, "Oh, I know this offering and it's worth my investment"?
The best thing for understanding your readers is to start working on building a reader persona. This isn't a one-time exercise where you know all things about your readers, but it's incredibly helpful to start with a baseline of what you THINK you know about your readers and then intentionally measure it over time (anecdotally, through editorial audits, etc). I designed one for readers (here: https://buy.stripe.com/4gw28fd7kdAraNqfZe), and I like it because, well, it's mine 😊and I know from experience what's important to know and track about an audience.
I think #3 is the key thing I've been missing. I say that paying subscribers get roughly 50% more, but there's no predictable pattern to what gets paywalled. So that will change in 2025. Fairly low hanging fruit, but I haven't really been ready to plan at that level before now, so this post is timely.
I suppose these principles hold true at any scale, but I was thinking about this today while listening to Preet Bharara's "Stay Tuned" podcast. He offers a paid version for "Cafe Insiders," which includes the full version of some of his excerpted interviews. But I don't want it badly enough to pay, so I'm typically happy to wait for the next episode I can listen to in full for free. The rub there is that Preet is still making money on advertising, and I'm still helping him toward that goal by generating traffic. I'm no advocate for bringing ads to Substack, but it does make the paywall puzzle a little trickier, since you can be killing it with eyeballs and still not be making anything. Pretty much everything rides on that paywall.
I'm glad you're pulling some tools out of this essay! And what a good example re: Preet Bharara's podcast and having advertising money. The thing a lot of higher profile people have the flexibility to do is publish certain media that SEEMS paywalled but is actually just for lead gen toward either a bigger or future offering. I've watched a lot of folks who start a podcast only because they know in 3 to 5 years they want to have built an audience for a book they're working on. It's mind boggling how marketing and media production can flex once you reach a certain size.
I'm inclined to agree with you on "pretty much everything rides on that paywall." Because it's true -- somewhere in the ecosystem of interacting with a person online, if they aren't independently wealthy, the paywall shows up. It's been curious to watch Dan Harris shift to Substack and it's made me wonder if/when his other media will toggle between free and paid, precisely because he CAN experiment with that kind of reach. When we're smaller, we have to be a little more precise about things. And it sure does help when you have a clearer understanding of what you're building large scale before you start playing with paywalls.
The whole thing is such an anomaly lol. Of all the newsletters I pay for, only ONE of them offers special paid content over and above their freeness. The rest are just awesome writers and they don't paywall anything. I just upgrade because I love them. I don't need extra stuff.
Even more bizarre: I'm an admin on dozens of other Stacks because I work for them. This means I have free access to all their paid content and yet, I don't even peek at the paid stuff because if it's not my jam, it's just not.
I recently began minimal paywall posts but you touch on the important point of whether we offer enough value to make it useful. Offering value to free and paid readers can be a balancing act. Thanks for sharing this!
Hi Amanda, thank you for offering sanity today! I'm losing my mind (well, just a little bit) over how to encourage more paid subscribers to [B]old Age. I'm freely offering a lot of good content (essays, Q&As, etc.) so I'm satisfying that piece of the puzzle. My readers are engaging (over 100 comments on a recent essay about "identity" as a writer), so that's good. Right now, some of my more personal essays are "paid only," as is a series I've started called "Ask Debbie," to answer readers' practical and existential questions about [b]old age). The question is, am I offering too much for free, so there is not enough incentive to upgrade to paid? What do you suggest to help me figure this out?
My curiosity naturally goes to what you know about your readers and their motivations. Have you done much intentional work around readers? In my experience, paywalls need a clear tangibility to them. Personal essays or answering reader questions might not be the clearest selling point for new readers, if only because they're not very tangible for a person who knows nothing about you. My hunch is it would take a long time for someone to build a relationship with you to see those paid offerings as valuable enough to upgrade. So it could be a slow drip of upgrades if that's the offering. What do you think you could offer that's more tangible?
This is great food for thought. By tangible do you mean "access" to something I offer only for [b]old women, for example? How would you suggest I do "intentional" work to find out more about my readers? I do know anecdotally that my readers are other older women, wanting to share their experiences, because I can see who is subscribing and who leaves comments.
Hi Debbie - By tangible I mean, this thing is readily valuable to me even if I don't know who you, Debbie Weil, are. Is it something that a free reader can see and be intrigued? Is it something a paid reader can cumulatively add up in their minds when their monthly or yearly renewal is on the line and go, "Oh, I know this offering and it's worth my investment"?
The best thing for understanding your readers is to start working on building a reader persona. This isn't a one-time exercise where you know all things about your readers, but it's incredibly helpful to start with a baseline of what you THINK you know about your readers and then intentionally measure it over time (anecdotally, through editorial audits, etc). I designed one for readers (here: https://buy.stripe.com/4gw28fd7kdAraNqfZe), and I like it because, well, it's mine 😊and I know from experience what's important to know and track about an audience.
I think #3 is the key thing I've been missing. I say that paying subscribers get roughly 50% more, but there's no predictable pattern to what gets paywalled. So that will change in 2025. Fairly low hanging fruit, but I haven't really been ready to plan at that level before now, so this post is timely.
I suppose these principles hold true at any scale, but I was thinking about this today while listening to Preet Bharara's "Stay Tuned" podcast. He offers a paid version for "Cafe Insiders," which includes the full version of some of his excerpted interviews. But I don't want it badly enough to pay, so I'm typically happy to wait for the next episode I can listen to in full for free. The rub there is that Preet is still making money on advertising, and I'm still helping him toward that goal by generating traffic. I'm no advocate for bringing ads to Substack, but it does make the paywall puzzle a little trickier, since you can be killing it with eyeballs and still not be making anything. Pretty much everything rides on that paywall.
I'm glad you're pulling some tools out of this essay! And what a good example re: Preet Bharara's podcast and having advertising money. The thing a lot of higher profile people have the flexibility to do is publish certain media that SEEMS paywalled but is actually just for lead gen toward either a bigger or future offering. I've watched a lot of folks who start a podcast only because they know in 3 to 5 years they want to have built an audience for a book they're working on. It's mind boggling how marketing and media production can flex once you reach a certain size.
I'm inclined to agree with you on "pretty much everything rides on that paywall." Because it's true -- somewhere in the ecosystem of interacting with a person online, if they aren't independently wealthy, the paywall shows up. It's been curious to watch Dan Harris shift to Substack and it's made me wonder if/when his other media will toggle between free and paid, precisely because he CAN experiment with that kind of reach. When we're smaller, we have to be a little more precise about things. And it sure does help when you have a clearer understanding of what you're building large scale before you start playing with paywalls.
The whole thing is such an anomaly lol. Of all the newsletters I pay for, only ONE of them offers special paid content over and above their freeness. The rest are just awesome writers and they don't paywall anything. I just upgrade because I love them. I don't need extra stuff.
Even more bizarre: I'm an admin on dozens of other Stacks because I work for them. This means I have free access to all their paid content and yet, I don't even peek at the paid stuff because if it's not my jam, it's just not.
Oh wow you’re the DREAM reader, Kristi!! If only we all behaved the same way!! 😂
Hahaha right?
I recently began minimal paywall posts but you touch on the important point of whether we offer enough value to make it useful. Offering value to free and paid readers can be a balancing act. Thanks for sharing this!