July 5th, 2010
Why I am Switching to a Paid Email Newsletter
It’s fitting, I think, that my final entry on this blog is about how I am experimenting with a paid email newsletter. Perhaps business school had more of an effect than I thought.
For me, starting a blog was an experiment to see if anyone “out there” would be interested in reading what I had to say about various technology and startup-related topics. And I mostly wrote about what I wanted at first. I knew the maximum audience for what I was writing about was maybe a few hundred people anyway.
But then this weird thing happened that I like to call “page view whoring” (PVW), where I started to scheme about how to up my page view counts instead of just writing about some weird topic that I thought was interesting (bit.ly speculation, anyone?). PVW is a vicious cycle where you realize that effectively monetizing your content means you have to appeal to a wider audience, dilute your voice and probably alienate your early adopters – the ones who appreciated your niche content to begin with.
I don’t even run ads on this blog! It wasn’t about money right away. But it WAS about motivation. Why was I putting in the time to write stuff? Well, for non-ad-driven blogs they usually start out as a for-the-love side project and then the good ones can turn into branding tools for the authors who leverage “their brand” in some creative way (shilling products to their audience, lead gen for various businesses, “deal-flow”, speaking engagements, book deals, etc.).
But I don’t want to build “a brand” – I just want to write about kind of weird stuff that I like and have people appreciate it. And the PVW was starting to creep me out. Like, “If I write something about privacy and Facebook it will get some points on Hacker News!” And then I did. And then it did. Turns out you can get pretty decent at PVW if you put your mind to it.
And that’s when it stopped being a purely for-the-love side project.
It became “Hey! 5000 page views this month! If I can just get that to 10,000 maybe I can start making money from this” and that was the moment when I agreed to dilute my message for the sake of maybe making a little cash off this side project. I hate admitting this in public, but it’s true: I am a fucking capitalist.
My hypothesis is this: by introducing the money part at the beginning of the cycle instead of the end, one can avoid the vicious PVW cycle. When I heard about Sam Lessin’s new side project Letter.ly, I was intrigued.
The model is just a bit different, but I think awesome. You state your price (mine is $2/month) and people can pay it if they want to subscribe. Not a new idea necessarily, but extremely well-executed and easy to set up.
Example: John Gruber gets 3 million page views at Daring Fireball and charges $4500/week for sponsorship. I only need 9000 subscribers to make the same amount of money, which coincidentally is probably the maximum number of people who’d be interested in what I have to say anyway. It’s just as much work to get to 9000 paid subscribers as it is to get to 3m page views, but the paths are *very* different. I think mine will probably top out at maybe a few hundred, but the drastic difference between 3 million and 9000 is notable.
I am already starting to see the difference – I feel a true sense of responsibility to my new subscribers – to produce something that I think is quality niche content and that’s mine. I am only writing for people who care enough about what I have to say that they paid for it, which creates a new sort of incentive cycle that to me is more likely to produce interesting stuff. It’s also a new way to filter an audience – effectively eliminating those “off-the-Google” spammers who stumble on your blog and try to hype Viagra in the comments section. And for those of us this far down the long tail, it’s an interesting option.
And isn’t it bizarre that switching *away* from the free model might be a way to keep niche content truly niche? The internet surprises you sometimes.
Sign up if you want: http://letter.ly/amanda.
**Sidenote: I don’t think this model will work AT ALL for big media properties. Paywalls for publications like the NY Times are, I think, likely to fail. But that’s another post for another time.