Just call me Kath
in which I am appealing
Enough people have pledged money for a subscription here that I will start collecting them. The question, on which I would like your advice, is what should I be charging for? There are two common freemium models I know of place the paywall either horizontally or vertically. With the vertical paywall the juiciest posts are reserved in their entirety for paying subscribers. I don’t like this because it is the longer, and more considered posts that I want to have the largest influence and readership. The horizontal paywall shows the beginning of every post and puts the paywall a third or a quarter of the way down a long post. This frustrates me when I run across it so I assume you find it irritating too.
Finally there is the Guardian model – also favoured by our dog when I make myself a cheese sandwich. The Very Good Not Barking1 person lies down and fixes the victim with a look of imploring concentration until cheese is produced.
I prefer this method. The chief reason is that I want as many of the right people as possible to read this. I don’t pretend that anybody needs to pay for it: I don’t supply actionable intelligence in the way that people can who provide useful news. If I made money from this, it would obviously get more of my time and attention. But — fair warning to all the clergy who read this — there is not enough money in the world to make me concentrate on Church politics the way I have had to do this winter.
Twenty years ago (really) when I had a lively little blog, nobody charged and I had a proper paying job. The reward of blogging in those days was to become part of a loose-knit group of mutually conversing friends. Some of them still crop up in the comments here, so that has not entirely disappeared, but nowadays the outcrops of intelligent and well-informed comment are spread all over the internet and the intervening wastelands seem much more desolate and dangerous. Another difference is that back when blogs flourished the young Republican barbarians were destroying the Iraqi state, not their own. Ah well.
I’ve quoted September 1st 1939 often enough: Auden is the tutelatory spirit of this place — Defenceless under the night / Our world in stupor lies. But on Sunday we heard a slightly different message at the Festival Hall — Teresa Williams singing Keep your Lamps Trimmed and Burning.
Unless they are American. See this story
I think this is a dilemma for a lot of writers here.
I've experimented with a few different ways and still don't really know how best to do it. What I would love to see is a pay-what-you-like model.
Right now I offer the standard subscription plus the option to tip via PayPal or Monzo where I reciprocate by manually subbing a full subscription.
Whether I paywall a post is down to what I am writing about. If it is something off format, quite personal or that I don't want easily linkable, then I drop it behind the paywall.
I trust the people that support my work here and feel more comfortable sharing the more sensitive stuff with them.
In the end I'm doing this more for me and to have a nurturing community I can grow with than for the pennies it might bring in.
I have things that may be happening soon that could have me going way off piste, so plan to paywall everything for a while. This will give me an intimate, experimental writing environment but I'm pretty sure it will also stifle all growth. Pros and cons I suppose.
Thanks for pondering this it's good to think these things out loud.
I hope this helps.
Christian.
In the joyous event that this starts to generate enough income to pay for you to do the odd bit of investigative journalism, I'd be up for the vertical paywall to make occasional appearances. But the audience would have to be lined up *first*. So maybe something to keep in reserve for later, in case of joyous et cetera?