A lot of people are happy to pay $10/month for https://www.stratechery.com. Interested to see who else out there has loyal readerships willing to pay them!
List of real life ideas/pain points that can be solved and sold with software, with some decent research into it (not like "my uncle says he will pay $3.50 to automate his antique shop")
Same as the previous one, but in the non-profit space and not for making money. Specific problems that I can write code for, without having to worry about whether it is actually useful or not
Stories/commentary/interviews about companies working on solving very hard problems with tech, regardless of whether they succeed or not (not photo sharing apps, but problems like genetics, pharma, privacy etc)
Actionable insights/ideas on improving my abilities - creativity, problem solving, health etc (no pseudo science, no "motivational" stuff)
> List of real life ideas/pain points that can be solved and sold with software, with some decent research into it (not like "my uncle says he will pay $3.50 to automate his antique shop")
Amen to all of these, especially to the "not photo sharing apps" point. I love working in tech and am in awe of its transformative power, but I am very sick of so much talent/money going to useless attention zappers.
I'd happily pay for the first three mentioned in the above post
I've been blogging since 2004 with no real ads or affiliate revenue to speak of, and it's news to me that it's "unsustainable." But then, I guess it depends upon whether we mean "sustainable as in keeping me motivated to write," or if we mean, "financially sustainable as in keeping me in fresh sock garters and Camambert risotto."
I get maybe $500 a month from people buying my books, and another $20 a month in amazon affiliate revenues from links to other people's books. If I tried to live on this, I'd starve. But this is not unusual, and I suspect that I am making more money than most people who blog.
Let's be clear: It's very rare for someone to make their primary living from blogging. But that's true of most creative things, be it writing, music, art, custom bicycle frames. These are, by and large, terrible businesses from a venal point of view.
Most people are in it for the love, because writing scratches their own itch. It's an awful business to be in: Like pop music, it's mostly a few big winners scooping the lion's share of the revenues, with everyone else scraping by or having a day job to pay the rent.
I am ok with people paying me zero dollars, because I write for myself. If I tried to live off it, I'd have to make insane compromises, like putting out a new book every time a new language looked to become popular, or writing clickbait blog posts on a schedule. And even then, the odds are that I would just get by, and need to supplement that income with speaker's fees and consulting.
Writing for money is a questionable model for a vocation, and a terrible model for an avocation.
Writing for yourself is an excellent model for an avocation, but unsustainable as a vocation.
> It's very rare for someone to make their primary living from blogging. But that's true of most creative things, be it writing, music, art, custom bicycle frames
Some kinds of blogging/newsletter-writing is cheap. Other kinds, particularly the investigative kinds, are not.
> what we are witnessing in real time is those forms of journalism evaporate, as the web destroys their business models
The Wall Street Journal and New York Times are doing fine. Smaller publications, too, like The Information seem to do okay. Paywalls work because (a) online ads are crap and (b) most readers are too cheap to pay unless forced to.
> I think that blogging is not the same thing as journalism
I agree. I also think this blurring of the line has caused people to expect both for free, which is clearly untenable. That said, newspapers include op-ed sections and some "thinker" newsletters I subscribe to (e.g. Mike Allen's political daily) have broken legitimate news.
> If any I read started charging I'd find similar content somewhere else.
I'd double down on that, any site that has a free article limit (looking at you NY Times) I don't even bother with.
Or any site that whines about running an ad blocker.
True they need to make some cash to keep the lights on but I have never in my life bought something from seeing an online advertisement and don't really appreciate being tracked all over the interwebs.
That's actually quite the thought provoking question.
I think, since I'm so accustomed to getting information gratis and don't really have very much disposable income, if push came to shove I'd just give up on all non-free sources of information and find some other way to occupy my free time -- perhaps quit being lazy and work enough to upgrade my computer so I could get back into Blender development or something along those lines. It's much too easy to spend hours reading random articles or watching the youtubes instead of being productive "for society" and I have a bunch of half-finished projects scattered across my harddrives that could easily keep me entertained if I lost access to free content on the internet.
When I ask myself this question, I find I'm not willing to pay for most blog articles, neither though advertising nor directly. When I follow through and forgo the information, I find other pursuits to fill the time, and these are usually more fulfilling. I feel more healthy after a morning of playing Minecraft or working on my Node app, than a morning of reading blogs and social media.
>Must it be paying for knowledge? What about paying for convenience of accessing it anytime anywhere and in a timely manner?
I'm willing to put up with a considerable amount of inconvenience for open content, including advertising (as long as they are not tracking or using unknown scripts).
$5/month is also a lot of money to me, that currently covers: website, IRC, VPN and a game server. Most the people here may be on a better than average wage working within tech fields, so I imagine opinions to be skewed.
>Ultimately someone has to do the research and legwork. If they don't get paid they'll do less/none.
I mentioned this originally and I'm not entirely aware of how to tackle this - but I think the overall cost to the user financially should be really low or nonexistent. That could mean an attention economy, mining coin on a specialized chip, or whatever other reasonable means. It should also be a choice where possible.
Another idea I thought of a while back would be to have people reading the content help share the load of hosting by acting as a peer. There's some not very well supported server sockets (last time I checked) coming for browsers that could make this possible, but equally with a well designed client. Potentially the more popular the content, the less it costs to run.
I don't think I would pay a monthly membership for a website, but what I would be willing to pay for is Google and Facebook to stop watching me and showing advertisements.
If I could pay the online ad companies to pay the content creator like I was a "click" or a "view" I could have an ad-free online experience while the content creator continues to get paid like I had seen the ad.
The opportunity for Google is huge I know a lot of people who would cough up $5-10/mo for an ad-free online experience.
None of them. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of blogs and media sources I like, but at the end of the day I can get any information I want somewhere else for free.
Heck, in many cases, the information I need is either paid for by taxes (the BBC) or provided by hobbyists for free anyway.
I'm not sure this is correct always. Sure you can get much of the information for free, but not any, as you mention. And even if you did, you'd be paying for it with your time, spending hours and days poring over data and separating facts from noise. For example: if you are an investor, can you get information on potential opportunities (stocks to buy or whatever) without having to spend money or a lot of time? What about real estate? If you or a loved one has a unusual medical condition and you're interested in knowing every recent development in the diagnosis, treatment etc of the condition, can you get it accurately and quickly for free?
Happy to be proven wrong, but I guess we'd be paying for good information/commentary/analysis etc one way or other - with time or money.
I just began paying $5/mo to be a "member" at Medium. It's meant to enhance the discovery feature and the ability to access curated archives. Really it was a spur of the moment decision after I found myself reading and greatly appreciating an article from 2015[1], but I haven't really used the membership or understood it well enough to say that I'll continue yet. I think there's great need for a specific type of personal journalism Medium is known for, and I do want to support it especially if it means better research and discovery. Also given how much I've read off of Medium (good and not so good), a payment of some sort felt due. Let's see.
I read more blogs (single articles based on headlines of interest) than newsletters (digests that show up in my inbox). While I find many of them interesting and informative (krebs, schneier, ars, hn...) there's so much duplicated info around there isn't much I'd be willing to actually pay $60/year for.
Would rather do something like cryptocurrency micro-payments per actual article read to the end (or upvoted, clapped, etc) as opposed to spending a set amount of money per month for potentially unhelpful content or articles I don't get around to reading.
That would reward content creators for writing good material that actually gets read and the economy of scale would pay based on that mutual incentive. Such micropayments would also be a better metric than simple impressions and clicks.
5/month is too much. Consider how many different websites you're reading in one month, then imagine they all cost $5/month. It will start to hurt.
On the other hand, sites that charge you directly have to charge a minimum because of banking fees etc.
What we need is some middleman that will charge you $15/month then distribute it somehow along all the sites that you wish to support. Criteria to be done, maybe evenly, maybe based on how much you read from each...
There aren't many. HN is the closest, but the truth is that I'd not start out paying $5 a month for it: I'd have to have 3 months free to test, then .... maybe. I'd probably pay for Reuters, AP, or BBC. The thing with these is varied content or content I check on my own.
The problem with most things bogs is that I don't get that much out of them. They are like newspapers or magazines: Might be OK every now and then, but nothing I'd read daily without getting bored of the content or finding it not nearly as useful as paying attention to them occasionally. I really wish advertisements were responsible and non-intrusive, but unfortunately this is rarely so. It wasn't so with television, newspapers, and magazines pre-internet either. Paid cable was filled with so many ads! Even paid channels advertising their own advertising long after a decent cable guide on demand existed.
My other big exception might be a cooking blog if it lacks the horrible ad experience and stops people from forcing their morals on me (I can buy organic flimsy brand butter if I choose, but listing it as an ingredient annoys me to no end). But again, I'd not pay it upfront and a free full-access trial would be necessary.
> and stops people from forcing their morals on me
Those are almost certainly not their morals that they're including in the recipe, but rather their monetization strategy. Those brand-specific ingredients are likely examples of brand placement.
The brand specific ones are probably so. Simply listing "organic butter" isn't such a thing, and it happens quite often. I understand enough to just use the butter I have, but some folks truly aren't. (I once had someone tell me ibuprofen didn't work for them: they had to have Advil. Same stuff happens with cooking, even with ingredients mandated to be the same).
I'm in the same boat. I have a subscription to a music service and a VPS provider but that's it.
Recurring charges are weird, maybe stressful is the right word. I'm constantly pressured to use the service to feel like I'm not waisting money but then when I do I have to keep evaluating whether it's worth it.
Perpetual licenses I have no trouble popping though.
I think my gaming habit is a good example, I probably spend on average $10-20 on games every month from the same service but I wouldn't pay $15/mo for their entire catalog.
I stumbled upon https://www.dailycodingproblem.com/ recently and it's the first time I want to pay for a newsletter. I don't need to pass a coding interview, but I used to be a competition programmer in high school and love thinking of tricky coding problems to solve. The newsletter includes a detailed solution to each problem (the next day.) What a great idea.
I also used to pay for http://railscasts.com/ by Ryan Bates - back when it was a paid subscription. I paid for how succinct the information was organized, despite there being a tonne of other Ruby blogs out there.
Almost none, unless it was something I'd read every day + found more than 1/2 articles relevant + useful. Won't even pay for NYT if only 5 or 6 articles/month add significant value.
We need a subscription business model that aggregates content like cable/pay tv, so I can pay a fair price once, and continue grazing across most sites without worrying about individual subscriptions or micropayments. WSJ and Economist are only sources I would pay for (at a reasonable price) that aren't providing specific data points I can use. And, most people wouldn't find those as useful as I do, so it's down to personal preferences and how much of any source you'll get value from.
It's why individual subscriptions to everything is a dead-in-the-water business model that's going to kill off most journals. Most sites will be abandoned if there is a paywall.
Think about it this way -- how many people would pay for The History Channel or HGTV as individual add-on tv channels? Yet a very large number of people will occasionally watch those sources if it's included in general subscription, and they add value to the overall package, even if you rarely watch them. That's the way I view 99% of online content.
And, you have to make it dead easy, and not be constantly harrassing me about subscriptions or micropayments, or I'm gone. And, I also expect sites I'm paying for to be ad-free and not slowing down my browser, or I won't pay.
I was curious to see the responses to this question.
I run Opportunity Overload and we have paying subscribers for our pro-tier. We started at $10 per month and now have a $50 per month plan (still working on the details of this).
We send out the best weekly entrepreneurial opportunities in the form of sites, side projects, domains, broad opportunities and courses that we write.
I was paying $5/mo for Ars Technica, and recently switched to paying $50/year, because they were giving away a Yubikey with it. You don’t get any more content, but no ads and full text RSS.
I discovered it primarily as a YouTube channel but the guy who makes http://iliketomakestuff.com has some great projects out there, including a number of arduino based projects. I’m trying to expand my horizon beyond web development and it appeals to my inner maker.
It's not a blog or a newsletter but proper journalism and definitely worth the $5/mo I pay for it. I don't think there is any newsletter that just recycles other people's content would be worth the money.
LWN.net. I don't read their articles often, but seeing what's on the forefront of the Linux project and associated work without combing through tons of commits is useful
I'm subscribed to the correspondent but it's more their mission and work I'm supporting than actually paying to read their articles, though they are very good.
I'm curious why Twitter isn't at least experimenting with this (or Facebook and others). Even if just 10M accounts paid $5 per month, it is 600M biz a year.
If it ceased to be free it would possibly maintain its utility and gain some civility b/c most of the people that constitute the political echo chamber would balk at paying.
Currently I don't pay for any blogs or newsletters. I'd be willing to pay for high quality content as long as it were still made freely available, ideally with a permissive license. It is my belief that knowledge should generally be accessible to society.
I support content creators that have used similar strategies in other mediums. Some examples:
1. Exploring ES6 [0]. The book is freely available online which means I can access it anywhere and easily share relevant sections if the need arises, such as when having an online discussion or explaining to a beginner how a specific feature works. I happily bought a copy and regularly recommend it to others.
2. Textual [1]. It's an open source IRC client which charges for the precompiled version. I like having the option to dig into the source and compile it myself if the need arose. Paying for it allows the developer to continue working on bug fixes and improving the tool.
If I were more involved in the topics they covered, I'd happily start paying for LWN.net [2]. They allow linking to articles without paywalls and seem to produce very high quality content.
Drudge doesn't do any reporting, just aggregates articles from all over the spectrum - Buzzfeed to Breitbart, Newsweek to Newsmax, but mostly stuff in between (the headline right now is distilled from the first sentence of the Rasmussen article it links to, which I don't think is a biased source, although you may not like what is being reported)
I'm willing to pay $5/month for one blog: my own. That is what a basic VPS with plenty of bandwidth costs.
edit: Interesting, this is fast approaching my most downvoted comment ever. Wonder why that is. I didn't even bother to link my own blog in case that came off as overly self-promotional.
If you think that content should be free, what is wrong with putting your money where your mouth is and giving your own away?
Same -- I pay about $5/mo to host a blog. Part of me wishes people would pay to read it, but the rest of me is in touch with reality. People who want to give me money can buy other things.
I am also willing to pay for good reporting and writing, e.g. the New Yorker and my local paper, because they require actual work. I wouldn't pay for Stratechery, which is just an opinion blog.
List of real life ideas/pain points that can be solved and sold with software, with some decent research into it (not like "my uncle says he will pay $3.50 to automate his antique shop")
Same as the previous one, but in the non-profit space and not for making money. Specific problems that I can write code for, without having to worry about whether it is actually useful or not
Stories/commentary/interviews about companies working on solving very hard problems with tech, regardless of whether they succeed or not (not photo sharing apps, but problems like genetics, pharma, privacy etc)
Actionable insights/ideas on improving my abilities - creativity, problem solving, health etc (no pseudo science, no "motivational" stuff)