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Daniel Catena's avatar

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!

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Joshua Doležal's avatar

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.

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