Dan Lewis

Thinking about Paywalls and Writing

I’ve been thinking a lot about Andrew Sullivan’s new venture (still) and wanted to get some thoughts down. These may be disjointed — I’m using this post as a scrapbook of sorts.

In general, writers probably want to spread their ideas as much as they want to make money.

Books do both, but online, the expected cost for the reader is $0. If you charge, you lost the vast majority of that audience — like the penny gap, but for content.

The default rule should, therefore, be that you don’t want to charge people to read. Forget the business model for a moment — if your goal is to influence or something similar, it makes a lot more sense to keep (most of?) the content free.

This isn’t absolute, even if the given is true. Gated content at a top publication (e.g. ESPN’s Insider) is probably better than ungated content at a much smaller one, but that’s an ever-thinning exception outside of sports (where ESPN is the clear market leader). Part of the value comes from the size of the publication, as your reach is larger even with the paywall; part comes from the reputational value of the larger pub (which is probably why books are still awesome for spreading ideas).

Reader-experience aside, where the money comes from shouldn’t really matter much.

This isn’t an observation about ads. Let’s assume you solicit donations to support your writing. $100,000 from one person is the same as $10 from 10,000 people each. Assuming that there’s no expectations on behalf of the donor, the two should be identical to the writer.

There are some exceptions to this, too. Some people believe that if you don’t pay for content, you shouldn’t be entitled to it; or, perhaps, that if some people pay, others shouldn’t be entitled to it.

There may be more money in ex post donations than ex ante purchases.

This is rank speculation on my part. But: are people buying access to future Andrew Sullivan content, or donating in thanks of past content? I think there’s a good case to be made that it’s more the latter than the former:

I’m eyeballing this, and, treating the $20 buyers as the same as $19.99 buyers, it looks like about 60% of his day-one buyers spent the minimum. I think it’s fair to say that the other 40% are as much donors as they are purchasers — and obviously, some (I’d say the 10% who paid $50 or more) are clearly donors over purchasers.