Thinking outside the box with paid subscriptions

More and more publishers are trying to figure out ways to keep their content in front of the paywall.

Image licensed from Getty Images

Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media newsletter. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button:

Hey folks! Today I’m answering questions from readers. If you have a question you want me to answer in a future newsletter, leave it in this thread.

Thinking outside the box with paid subscriptions

The first question comes from Taegan Goddard

Exclusive content and no advertising are common offerings for digital subscribers. But what are some of the more creative items you’ve seen in a subscriber bundle?

Good question! And I think it’s one that a lot of smaller publishers are asking themselves as they realize how difficult it can be to produce a high volume of both free and paid content simultaneously. I’ve written about this before, but every moment spent creating content that’s locked behind a paywall is time not spent expanding your audience. And if you’re not expanding your audience, then it becomes incredibly difficult to find new paying subscribers.

If you’re a large media outlet like The Wall Street Journal or New York Times, then this isn’t a problem because you have a huge editorial workforce at your disposal. But if you’re an individual creator or run a small media outlet, then that balance is more difficult to maintain. 

That’s why more and more publishers are experimenting with new ways of providing value to paid subscribers that require locking less content behind a paywall. Here are a few ways they’re going about that:

Access to an online community

This is one of the most common strategies I see. Subscribers are given access to an exclusive online forum that isn’t available to the wider public.

It’s easy to see why a subscriber would find this valuable. Depending on the niche of the community, you can generate extremely thoughtful discussion when those participating in the discussion are your most devoted readers. Participants can leverage the community to crowdsource ideas or troubleshoot their individual problems.

This can also be great for the publisher because it requires less effort than producing paid content. Sure, you have to dedicate resources to moderating the community, but for the most part you can simply sit back and let the community generate its own content.

The challenge with these communities is they can be hard to jumpstart, especially when your subscriber base is still low. If you only have a few dozen paying subscribers, then the community will be a virtual ghost town when they go to visit it, and they won’t have any incentive to return.

The best way to jumpstart a community, I’ve found, is through heavy participation from you, the content creator. This sounds like it could be time intensive, but it doesn’t really need to be. I maintain a private Facebook group for my newsletter subscribers, and I will literally just throw links to articles I’m already reading into the group, and I’ll add in a dash of commentary. I’m also super responsive to comments, but again, it really only takes a few seconds to hash out a reaction to something someone has said.

So even if your private forum starts off as a ghost town, then your subscribers are still incentivized to return to it because it gives them personal access to you. Speaking of personal access…

Live Q&A streams and other kinds of behind-the-scenes access

Another great way to give subscribers personal access is through live video streams. You basically announce that at a specific time, your subscribers will be able to click on a link that will take them to a live stream with one of your content creators. Subscribers are then able to submit questions — either by chat or by voice — and the content creator responds to them in real time.

This kind of content is not only great for passive consumption, but it allows subscribers to feel like they’ve had a hand in creating it. Some publishers are even able to take recorded versions of these livestreams and redistribute them for free on on-demand video channels. This strategy essentially allows them to have their cake and eat it.

I’ve seen creators also give other kinds of behind-the-scenes access. For instance, the YouTuber Johnny Harris illustrates custom maps for many of his videos, and one of his Patreon subscriber perks is that he sends you high resolution images of those maps. These are materials that he’s already producing anyway, so simply sending them as a subscriber perk takes very little additional effort. 

Physical objects

This is an area where there should be more experimentation from publishers. The best example I’ve seen of it is the New Yorker’s tote bag. New subscribers to the magazine get a free tote bag in the mail, and it quickly became a widely-adopted fashion accessory. I live in DC and it’s rare for me to venture out into my neighborhood without seeing at least one of these iconic bags. We have at least two of them in our own apartment. 

I actually think the best physical object you can offer to subscribers is a physical zine. These are stapled-together publications that are relatively cheap to produce, and by limiting it to just one zine a year, you can minimize the logistical hurdles that come with mailing out a physical object. 

I’ve seen this strategy adopted by several Patreon creators. Tim Pratt, for instance, is a well-known science fiction & fantasy writer, and he offers a Patreon tier where he offers to “send you a signed and illustrated short story chapbook at least once a year.” The writer Ernie Smith also tried this out with his newsletter Tedium: “I’d like to announce that Tedium will be releasing a limited-edition zine that will only be produced in numbered editions for everyone in my $5 Patreon tiers and higher,” he wrote. “Anyone in the U.S. who wants one should sign up, because I’m only going to be doing a single run, which I’ll send out sometime in October. If you miss it, you miss it.”

Not only is a print zine a tangible benefit that subscribers can hold in their hands, it’s also an advertisement for your digital product. I’ve always had a soft spot for print zines as a medium, and it would be cool to see them make a comeback!

How this newsletter evolved over the last eight years

The next question comes from Wil A.

You recently passed three years of posting on Substack

How would you say your writing style has changed?

So I wouldn’t say my writing style has changed, per se, but the content and format certainly have. I would break this newsletter’s history into four distinct eras:

Era 1 (2014 to 2020)

For the first several years of this newsletter’s existence, it was distributed through Tinyletter. For the most part, it simply curated links to outside articles, including my own. The format was therefore pretty bare bones and growth was slow. 

In May 2019, I grew frustrated by Tinyletter’s moderation issues and lack of innovation, so I migrated my entire list over to Substack. But the newsletter itself didn’t change much. For instance, check out my first issue distributed by Substack. As you can see, it’s little more than a roundup of article links.

Era 2 (February 2020 to July 2021)

In February 2020, I made two major decisions. The first was to launch a paid subscription. The second was to start producing original content for the newsletter.

Honestly, the product wasn’t very good at first, mostly because it took me a long time to figure out what it was. The output varied widely. Sometimes you’d open up a newsletter and it contained a deeply-researched case study spanning 3,000 words. Other times, it was just a roundup of news items with short commentary.

This is why I advise writers to not launch their paid and free newsletters simultaneously. It just takes so much time to figure out things like publishing cadence and format. You need time to learn what your audience wants. 

Era 3 (July 2021 to July 2022)

At some point last year, I had two revelations:

1. People didn’t want to read huge blocks of text in their inbox.

2. They also needed to know what to expect when opening my newsletter.

I decided to stop sending my longform case studies as newsletters. Instead, I simply published them as articles to the web and then linked to them within the newsletter.

I also established a more consistent format for the newsletter itself. Today, it has two distinct sections: an analysis essay at the top spanning 800 to 1,500 words and a roundup of links below that.

In March 2022, I launched paid sponsorships for the newsletter, and that forced me to be even more consistent in terms of formatting and frequency. Suddenly, advertisers needed to know when their ad would run and what it would look like within the newsletter, and ever since then the free version has been delivered every Wednesday afternoon. 

This was around the time that I started feeling like I was regularly producing a high-quality editorial product for my audience. It took me two years of experimentation to reach that point.

Era 4 (July 2022 to ??)

I made a drastic decision within the last week: I’m no longer going to produce longform text case studies.

That’s not to say that I’m no longer conducting longform interviews with successful media operators; it’s just that those interviews will now just be published to my podcast and YouTube channels.

Why did I make this change? Well, for one, those case studies required a lot of time and energy to write, and yet not that many people were reading them. My last case study, for instance, has only generated 181 views. That’s not enough ROI for something that took me 10+ hours to create.

Now, most of my writing time will go toward the shorter analysis pieces you see in my newsletter. Not only do people read and share these more often, but the time freed up from ditching the case studies will allow me to write those analysis essays more often. That means that I can start producing more subscriber-only newsletters, thereby strengthening the value proposition for my paid memberships.

I’m super excited about this new era and will definitely update you all in a few months about how it’s going. As always, I’m open to feedback in the comments. Tell me what you think!