Reflections on paid and free subscriptions
Why some blogs may be worth my money (and Substack has it going on!)
Recently, I received a notification of a new post on one of the amateur radio blogs I follow. That blog is published on Substack and a few issues ago, the owner shifted his subscription model from free to paid. And nobody stepped up. Now he is disillusioned, so much so that he is ending his blog.
This made me pause to think about my own blogs and my expectations. Tom Scribbles is essentially an aside for me. It’s a space where I go to capture some random thoughts and experiences. It isn’t published on a regular schedule. I don’t set aside regular times for writing. Indeed, I write when the urge strikes. My primary audience is, truth be told, myself.
Nobody asked me to write about specific things. Any expectations for Tom Scribbles come from the minds of those who read it because I don’t have expectations — instead, I have an outlet.
In this scenario, I can’t justify asking people to pay money for what I post. My content is too random, too irregular, and probably of too little value to justify someone investing a few coins to support me. And I’m pretty okay with that.
But there are blogs that I would consider supporting in the form of a paid subscription. Steve Stroh’s Zero Retries blog on Substack is one. Steve writes and publishes regularly, and every issue contains at least one gem I find very interesting. He is ahead of me in his amateur radio knowledge so I discover new things every time I read his latest post.
The Ham Radio Workbench podcast is another product for which I would open my wallet. The sometimes wacky, sometimes serious hosts always bring good technical information and interesting guests, but more than that, they bring a huge amount of enjoyment. At a couple of hours per podcast, I am entertained and enlightened during my long drives. I’ve had one-to-one contact with two of the regular hosts and found them to be charming, witty, and very intelligent. Even my spouse (who is not a ham radio afficionado) finds the hosts funny and enjoyable.
I can and do learn from Steve and from the HRW crew. That has value to me. I would pay to continue receiving that value, either in a paid subscriber-only model, or in a value-add model in which limited content is available to free subscribers and full content is available to paid subscribers.
This is where I feel compelled to put in a shameless plug for Substack. For more than a decade, I’ve published blogs through other services, from big to small. I’ve self-hosted and paid for hosting. I’ve worked social media to try to increase readership. In every case, the number of readers I accumulated was so small that it wasn’t worth continuing to invest effort in writing for them. (And this is the reason I am happier writing for myself!)
But what I’ve discovered with Substack is this: Substack has it going on. In a few months, my ham radio blog, The Random Wire℠, has accumulated more subscribers than any blog I’ve previously authored. TRW is not published on a regular basis and it strays a bit from being focused only on amateur radio. Nevertheless, in two months more than 150 people have subscribed. This can’t be due to my superb, engrossing writing. I think it is the way that Substack is creating and supporting an ecosystem that is friendly to authors and readers alike. I’m a happy author.
Expecting people to pay for an irregular author like me seems a bit absurd. I’m not going to try to twist anyone’s arm to get financial support for something I write mainly for myself. I look at it this way: if you really like something I write, buy me a coffee or post a comment so we can enjoy some more learning together.
Thank you for investing a few minutes with me in this reflection!
Just after writing this short piece, I listened to a few interviews of Neil Young on NPR's Fresh Air. Young hit my feeling exactly on my lack of a regular writing habit:
"I only try to write when I feel like writing. But if I feel like writing, I don't care what else is going on, I won't do it. I will write...If a[n] idea comes to me out of nowhere, I look at it like a gift. It's not a distraction. Everything else in the room is a distraction. I don't care what it is. So in that way, I'm committed. I'm committed to the muse. I roll with the muse wherever it goes. If it comes to me, I'm going with it...And you just have to be there and ready with open arms to take it in and then send it back out in a form that people can understand or that people can enjoy."
Source: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1141860222
Tom, thanks for the very nice mention of Zero Retries. I'm glad to have you as a subscriber. I too followed the "one of the amateur radio blogs" you reference, and I feel the same way you do about that author's decision. I discuss my philosophy about Zero Retries publication model in this week's issue, which will appear on Friday 2022-12-16 at 15:30 Pacific.
Like you, I'm impressed with Substack - in my opinion they're doing a great job enabling small authors like you and I.