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This is true. Our explicit advice to writers is make your best stuff free. Paid subscriptions unleash writers. With Substack, they can get reach *and* the ability to go deep with the truly interested.
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One thing I misunderstood about writing moving to subscription is I thought all the good stuff would be locked behind paywalls. My experience thus far has actually been the reverse; it’s a freemium model with the best stuff for free to drive interest for the paid stuff.
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It's good for creating market making, but long-term it's not entirely healthy because it encourages status-loaded micro-patronage motives over less loaded transactional motives. There's a reason restaurants don't give you free steaks and charge for the bread and water.
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You can't feed one quality article to a million people either :D Mass media needed advertising and the chokepoint of the printing press to sustain it. The broader the target audience, the more you have to give up on precision of what you want to say, and to whom.
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I understand where you guys are coming from. The model you recommend and get behind officially is the best one for the droves of refugees abandoning mainstream journalistic media. But what's good for the Big Head is not necessarily good for the Long Tail.
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But the whales aren't starting from scratch. In a sense you're mining the fossil fuel of existing reach built up on mass media. My alt advice for newbies would be to make a lot of the best stuff free initially, but then slowly start building long-arc premium paywall content.
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Glad to hear it. I'd recommend refining the positioning and messaging ato distance yourselves more clearly from what I think of as the patronage+pandering market. There's no free lunch, and I'm sensing a sort of wishful idealism that worries me.
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I realize you have to thread needle between encouraging quality free content to drive platform growth and encouraging value for paying subscribers that is less available for floating all boats, but long-term, "value for subscription $" needs to be a core, not an afterthought.