via Glenn Fleishman for Six Colors:
A new interest in newsletters has emerged as banner-ad rates and Google AdSense rates declined. Several cartoonists I know have $20-per-year newsletters that have attracted hundreds of subscribers or more who get early access to cartoons, some original content, and the exclusive thoughts of the creator. Patreon has also been a way to pay per something, whether unique writing, videos, songs, or even a monthly stipend for a creator.
Subscription blogs are also of interest. They’re nothing new, but the scale of success is. Andrew Sullivan famously two years ago took his blog, The Dish, which had had a few different homes over its long run, and went indie, raising enough money from subscriptions, and offering a bit of content through a “leaky” paywall to attract new readers, that he could pay himself and a modest staff. (He recently decided to shut down his site due to what sounds like exhaustion after many years of writing online continuously.)
The podcast aspect of this article aside, I’ve debated transitioning over to a newsletter format for this blog. People can subscribe to a monthly digest of thoughts, ideas and essentially what I deem to be “best of” the last 30 days. For $5 a year, those that really enjoy the blog can get a newsletter that has some exclusive content but maybe less curated.like a “firehose” of my blog. It would include a linked list, longer stories, some persona life updates, etc.
I don’t want to monetize this blog but I wouldn’t mind monetizing a newsletter and seeing how it goes. For starters, newsletters cost money if you are going to use a site like MailChimp for sending these out, crunching metrics, managing unsubscribes.
The main issue with charging money is now I have a customer who is expecting a product that has value to them and is delivered on-time. it’s the main thing holding me back but worth pondering.
On the subject of podcasts, I used to do these quite often from 2005-2010 but it takes a lot of work to run a show once a week and a lot of people were talking about the same things. I’d be interested in doing it again but I’d need a reliable partner who was in the same room as me to discuss things with and a subject that would fill up at least 15 minutes a week and finally, the equipment to achieve decent sound-quality. I’d revisit this at some point but I simply prefer writing.