[DIGEST] Free vs. paid

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Hi friends,

The debate between paid vs. free articles on Substack is also the debate between growth and monetization eating at Silicon Valley.

If you want to grow, then you should make everything free and pay as much as possible to acquire a metric ton of subscribers.

“Eliminate friction points” is what they say in order to maximize your potential audience.

If you want to make money, you should make everything paid so that you get the most money for your effort. The problem is that paywalls put a massive obstacle between you and your potential subscribers that turns a lot of people off.

Even best case, you can only reasonably expect at most 10% of your subscribers will become paid members, and if you only have 100 subscribers…well, you can only make so much charging 10 people $5/mo.

The more people on your list, the bigger that pie becomes, but growth costs. Most estimates peg advertising costs for a new subscriber to a newsletter costing between $1-$3, which I can tell you from recent exp…