Attempts to monetize this blog
At least a little anyway
I don’t really have the resources to spend 8-10 hours a day on here unless the blog starts paying a little more. Some say that you need 10k free subscribers to get enough paid subscribers to make this worthwhile but I’ve sort of figured on 30k free subscribers which would give you about 1-1.2k paid subscribers (average seems to be about 4%). I’m not even close sitting on about 600 subscribers in total (I’d be at 700 if not for losing about 70 subscribers during my mayoral run).
So the first thing that I’m doing is locking up previous posts. At the moment anything older than 2 months is locked up but I’ll probably move that to a few weeks fairly soon. I’ll leave some of the older posts unlocked, for example the WEF Young Global Leaders one but otherwise they’ll be locked up.
I figure this is the best way to get some income from this blog even if it is not very much. Otherwise you have to lock down comments or unlock your posts after 3-4 days but that’s censorship biased towards those who can afford to be paid subscribers.
If it doesn’t work I’ll unlock everything again in 6 months. But let’s see how it goes for now.
I might also be a little less frequent until the end of January, as I have a real income to attend to as well.
Hey Rich. Totally understand where you are coming from. As someone who is on a very limited income, I wish I could be a paid subscriber to everyone I read here on Substack. But it's impossible. What I do from time to time is buy a coffee or give a tip to an author. I know it's not a lot, but you might consider putting a tip jar or something on your posts. Thanks for all you do to keep us abreast of things going on in NZ.
Good luck. From what I see income is more or less going to Big and Bigger names or shall we add hobby blogs for cooking knitting and candy. There is a vast middle ground of folks who may generate revenue but as Ray Horvath observed minimum wage pays more. I am going to ask for contributions at some point, but not make any effort to restrict readership otherwise. My first thought best thought posts are likely not as tasty as the pizza slice I contend against. :)