It's Pledge Week!

For the low, low price of just $7/month, you can receive ... pretty much exactly what you're getting for free right now—plus, starting next week, an additional perk!

(Photo by Catherine McQueen / Getty Images)

No, this isn’t really a pledge drive. I’m not National Public Radio. For one thing, my Substack newsletter isn’t partially funded by federal tax revenue.

When I launched this venture on June 1, I knew exactly what I needed to do. This was going to be a full-time gig, taking the place of the job I had for the previous 8-1/2 years, writing 3+ columns a week for The Week. I’m immensely grateful to Substack for including me in its Pro program, which is giving me about 70 percent of my Week salary for the first year. Without that support, I could never have attempted “Eyes on the Right.” But the subvention will go away on May 31, 2023.

Which means that by that date, I need a certain number of paid subscribers. Right now a little more than 6 percent of my subscribers pay the monthly subscription fee. At the moment, meeting my goal would require that figure rising to about 27 percent by the end of May. Though putting it that way is a little deceptive, since my total number of subscribers (paid and unpaid) is rising all the time. So the true percentage I’ll need by late spring will surely end up being quite a bit lower. Maybe something around 14 or 16 percent? Hard to say. But it will almost certainly need to be significantly higher than it is now.

Honestly, I’m hugely gratified that anyone is paying for this newsletter, and not just because the competition is fierce. It’s also because those who are paying aren’t (so far) getting very much extra for their money. Since launch, paying subscribers have had the privilege of leaving comments on the posts, and they were invited to pose questions for an “Ask Me Anything” post I did in August. But that’s about it.

Until now.

The trick to getting subscribers to “convert” to paying, I’m convinced, is a mix of positive and negative nudges. Those nudges should be mild. Otherwise, I risk large numbers of people canceling their subscriptions in anger. That’s what might happen if I suddenly placed all of my future posts behind a paywall, for example. So I’m not going to do that.

Instead, starting next week, I will be making two changes. First, going forward one or two of my three weekly posts will employ a paywall partway through, allowing non-paying subscribers to read a portion of the piece before being prompted to convert to paying in order to read the rest. I may do pay-only posts from time to time as well, but not right away. Let’s see how this delicate negative nudge works first.

As for the second change—the positive nudge—it will be a perk just for paid subscribers. Starting next week, I will record an audio version of every post a few hours after the post is published. That recording will arrive in a separate email sent just to paying subscribers, allowing them to listen to the post through the Substack app, in a web browser, or within the email itself, like a short podcast. I will likely do some other short audio posts, just for paying subscribers, down the road. One of the first will be something I record late in the evening the night of the midterm elections on November 8—just my preliminary reaction to the shape of the outcome, with a written post about the results coming later that week for everyone.

I hope the negative nudge isn’t too annoying—and that the positive nudge turns out to be something people come to appreciate and enjoy. If the changes don’t inspire many conversions, or feedback from subscribers is very negative, I may change things up again. And regardless, I’m sure to make adjustments down the line. But something has to change from the status quo if this endeavor is going to succeed.

Thank you for subscribing, reading, and contributing to this community. (I’m opening comments to everyone—paying and non-paying subscribers alike—on this post, so people can leave feedback about today’s announcement.)