Read all the way to the bottom to find out the four ways to make money from writing online, all of which definitely absolutely work.

A couple of months ago, my old coworker Jesse hit me up with an exciting proposition: He wanted to know if I wanted to start a blog and if his company could sponsor it. I was like, “Hell yes obviously dude what c’mon.” At some point during this exchange, he explained that his company was called Supertab and that they do micro-paywalls, aka charging people small amounts of money to be on a website. This is a fundamentally different thing than a regular paywall, which is usually tied to a subscription. They tend to get expensive.

I came up with the idea to do a blog about pieces of “media” that I deemed to be “events,” just as a dumb frame to help me focus my thinking. The result is this magisterial blog of media and music criticism, Media Events. I would like to think that this blog is actually, somehow, about America. Anyways, part of the deal would be that said blog (Media Events) would have a micro-paywall on all of the posts. We decided that we’d charge people a dollar to read stuff, because it is a recession.

Trying anything new or different online is an exercise in putting theory into practice — asking yourself what causes people to engage with something, and trying to do things that optimize for your conclusions/assumptions. 

The way Supertab’s thing works is that, after you scroll past a certain point on any given post, the page goes blurry and a thing pops up saying that you’ll need to cough up a buck to keep reading. It’s a micro-paywall because I’m not asking you to subscribe; you get to read as much of the site as you want for 24 hours (though you can pay three dollars to read the posts for a month). The posts are good; they are definitely worth a dollar.

The other thing about trying anything new or different online is that people are averse to change, both macro and micro. It took me years to believe that consuming information via podcasts or (non-Adam Curtis) video essays could be as valuable as reading an actual essay. I’ve missed the boat on almost every new social media thing since Tumblr, simply because I was unwilling to learn how to operate in a medium I wasn’t already familiar with. I’ve been able to adapt to stuff like Substack and now Ghost, but only because they’re ultimately blogging platforms, and blogging is what I do.

People don’t want to pay to read things online, not necessarily because they’re cheapskates, but because they don’t like friction. This is why print still reigns supreme when it comes to actually reading things for pleasure: All the friction of a book or a magazine occurs upfront, at the cash register or the online checkout page, and once you’ve gotten that out of the way and have sat down with this discrete object, one with no other function beyond being read, the friction melts away. There are no notifications, no opportunities to tab over to email or social media, no other interruptions whatsoever from the thing itself. 

AMID THIS DISCUSSION OF WHY PEOPLE DON'T LIKE FRICTION, PLEASE BE WARNED THAT THE MEDIA EVENTS PAYWALL IS ABOUT TO HIT

Meanwhile, the very fact of writing being presented as a physical object justifies a magazine’s price: They are artifacts, things whose value proposition is that lots of different people worked together to write and edit and design and lay out and print and bind and package and ship, and everyone along the chain of custody from author to reader must be compensated. 

This is all to say that I am very sympathetic to people who are turned off by the sick-ass micro-paywall I have up on Media Events. My usual impulse is to make things free, even to my own detriment: If I am making something public, then that means I’m proud of it, and I want to show it off. I don’t want to make people jump through hoops! 

And yet, on this post there is a hoop, and it costs one dollar to jump through. As such, I very much understand if people do not want to jump through it. 

The reason I’m going against my impulses here is because the posts should not be free, and they never should have been. 

Creating is labor. Writing is labor. The past few decade and a half-ish has obscured this, because the economics of the news business were based on a model where everyone got everything for free. Even before the internet’s spread, magazines would severely undercut their cover prices if you subscribed for a year, because that meant that your eyeballs were receptacles for the ads they ran. (There was also this made-up statistic called “pass-through rate” which magazines used to juice their numbers, but I’m not going to get into that now.) 

Now, internet publishing is a shell of its former self. Most of the media jobs that still exist aren’t worth having, including and perhaps especially the ones at traditional and/or “cool” media outlets. I speak from experience. Instead, we’re stuck in an almost feudal system, full of massive tech companies whose leaders have both the power and will to impose their very specific theories of media (and how media should be monetized) upon their user bases. Too many of them believe that every person creating things online should function as a small businessperson and/or peasant, working for free in ways that benefit the platform/kingdom in exchange for the audience it provides. If the subjects make money from advertisers, great, if other subjects want to give them money for their stuff, even better. Platforms don’t pay their posters, and kingdoms don’t pay their subjects. They’re doing them a favor. If anything, the logic goes, the posters should be paying them. 

But even so, these platforms have a lot of success stories! I know because I’m friends with people who manage to support themselves by monetizing their audience! This is not a diss to any of them whatsoever, but them making great money through running a Substack or being a YouTuber serves as a way to obscure those untold millions who are just as talented and put just as much time and effort on their work, but get paid bupkus. This isn’t because of meritocracy or any bullshit like that. It’s just that there’s a surplus of posting labor, and a finite amount of people willing to pay them out of their own pocket. 

So what kinds of stuff do people pay for? 

There are a few buckets. One is insider information that’s being made public, especially stuff that’s actionable. An investor-style person who’s subscribed to The Information — a website so focused on scoops that it’s literally called The Information — might find out about something that’s happening in Silicon Valley a couple hours before it gets aggregated by The Verge, and during that time, they have an edge that could help them make money. A way less-intense version of this is that I subscribe to NBA insider Marc Stein’s substack because it is worth five dollars a month to me to find out about the latest Lauri Markkenan trade rumor without having to wade through a bunch of made-up stuff on Twitter. 

Another is people talking shit. I could probably get a few hundred bucks by writing a vicious takedowns of Charli xcx — or even better, starting an unnecessary beef with Freddie de Boer, whose following on Substack is partially made up of people who pay to read him talk shit on people — but the one time I wrote something really mean I got punched in the head as a result. Ever since, it hasn’t really been my style. A way heavier version of this would be to devote this entire blog to spilling every drop of tea I have ever gathered about every musician and writer I have ever inadvertently heard stuff about, but that would make me a horrible person so I’m obviously not going to do that. 

The third one would be leaning into the parasocial angle: Developing a relationship with your audience can cause them to think that they’re your friend, and then some of those people will give you money, almost as a substitute for buying you a drink at the bar. Kelsey McKinney recently wrote a great piece at Defector about why parasocial relationships are not tight. 

Finally, you can trick people into paying you money by promising some sort of great thing at the beginning of a post and then hoping that people’s desire for the payoff entices them enough to navigate the paywall. This is what we in “the biz” refer to as creating a “curiosity gap,” and it’s a thing that you’re supposed to think about when packaging a story and/or trying to get people to pay for one. I did a version of that at the beginning of this blog as a joke, but maybe you did not think it was a joke. In which case, I am deeply sorry. 

So far, everything I’ve written on this blog is just about a thing that happens to interest me at the moment. I’ve been feeling the squeeze of media-centric PMC online existence for a while now: specifically, the illusion of its ubiquity, and how this illusion colors the ways in which my cohort experiences culture. I see so many people online who act like some niche bullshit they’re into, whether it’s a musician or a meme or a specific way of phrasing something, is the biggest thing on earth, and it makes me feel insane. The people who critique/mock those people aren’t much better, either, because they are still speaking to the incredibly small group of people who need to be told something like this. It’s not that deep, it’s just that the scope of human experience is wide. Just accept that you’re a fucking weirdo, keep it moving, and never, ever talk like you do on the internet in public. 

This doesn’t mean that anything any of us do is worthless at all — there’s much to be said for finding your niche and making the most of it — but the flipside is the danger of succumbing to myopic overwhelm. Even the sports internet, which I became an accidental participant in when I wrote my book, is vastly larger than whatever internet we live in, but it’s a drop in the bucket.

If there’s one thing that writing this blog has taught me so far, it’s that most media, especially VC-backed stuff, is more of a house of cards than I even realized. Most metrics are meaningless. Your open rate is the result of your newsletter client stretching the definition of “open” past the point of meaningless. Your average time on page is not a reflection of people actually reading shit but instead of like three people opening your post in a tab and never closing it. Your number of unique visitors is likely the work of some SEO jockey you don’t know about buying you traffic. It’s a shell game, and the only metric that actually matters is cash.

There are a million ways to go about getting it — tricking investors with fake numbers, racking up paying subscribers, running programmatic ads against clickbait, holding “activations” with “brand partners” featuring “celebrity talent,” throwing an ideas festival, money laundering, selling merch/physical media etc. Or you could just ask people to pay a dollar to read the posts. 

HIGH-LEVEL TAKEAWAY: You have paid a dollar to read this post and now have 24 hours to read the rest of my posts. Next week, you will return to Media Events and pay another dollar to read another post.