Hi all!
I’m still basking in the glow of the incredible community reaction to the relaunch of our subscription program. After 24 hours of stress-testing the system, we’ve learned some things. So I’m here to offer some updates and clarifications.
- The subscribe page is here, for those interested. You can also access it from the hamburger menu on the upper left corner of the site.
- On Wednesday, we removed the video ad that most (all?) of us hated. My argument was that we could make up any lost revenue simply by giving people a better site visit experience. In 24 hours, the subscription program generated enough revenue to replace two months of video ad revenue. So thank you for making me look smart. Best of all, this incentivizes us to continue removing obnoxious site elements.
- Several of you complained about the donation nag at the bottom of the story page, the one that says “You’ve read X stories, give us money!” That nag shows up even if you’re a subscriber and have donated. You hate it, I hate it, it’s obnoxious. Well, you’ll be happy to know that we’re working to remove that nag for donors and subscribers.
- I announced that existing subscribers could extend their current subscription for another year at the current introductory rate of $40/year. Turns out, things didn’t quite work out that way once we turned on the system. So a million apologies for that. The team is going to remedy that. No ETA on when we’ll get that feature working, but don’t worry, we won’t raise rates until it’s fixed. It’s important to me that existing subscribers get rewarded for their support and trust in us.
- Some people were like, “What about PayPal?” I was like, “NO, it’s a pain to support multiple payment systems!” I’m here to sheepishly say that I was wrong. We are working on adding PayPal.
- Some people asked for a monthly payment option, and it’s coming very soon.
- There is a bug that's preventing people from managing their subscriptions when navigating to their own subscribe page. We are prioritizing fixing it.
- Some people tried to gift subscriptions to people who already have a lifetime subscription. That’s just never going to be possible. If you want to offer new support for the site, you can always donate or my favorite option: gift subscriptions for your favorite community members who lack one.
- Other lovely souls with lifetime subscriptions tried to buy new subscriptions to support the site, which is so sweet I want to cry. Same as above: If you are so moved, you can either donate or gift subscriptions to others. Also, I love you so much.
- Some of you who missed the announcement story might be wondering what this “lifetime subscription” thing is. It was something we offered at one time an era ago. It turned into a great deal for those lucky enough to snag one, but not a great one for us long term, so we retired them. Several people asked what it would take to bring them back, and it would cost at least $1,000 to make sense. I don’t know if there’s really any demand for something that expensive, but I could be wrong.
- So many people marveled at how great the site looks without ads. Guys, it’s legit. Subscribers will vouch for me here—the subscription makes a night-and-day difference when visiting the site. It is a joy. Me? I watch the site with ads. I don’t ever want to forget how annoying they are, as it motivates me to keep working toward reducing the clutter and scripts.
- I spent a great deal of time thanking people in that original post, since I think you are all so amazing and wonderful. People kept commenting once I went back to writing stories for the site, so I’m sorry if I never got to your response. I love and appreciate every single one of you 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼.
