Between Free & Paid Subscriptions

[This post was first published on Cent]

The ability to subscribe to something as easily as we can today is really quite amazing.

Check a box or submit your email address and click ok, then *boom* - you're subscribed.

And there are so many great, high quality things that you can subscribe to today for free.

I'm subscribed to Token Economy, NFTY, Proof of Work, Exponential View, and Benedict's Newsletter. They're all free and they're all amazing.

All the podcasts that I receive automatic updates for plus every account that I follow on Twitter and Instagram are also examples of amazingly high quality free subscriptions.

But I also pay for some great stuff too, like Stratechery, Hot Pod and The New Yorker.

While arguable, the quality between paid and free subscriptions is negligible to non-existent in my opinion.

Others hold similar or even stronger opinions than me on the matter. Check out PoW's Eric Meltzer in issue #47: "PoW will always be free (and ad free!) because there’s no way to make money from it that doesn’t make it worse."

[Side note: What's noteworthy in Eric's statement, is that one can assume he has readers who want to pay, they just don't have any way to do so.]

Those arguments aside, both ends of the subscription spectrum fall into dead alignment on one point: Their success lives and dies depending on their readership. And more specifically, the vocal, passionate minority of typically early readers and supporters.

That early readership cohort is so important to the success of any subscription offering because they carry out marketing, sales and advertising functions. For free.

While I don't want to call that arrangement intentionally exploitative, I don't think that the trade of free content (or *paid* content in the case of those word-of-mouth marketers who still have to pay) is a fair exchange of value. It's not nothing,

That's where Seeding🌱 or at least something like it comes in.

The impulse for individuals to pay for *good* quality content is real. The desire to want to support and spread the good word about your favorite new subscription is basically the story of human socio-cultural development.

It's about time to reward those early, paying and passionate followers and supporters.

Seeding more perfectly aligns the interests and incentives between creators and their early, passionate and sometimes paying readership in particular by making it possible to easily reward the latter cohort for their valuable contributions.

Seeding provides a fertile middle ground for subscriptions right between the anachronistic extremes of the old free versus paid dichotomy.