Quick Update about the Blog
Hi friends! Hope you all had a great three-day weekend, for those of you in an area that got a three-day weekend! This is just a quick update instead of a full-length post.
Let’s talk about subscribers! As of today, there are 225 subscribers to this blog1, and 14 of those are paid subscribers. This is pretty great! I’m excited that all of you are out there reading this…. whatever it is, and even more excited that 14 of you are willing to financially support the work we’re doing at ACRL.
As I’ve said before, this publication doesn’t pay our salaries, but it does help cover for our conference and travel budget, which gets us new clients which do pay our salary. However, managing the accounting for these paid subscriptions does take up a non-trivial amount of time, especially around tax time. Given that we don’t have a huge number of paid subscribers, it has been an ever-present question in the back of my mind if it’s worth the effort2.
So, for the remainder of this year, I’m trying an experiment: I’d like to increase the readership of this blog in general3, and specifically, I’d like to increase the number of paid subscribers. I feel like if we could get between 50 and 100 paid subscribers to the blog (which would bring in around $2500-$5000/year), that would be enough to make the accounting effort during tax season worth it. But, if we can’t get there, I don’t think it’s worth my time to manage the paid subscriptions.
So that’s my goal: for the rest of the year, I’m going to be trying a bunch of experiments with the blog to try to increase readership in general, and paid subscriptions specifically. All the content here is still going to be released to the public on Monday afternoons, but I’m going to be experimenting with some other “paid benefits” for subscribers, and we’ll see what happens!
Also, if you’re currently one of my free subscribers, and you feel like you’ve gotten some value out of what I’ve written, would you consider upgrading to a paid subscription4? You’ll get a warm fuzzy feeling in your heart, the ability to comment on my hot garbage, and maybe some other benefits in the near future.
Thus concludes my meta-blog-intermission! As always, thanks for reading.
~drmorr
Substack really wants me to call it a newsletter, but eff that. It’s a blog.
I also don’t really love the Substack platform, and would happily have an excuse to migrate off of it, but the paid subscribers feature has (thus far) been the thing that’s kept me on it. I know Ghost promises a seamless transition from Substack but… I haven’t had time yet.
I mean, who doesn’t want to read about SimKube all day every day???
As an aside, many tech companies offer “professional development” or “educational” benefits that will reimburse you for subscriptions to publications like this! You could subscribe and not even have to pay for it!