Molly White is a writer. Wait, she’s an amazing writer. You may know her from Web3 is Going Just Great which is “a project to track some examples of how things in the blockchains/crypto/web3 technology space aren’t actually going as well as its proponents might like you to believe”.
She also does a newsletter called [citation needed] which (critically) covers cryptocurrency, AI, and other issues in the tech industry.
For [citation needed] she offers a Pay What You Want model. Here’s an excerpt from the about page:
All content is free and available to all readers, and will continue to be that way. Paywalls suck and you won’t find them here. What you receive will be exactly the same regardless of whether you choose to pay for a subscription or not.
That said, paid subscribers are crucial to allowing me to continue doing this kind of research and writing, and so if you are able to support my work I would be immensely grateful. You will also get access to additional features including commenting.
I understand that not everyone is willing or able to support at the same rate, so I’ve set up a system to allow you to pay what you want. The suggested rate is $10/month or $100/year, which comes out to around $2.50 a newsletter just for the weekly recaps — less when you factor in the additional deep dives and special editions. But whatever you want to or can afford to pay is just fine with me, and deeply appreciated.
There’s a bit more on the about page to read, but I really wanted to include the above text. (The rest of the page is mostly about Molly and her credentials.)
This is how I want it to work. This is the Pay What You Want method, and I think it can work… because it does work.
I subscribe (and by that I mean pay) for a number of publications in Milwaukee. Mainly Urban Milwaukee, OnMilwaukee, and I think The Recombobulation Area. (Note I said I think because I can’t remember if I signed up so I need to recheck that. I’m not a fan of Substack, which Dan uses, but I still want to support him.)
Of the above, only The Recombobulation Area is a one-person shop, and the other two are large(r) organizations with full staffs. They both do ads, and that’s fine, they need to do so, but I will pick either of them over the old guard of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel or any of the local TV stations who usually offer a healthy mix of too many ads and poor design.
Sorry, back to Pay (Molly) What You Want! I should find more examples of this concept. I remember when I got in touch with a news organization that offered subscriptions because they published one really great story, and I wanted to support them. They told me I could subscribe for $99 per year. That was it. They had no option for a one-time donation or a Pay What You Want option, which is sad. I would have immediately subscribed for $1 per month, and maybe increased that if more great stories were published, but they lost me.
I support Inkscape and OpenSCAD each month, and being able to choose the amount, or given more options on smaller amounts, is what got me in. If the options were too high I’d really have to weigh the decision, but $1 or $5 per month is a no-brainer for me.
Are there more people & organizations out there utilizing a Pay What You Want model?
