A Free Article About Paywalls
Happy Valentine’s Day to all the Haters and Losers!
Most Substack writers who write paid content (even if they also write free content) will come up against one particular piece of criticism: they paywalled something.
I remember being annoyed at a paywall several years ago. It was during early pre-vaccine covid, and some Washington Post article came out that seemed to have important information about covid’s severity in children. As a mom, I was curious to read more, but it was paywalled. I felt irritated. This felt like potentially life-saving (or sanity-saving) information, and it wasn’t accessible. Moreover, it was pushing parents toward less valuable sources, be they misinformation or overly fearmongering Twitter vortexes.
But most of the time when people complain about a paywall, it’s not because the author is guarding important information for public health (and even then, writing about public health should be compensated.) What I write won’t be relevant for public health at all, unless you have some kind of disease that requires you to take in a quota of one gooning joke per day (DM me for free lifetime subscription if this sounds like you.)
But let’s go back to why a writer would paywall something. It’s to make money. Because, well, for many of us Substackers (or freelance writers, who can also be paywalled) this is our job. I’ve noticed that whenever I post about doing Substack full time, certain people laugh at me because there’s no way that’s possible and I must be getting bankrolled by my husband or parents. But on the flip side, when they see me actually making money on Substack by having a paywall, they get mad at me for greedily running a grift, as if charging someone for a good or service is inherently some sort of scam.
Because Substack doesn’t spam people with ads, the money comes from paid subscriptions (and I like to think for many people, those paid subscriptions are worth it- in my case, you get 5-6 fairly long-form pieces of content per week in addition to my weekly free column and occasional free posts.) I also opt to let anyone redeem a free trial to read an article—a lot of those people (albeit not the majority) eventually like what they see and decide to stick around. I could turn this feature off, but I like that it provides some degree of free content to people who might not be able to pay, while encouraging those people to eventually become paid subscribers.
But the same way we don’t expect plumbers to fix toilets for free, or for teachers to teach for free, we also shouldn’t expect artists or writers to produce all their content for free. The same goes for artists on Instagram who get DMs from influencers asking for free art or logos “for exposure.” I spoke with another Substack writer who has people regularly DMing her asking to send them her paid articles for free, simply because they’re mutuals, without even offering to help her promote them. Perhaps because a lot of people do write or create for free (because it can be a hobby too) people’s expectations are a little out of whack. I write at least one free article a week, and before Substack, I did comics for free. I also sometimes remove paywalls from popular articles as a gift to free subscribers. But doing things exclusively for free, forever, isn’t really a sustainable job for anyone who isn’t a trust fund baby (and I thought we didn’t like those either.)
The “PAYWALLED!” criticism comes from the following places:
I’m mad that someone is producing content I might enjoy that isn’t free
I’m not mad that someone is attempting to make money, but I hate what I assume they’re probably writing about. But because I can’t read the article to be sure, I will complain about the fact that it’s paywalled (even though I hate it and don’t want to read it.)
The first criticism is somewhat reasonable. Everyone likes free stuff. I like free stuff. But I think in our pursuit of loving free stuff, we forget that free stuff comes from someone else’s labor. Just the other day on Bluesky, I saw a prominent leftist account praise another leftist author’s work, only to provide a full series of screenshots from the aforementioned author’s paywalled article. Everyone applauded her for “making it accessible.” Nobody considered that she was making it harder for a leftist creator to make a living. For many people, even people on the left who claim to be pro-creative (the very people who seem to think we’d all be poets and sculptors in a communist utopia) they don’t think about the fact that paywalls are a salary for a worker. It’s like the Burrito Taxi dilemma. They’re mad that “capitalism” is making their DoorDash order expensive, without thinking about the fact that a real person has to deliver the order and that person should be paid fairly. I also have seen people get angry that Substack paywalls are apparently immune from websites that remove paywalls. Like, I don’t want to judge here, but you sort of lost your right to feel indignant and betrayed when you tried to cheat someone else out of their salary.
Now, the second point. This is actually much stupider. I get being annoyed about a paywall for an article you truly wanted to read (this is why I always offer a free trial for my articles.) But if you thought the article was dumb from what little you read of it (or even just the title) why do you care that it’s paywalled?
A great Substack writer,
, got a great deal of this criticism when she wrote about the dynamic on BlueSky, in which left-of-center pundits (an example she gave on her podcast was Ben Dreyfuss, just to be clear about the type of person to which she’s referring) were chased off the platform for being insufficiently on the left. If you’re curious, she wrote her description of the drama here. She wasn’t defending the far right (or even regular Republicans, as far as I know) but many people on BlueSky accused her of that, and someone even wrote an entire piece satirizing her. She was, effectively, a Main Character for an article that almost every critic hadn’t read. Phoebe’s article was paywalled (it wasn’t on her Substack; it was on The Globe And Mail, and she didn’t choose to paywall it.) But a great deal of the criticism she got was that the article was Bad and Wrong, but also, they didn’t read it because it was paywalled, which was also Bad and Wrong.I had mutuals who disagreed with the parts of the article they could access—and that’s fine. I actually can’t say if I fully agreed because I don’t have a Globe and Mail subscription- I just know that the criticisms she got in response were absurd (no, I don’t believe a Jewish woman is a “Nazi.”) But there’s a difference between saying “I disagree with the part that I was able to read” and going on a diatribe against the author for the crime of attempting to make money, or for what you fantasized she wrote about.
Generally, when you paywall an article (or are paywalled by a publication for which you freelance) you have to accept two things: many people will not read your article (fair, you can’t force them to pay) and also, many people will criticize your article based only on the title or the first sentence (less fair, but inevitable.) I guess you can’t control other people’s behavior, and to some extent, even hate comments are engagement that might help more serious readers to find your content. But there’s something amazingly narcissistic about writing hateful screeds over an article that you readily admit you didn’t read, especially when a great deal of the criticism is about the fact that you couldn’t read it. When I wrote Liberals were Cool, then your Mom Became One, about how association with middle-class white women over thirty makes political movements seem dorky, someone who didn’t even read the free preview decided the entire article was about weaponizing white woman tears at the expense of women of color (who I actually didn’t mention at all.) When corrected that the article was actually about misogynistic men (typically white, in this case) the commenter doubled down, for no reason at all and told me that if I wanted to malign white men, I needed to take responsibility for fucking them and raising them, because their actions are still the fault of white women. It would have been so easy to say, “Oh, I didn’t realize that, never mind!” You’d be surprised at how often people will fight to the death over what they imagined I wrote, even after finding out what I actually wrote.
Take this critique I got on my article, What’s Wrong With Boys? I admit that the title was a bad idea on my part; it was meant to be rhetorical, and the answer was, nothing is wrong with boys, it’s society’s treatment/education of boys that’s the problem. Because it was being addressed to a largely liberal and feminist parent audience, not an audience of young disgruntled men, I wasn’t going to go full MRA with the title or the content (because, also, I’m not an MRA.) I actually felt that the advocacy for boys was clearly addressed in the free preview (I don’t like to do a bait-and-switch.) But alas, Twitter had thoughts:
For those of you accusing me of being a crypto-right-winger, behold: I am a liberal feminist after all!
But anyway, that part wasn’t interesting to me. What I found interesting was the fact that if I paywall an article, I can’t complain that people didn’t read it. That’s fair! I can’t force people to pay for my content. But I feel like I do get to push back when people who didn’t read the article also pop off about it (and me) in great detail—which many people did! Multiple comments exceeded Twitter’s character limit to essentially write fanfic about the type of article I “probably” wrote, finished with, “And to top it all off, she PAYWALLED it, so I didn’t even get to read this article that probably sucked ass!” Other people kindly told me to just kill myself. One person sent me some image of an antisemitic goblin caricature but later said that due to my “ancestry,” my IQ was high enough to know how dishonest my article was.
So for now, I will continue to do my *horror movie sounds* PAYWALLS. At least for most of my stuff. So for you paid subscribers: you’ll continue to get those 4 exclusive, paywalled CHH articles per week. But as always, Many Such Takes will continue to be free every week. I will also occasionally remove paywalls from previous paid articles. So if you’re not a fan of paywalls, consider becoming a free subscriber, because there’s plenty of stuff without paywalls too, and much more to come! Like…
The Sublet Caper, and The Work Wife, both true comedic stories
Why Aren’t Trad Singles Finding Each Other? (Guest interview with
)
Paywall or no paywall, I’m glad you’re here. Well, most of you, anyway.
I'm a recent subscriber after your Matt Yglesias cross-post and for anyone considering it - this is the best-value substack I've ever subscribed to. So much new content every week and it is all incredibly thoughtful!
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