I thought paywalls were unethical. This is why I started paywalling.

"My husband got laid off. I was dropped by a client. Your work has been a lifeline." And I'm the jerk who wants to lock them out of the content they rely on. It made me feel like a sellout to want to paywall anything. I'm a journalist. Good people make their content free. That conviction cost me thousands of dollars, a lot of lost sleep, and nearly made me kill the newsletter I built.

After a year of regularly paywalling content and promoting paid features, I’ve tripled monthly paid reader revenue. That change didn’t happen because I started offering a flashy service or drastically changed what I did. I raised my revenue by changing my mindset around subscriptions. 

At Freelance Opportunities!, I support fractional and freelance workers by sharing paid work opportunities, grants, and funding resources. 

My audience includes people who are looking for work. Many have gone through a layoff, are actively trying to build independent careers, or are dealing with the reality we’ve all faced: the cost of living outpacing our income.

Because my readers are navigating independent careers, I felt a responsibility to keep my newsletter accessible. How do you charge for a resource when your audience includes people financially struggling? For a long time, I didn’t want to charge my readers. I was wrong. Here’s how I transitioned into using a paywall while keeping my offerings accessible.

I thought paywalls were unethical

I did everything in my power to avoid paywalling lists of opportunities. I thought paywalling important resources would make me a bad person. I felt guilty.

So instead, I leaned on other revenue sources. I accepted as many sponsorships as I could, even when that meant working with brands I didn’t like (and even on one occasion, a brand that didn’t pay me). I created basic paid tiers that people could optionally join to support my efforts. I tried to entice people with digital products.

Those efforts weren’t bad, but I wasn’t making enough. Sponsorship revenue varied month to month. I still had to take on client work, which meant stressfully balancing too many deadlines and often staying up until 3 am to schedule newsletter editions.

It was also a trap of my own making. I thought enticing readers with extra benefits would be enough. I thought asking people to support an independent freelancer would work. But though there’s people who will support you because they believe in you, there’s many who are only moved to pull out their credit card by an inability to access the information they need.

The truth is that the people who find your work valuable will pay for it. If you’re able to solve a problem they’re experiencing, they’ll pay.

The cost of not paywalling

You’d think that making any kind of money out of an independent venture is a success. That’s what I thought as I went from making money solely out of client work to running a newsletter business.

But I ended every day stressed. I lacked the time and money to do things that would grow my newsletter audience and improve it. I ended and started every day burnt out and frazzled.

The truth is that there’s always a cost to not paywalling your work: