Brought to you by the fine folks at Outpost for Ghost publishers. Get more subscription revenue for your Ghost publication with Outpost đȘ
Subscription fatigue is a completely useless concept for indie creators and I'm tired of people using it as a catch all for their misunderstandings of the subscription business. It has become the rallying cry of legacy media journalists who are jealous that their peers have gone independent. And it's become an excuse for creators who don't want to learn the subscription business to punk out.
Subscription fatigue mainly affects big corporations who want to reach a wide swath of consumers and who cannot ever get enough subscribers to feed their greedy bellies. They hire consumer trends experts who find that people report "subscription fatigue" and the major brand decides whether they can raise their prices or not. Netflix and the New York Times are forever chasing more, more, more. No matter how many they gain (and they are still gaining record rates of subscribers), it's never enough for them.
This problem is not affecting solo creators or small teams.
- Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket doubled paid subscriptions in February, right after Trump took office and the economy was predicted to tank.
- Hell Gate doubled their subscription revenue in their last annual report.
- Brand new publisher COYOTE Media Collective raised over $100k in pre-sale subscriptions and contributions this summer.
- Matt Brown and his team at Extra Points are hiring a full time writer for the first time, backed primarily by their readers.
- Jessica Valenti from Abortion Everyday hired an editor last month, funded by paid subscriptions.
- Tony Mecia who publishes The Charlotte ledger raised prices in March from $9 to $12 on the monthly subscription and from $99 to $129 on the annual subscription and is seeing no big changes in subscription uptake and a nice bump in revenue.
- I just surpassed 200 paid subscribers after 8 months of running my projects, with many subscribers buying in on an annual or lifetime plan.
"Subscription fatigue" is also not an actionable piece of information. It's not sustainable for you to chase down one time revenue from readers. The recurring revenue model is one of the most logical ones to choose right now, if you want to be audience-funded.
Most indie creators need less than 10,000 paid subscribers to be successful. Many of us only need 500-1000 people to come on board. Your addressable market will always be substantially larger than the number of people you need to pay you. You're not going to run out of people to reach who have enough cash and interest to throw you a few bucks.
If you try the subscription model and it does not work for you, you have a different problem. That problem is that you don't know how to position and sell your subscriptions.
I blame my arch-nemesis Substack for popularizing this problem. What Substack does is court famous writers over there who already have a large audience, and then when they make an offer to that audience, a small percentage says yes and that writer makes a few thousand bucks and everyone pretends it's a wild success. See how easy the subscription business is!
But the subscription business takes work. It especially takes work if you are building your audience and revenue at the same time. I'm convinced Substack doesn't know what this work is because they fail to support the majority of their users in executing it, despite their claims of providing "magic dust."
What is that work? Consistent and persuasive promotion. Your readers need to know why they would pay and how to pay you.
This entire blog and my other publication are both about how to run a subscription business so I'm not going to go further into the mechanics of that in this post, but I'll leave you with a snapshot of the Foundation Map (above) that outlines the basics of what you need to run a subscription media business. You can automate a ton of this (another thing Substack doesn't do!) and you'll also want to spend time making sure your existing subscribers are happy. That retention part is where you really win at the subscription business.
Selling subscriptions takes workâseparate work from publishingâand if you aren't selling your subscription then you don't have "subscription fatigue," you have "selling subscriptions fatigue."
Rather than chalk every problem up to subscription fatigue, why not evaluate what's really going on with your audience? Talk to them. Ask them why they're not buying in. Uncover what they think is valuable about what you're doing. You'll learn a lot faster with their help versus trying to pin your sad metrics on some abstract societal problem. People are buying subscriptions. Why aren't they buying yours?
