When you switch to a paywall model, you have to accept that you’re going to lose a large portion of your readers, which means you need to charge the remaining ones a lot more, no?
Yes, but no.
Technically there’s no direct derivation from costs to price charged. The costs involved in you providing a good or service let’s call it Vmin, determine a lower boundary, so that if you cannot charge below that you’re operating at a loss and won’t provide that service, instead opting to do something else. On the other extreme, your potentials customers’ maximum ability to pay (in aggregate), let’s call it Vmax, which in turn is bounded by their income, determine how much you can charge them. The price, V, that you’re effectively going to charge, is between Vmin and Vmax.
Customers will do what they can to push V towards Vmin. You, on the contrary, will do what you can to push V towards Vmax. In the end, V ends up somewhere in the middle, so that Vmin < V < Vmax. Therefore, my prior is that a charge of $20/month for such a service is much closer to Vmax than it is to Vmin, for the sole reason this is the incentive playing on the provider’s side.
Be as it may, I neither accept lying, biased, and dark-pattern exploiting ads, nor do I have a high enough income to justify paying more than a few dollars per month, in aggregate, for the sites I read. Solving this equation is something site owners, together, should work into. If there’s no solution and the end result is less of those specific contents, well, I derive marginal utility from having access to that content, so if it goes missing, shrugs.
Yes, but no.
Technically there’s no direct derivation from costs to price charged. The costs involved in you providing a good or service let’s call it Vmin, determine a lower boundary, so that if you cannot charge below that you’re operating at a loss and won’t provide that service, instead opting to do something else. On the other extreme, your potentials customers’ maximum ability to pay (in aggregate), let’s call it Vmax, which in turn is bounded by their income, determine how much you can charge them. The price, V, that you’re effectively going to charge, is between Vmin and Vmax.
Customers will do what they can to push V towards Vmin. You, on the contrary, will do what you can to push V towards Vmax. In the end, V ends up somewhere in the middle, so that Vmin < V < Vmax. Therefore, my prior is that a charge of $20/month for such a service is much closer to Vmax than it is to Vmin, for the sole reason this is the incentive playing on the provider’s side.
Be as it may, I neither accept lying, biased, and dark-pattern exploiting ads, nor do I have a high enough income to justify paying more than a few dollars per month, in aggregate, for the sites I read. Solving this equation is something site owners, together, should work into. If there’s no solution and the end result is less of those specific contents, well, I derive marginal utility from having access to that content, so if it goes missing, shrugs.