A correspondent who might want to remain anonymous (if not, he can reply in comments) writes:
You really do need to have the courage of my convictions and you might make some profit on the way. I am writing about the latest business model whereby one not only has to subscribe, i.e., pay for what was once free, but that only gets one in the door and not into the inner sanctums. The NYT has features that once were available—in the distant past of a few months ago—as part of the user’s subscription but now require an additional ponying up.
Consequently, you ought to do the same with your blog and offer some sort of tiered entitlement. An ordinary contributor will be allowed to comment on Wansink or David Brooks but would need to pay a nominal/exorbitant fee to post anything about novelists or the Hoover Institution; in between might be Harvard or the misuse of priors. Perhaps I have the hierarchy upside down, but you get the idea.
If scientific citations are worth $100,000 each, how much should I be charging for blog comments? Or how much should I be paying for them? It’s never clear which direction the payment should be going.
Listen Andrew. I have a plan for how you can divvy up your tiered subscription service. Tier 1 grants you access to statistical modelling posts, tier 2 grants lets you access causal inference posts in addition, and tier 3 lets you access social science posts on top of all that.
Tier 3 is cheaper than tier 2.
a penny for your thoughts?
I’ll offer my comments for $5/word; price negotiable depending on who I’m responding to.
Let the bidding begin.
I searched telegram prices, 1900. Expensive!
If I had to put my money where my mouth is, my mouth wouldn’t be very busy. I’m just sayin’…
> Or how much should I be paying for them?
For obvious reasons, I prefer the model where you pay for comments, preferably by the word.
BTW –
You should consider a podcast/Patreon. There are so many out there that generate a lot of revenue that way even though the podcasters clearly don’t do any actual work – they just hit “record” and shoot the shit for a coupla hours.
Although, from what I can tell you have too much integrity to do that and you enjoy what you do too much to switch it up.
“There are so many out there that generate a lot of revenue that way even though the podcasters clearly don’t do any actual work – they just hit “record” and shoot the shit for a coupla hours.”
That may be true of many podcasts, even most. I wouldn’t know as I only regularly listen to a small number. But try, for example, Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast–it is quite clear from the depth of the questions he asks his guests he puts real work into preparing for every one of them. If you pay for it on Patreon, you get an ad-free version and you get the right to ask him questions for the Ask Me Anything episodes. But you can get it for free, with ads and no questions, from any of the usual podcast sources.
Or for some light quasi-statistical entertainment, try More or Less from the BBC. It’s not all that challenging, but clearly they are researching questions, writing scripts, etc. It’s completely free of charge, although outside the UK it has ads.
One of my daughters does an occasional podcast and I know it takes her days of work to prepare, record, and edit each episode. I won’t recommend it here, however, because the target audience is pre-teen and teenage girls. No charge for that one, and no ads either.
Thanks for the recommendations. I’ll check them out – I like listening to pods when hiking or working out.
My sense is that there’s often a pattern where podcasters started out with a mission of one sort or another and then found that it can be quite lucrative once they get a large following. So there’s a self-reinforcing dynamic where the more fans they get along a particular orientation the more they limit themselves to content that rewards fans of that orientation. And so a real loyalty develops, and with paywalls even more revenue can be generated. And then it just gets easy and tempting to just put pods out regularly to baxiskly pump up the Patreon following and because you have loyalty you don’t need to be particularly creative or hard working. I think the dynamic pkays out with a lot of pod-less Patreon also, say Matt Yglesias who has become a really viable commercial entity. Just advertise with provocative hot takes in Twitter. I’ve felt this was the case even with podcasts that I liked to start out with.
I will say that one exception is Ezra Klein. Think as you will about the content, but he clearly prepares for his podcasts and has quite a range (like a lot of pretty lefty stuff while also interviewing a lot of righties). Of course, having a NYTimes salary can help subsidize the research but he was like that before he moved over from Vox, also.
Andrew:
Sounds good to me. In the grand scheme of things any amount of money is (ahem) a small price to pay for access to the truth. Others may have a difficult time ponying up, but not me. My liquid assets are sizable enough that I could quit my consulting work today and live comfortably on savings for the rest of my life— provided I die just after breakfast tomorrow morning.
John
When it comes to a guaranteed revenue stream, I think the “anonymous correspondent” has it backwards. Rather than dunning the contributors to the blog, instead, this blog might generate more revenue by becoming a “protection racquet”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket#:~:text=A%20protection%20racket%20is%20a%20type%20of%20racket,and%20other%20such%20threats%2C%20in%20exchange%20for%20payments.
“A protection racket is a type of racket and a scheme of organized crime perpetrated by a potentially hazardous organized crime group that generally guarantees protection outside the sanction of the law to another entity or individual from violence, robbery, ransacking, arson, vandalism, and other such threats, in exchange for payments. The perpetrators of the racket may protect vulnerable targets from other dangerous individuals and groups or may simply offer to refrain from themselves carrying out attacks on the targets, and usually both of these forms of protection are implied in the racket.”
The Hoover Institution, Harvard, NPR, TED TALK lecturers, etc., are far more wealthy than the odd NYT columnist, food researcher or advocate of parapsychology. And the blog would be doing good as well:
“Sometimes racketeers will warn other criminals that the client is under their protection and that they will punish anyone who harms the client.”
I have recommended fee-for-comment systems on two other blogs so far because a) moderating comments can be a lot of work for the blogger; and b) it might cut down on the number of crackpot comments or at least get something worthwhile out of them. I don’t recommend it on this blog (yet) because it doesn’t have much of a problem with crackpots. (I have seen fanatic Trumpists derail other science blog posts.) C) I tend to comment too much based on the something-is-wrong-on-the-Internet syndrome and ought to pay something for it, but that could be accomplished by a Donations button, which I do recommend.
Note that this is insensitive to where the 0$ point is assigned: you can also cut down on crackpot comments by paying certain people not to comment. Just sayin’. And I’ll keep saying it as long as it takes…
Nature charged authors 9500 dollars for a publication, based on which to levy 234 dollars open access surcharge per comment seems charitable.
I’ll be sending you a post card with 2@ cents epoxied on…
I think you should cut individualized deals with commenters. It is of course unclear which way the payments should go… Commenters who make the blog more popular would earn fees. Commenters who drive people away would owe. There will be no time to write the blog after these 3,00 individualized transactions, but that’s what happens when you ignore transactions costs in standard economic models.