How To Paywall
Edging your audience until they beg for it
Hello, I am good at paywalling. My highest-converting post on stubstack has converted ~6,200 people to paid subscribers. I think I’m good at this because I come from internet sex work land, where fierce competition and rapid feedback hones your entire being into a finely tuned point that strikes directly at the heart of wallets. The denizens of Substack have no natural predators, and meander about cutely like ancient overfed megafauna.
In the era of vintage, porn used to be a solid product. You could steal it for free, or you could own access (vhs, getting hour long videos from a niche porn site, etc). Over time it’s turned into a fractional product - you are sold arousal piecemeal, one stroke at a time.
Online paywalling for writing is still largely stuck in the classic porn age. Most people paywall lazily, or apologetically, or with classic tradition like mainstream news organizations or academic journals do. This makes sense - the kind of people who are focused on writing something informative are not the same type of people who study the gaping maw of desire. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “I go forage for Thoughts, I build a package of Thoughts, I hand you the Thoughts, you hand me money.”
By contrast, the framework I use for paywalling avoids many of the ‘classic porn’ mistakes writers often make. So let me walk you through how to paywall actually effectively. After all - I have unique insight! So you should listen to me when I say step one is:
1. Establish yourself as someone with unique insight into the thing.
First, you must convey the reason you are the person we should listen to, and not others. Presumably you have some advantage in whatever your topic is, whether it be ‘thinking about throwing parties a whole lot’ to ‘being literally academically educated in physics’.
(And if you don’t have any reason people should be listening to you over others… maybe you shouldn’t be trying to paywall it?)
I personally gain a lot from applying insights across fields. I cannot compete with the authority of more specialized writers, but I can compete with drawing connections across unusual life experiences or unrelated fields of study.
But your job here is to identify which crowded cave is the one where you somehow have a flashlight. Often we’re blind to our own knowledge.
But why are you so blind?
In the book Name of the Wind (or my recollection of it, it’s been a while), we often find the character Kvothe in the middle of striving, and this striving comes with constant failure. There’s no overarching narrative of being cool, he simply is trying desperately to learn a thing for survival reasons, and as soon as he starts getting comfortable then suddenly his world flips and he must learn a different thing. Your sense of his journey is one of continually not quite being good enough. It’s only nearer the end that you take a step back and go ‘oh wait this constant series of misfortune has somehow led to an extremely overpowered character.’
I call this the Kvothe Effect - where your sensation of your own value fails to match what you actually have to offer. We tend to see our own value to the world as stable, like a resting set point; you might view yourself as ‘not that good at x’, and no matter how much skill you gain, your brain still is anchored on ‘not that good at x’.
It’s only later on, when you end up in a situation that calls for your skills and then other people go ‘woah,’ that you notice you may have become Cool.
Much of offering people value is overcoming the Kvothe Effect; you have to be sufficiently in touch with the outside world and its perceptions of you that you can notice what aspects about yourself carry the most authority to other people.
You start to notice this through the little things - do people hear what you study and go ‘oh wow tell me what you know about your cool parties’? Do people refer to you as the ‘physics guy’? Are you continually confused at how everyone else seems to know so little about something you thought was basic and default? Do you find yourself continually explaining concepts to people who keep asking?
If so, perhaps you have a Kvothe Effect! This is why you might be so bad at presenting yourself as someone with unique insight.
2. Explain why other people are bad at this
Okay, we know why you have unique expertise - but why does the person reading need to know what you have to say?
Sometimes the need is implicit (‘how to fix your broken car’), but if you’re trying to communicate something more subtle, you’ll find that people don’t have a sense of taking a misstep at all. Their sense is, “I sort of know some things, and knowing a few more might be cool, I guess.” If you can point out how they actually have some fundamental misunderstanding of the topic, then this is quite powerful.
Ideally, you use your unique access to point out a common misconception. “I’ve found that a lot of people think throwing good parties is fundamentally about decor and good food, but this is actually totally wrong”
This causes people to look inside themselves and notice that they have made this error - and suddenly they realize that they are actually outside this topic in a way they didn’t expect.
Your job is to draw attention to the need inside themselves for the thing you have to offer. People do not innately notice this! It is not forefront in their mind! But there’s a reason you are doing any writing at all, and it’s because you perceive a gap in understanding. You need to make sure they perceive it too, or there will be no motivation to cross the bridge you are building for them.
If relevant, outline the concrete impacts of their lack of understanding - the ‘pain points.’ Failure to understand your point has presumably led to some issues in their lives. What are those issues? Lead them over to it, point directly at it, and say “look at that.”
In thinking about this, you might say “I can’t really see any issues, or really any gap in knowledge between me and my target reader” If that is the case, then in most cases you shouldn’t be writing about this.
So in your blog post so far, you’ve established your unique insight, you’ve pointed out the gap in knowledge. By this point, you should have walked through some genuinely useful stuff. Paying attention to the misconceptions people have, and trying to reverse engineer the psychology behind why people have those misconceptions, is in itself useful!
This might all sound a little basic, but I really recommend slowing down and asking yourself explicitly the answer to each step. I have found this practice valuable and I think you’ll find it valuable too.
3. Actually provide value
You should believe in what you paywall. Behind the wall you should have something useful, or profound, or genuinely beautiful, that you can stand behind and go “Yeah, I think you are getting something worth your while”.
But the people reading don’t know that. Anything could be behind that wall, something stupid and lame, maybe. How are they supposed to know that you actually have the power to satisfy their needs?
You should then, actually satisfy some needs!
My personal strategy is something like this:
I locate some deeply important and useful insight.
I identify the prerequisites required to understand that insight
I write out those prerequisites in a way where those prerequisites are useful on their own.
For example: Maybe you want to convey that 'good sex involves playing a status game correctly’. But first, you need to tell people what good sex is, and what status games are, the way people regularly misunderstand what status games are, and how to identify the core patterns behind true status games. All of those steps are useful in themselves, even without the final point of ‘how this translates to sex’!
I don’t like stringing someone along and then giving them nothing; I want the foreplay itself to be worthwhile, even if they don’t get the release at the end. Your piece should be holistically good, something that betters people no matter what part of it they touch.
Writing useful stuff before the paywall also incentivizes people to share your work even if they haven’t paid, and keeps people coming back to read your work even if they can’t access all of it. It also demonstrates that you’re willing to work to earn their trust. You are not a beggar. You are skilled, and you respect the attention of people even before the point they pay you, and even if they never pay you at at all.
You’ve provided them specific steps, pointing out concrete strategies they can use to help exploring their concepts on their own terms. These steps are useful.
But throughout all this setup should be a subtle pointing towards your final conclusion. You can have it in the beginning - for example
“You might think that everyone has a water buffalo. Yours might be fast, while mine is slow. But have you ever stopped to consider where we get them? Where do the water buffalos come from?
To understand their source, first we must understand the commonality between individuals that don’t have water buffalos.”
The component parts mean nothing if you don’t let the reader know that they are all building to something.
So: I’ve explained a few important steps to you, but you may have noticed they are all part of a specific framework. So how do you actually convert? What is the final, punchiest step to push people over the edge into subscribing?
Getting skilled at the above steps are the dominos that set up the final move, which is kind of a stupidly simple strategy that for some reason almost nobody else is doing??
