Helping out a non-profit can add meaning, purpose and new friends to your life, as well as help you learn.
Here are the things you should watch out for.
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“The robots are stealing our jobs! đ±â
The threat of technology stealing our livelihoods is as old as the perceived menace of foreigners marrying our daughters. We are experiencing a wave of Automation, fuelled by the digital transformation.
Yes, your CURRENT job is probably going away. What can you do about it?
This is not new.
When you think about important industries today, the textile industry is probably not the top of your mind.
In the 18th century, it was a big deal. It was so crucial for India that they have a weaver’s spinning wheel on their flag to this day.
“The hand-loom and the spinning-wheel, producing their regular myriads of spinners and weavers, were the pivots of the structure of that society,â
Karl Marx
And then the industrial revolution introduced a Mechanical Loom and Sewing Machines. People in UK previously employed in the textile industry started burning textile mills and factories, fearing for their futures. This has given birth to the term Luddite.
Luddites feared that the time spent learning the skills of their craft would go to waste, as machines would replace their role in the industry. Over time, the term has come to mean one opposed to industrialization, automation, computerization, or new technologies in general.
âLudditeâ on Wikipedia
Fast Forward: The No-Code tools
Journalism, as it existed in the 20th century, is indeed going away. Social Media companies like Facebook and the democratization of publishing brought forward by WordPress.com, Medium, Substack, etc is molding the entire publishing industry into a different form.
(That form, of course, has troubling aspects on the social front – mainly the outrage epidemic, clickbait, and fake news., but this is a topic for some other day).
Career journalists take some solace in pointing out that the programmers face the same threat. No-Code tools and AI are going to take over, and nobody will be safe from disruption.
No-Code tools like Zapier, Webflow, Airtable, and others are meant to reduce your friendly neighborhood programmer into a drag & drop interface.
This is a very poetic vision: The harbingers of the technology snake will themselves face the doom of being made irrelevant.
People losing jobs in numbers is of course, something to avoid. As the weavers in the 18th century and the Horse Manure transporters in the 19th century, overly specialized programmers MAY lose jobs to no-code.
What always struck me in discussions about âjobs going awayâ is that jobs are ultimately⊠work. And there is always more work.
This is not even a good thing! Productivity increases in the industrial revolution, and the information society gains could have introduced shorter workweeks and more leisure time.
Instead, they produced more bureaucracy and gadgets. Humanity will always find more work, to a fault.
How can YOU thrive?
The fact that there will always be work to be done does little for your quality of life, does it?
If you have just been disrupted by the advent of new technology, you want to have food on the table, ideally, keep your living standards or improve them. You want a good job.
Generalist skills and Narrow focus is Antifragile.
âJack of All Trades, master of noneâ is a shaming scheme developed by factory owners to keep their workers dependant.
An often recommended career trick is to combine two broader disciplines. Most skills can be synergistically combined to create more value. For example, mix Marketing with Computer Science or Sales with basically anything to unlock enormous potential. Warren Buffet recommends combining Public Speaking with any skill under the sun. Writing is another high-leverage skill (see David Perrell or Patrick Collison – Stripe CEO).
A journalist might apply his writing workshop to a new, niche field. Whatever future the new managing technology will bring, analysis, commentary, and explanation will always be needed. It may not look like old-school journalism, but the function will be the same.
Despite being somewhat knowledgeable about WordPress and payments systems, I also paint my job in very broad strokes. I am an Engineer that combines tools to solve problems. If these tools are no-code tools instead of programming languages – that only makes my job easier. Thinking in terms of systems interacting with each other and how they handle data is what Computer Science is about. Not coding in any specific language. Patrick McKenzie explains it beautifully in an essay ‘don’t call yourself a programmer’.
The ultimate power move is to apply this broad identity to a narrow field – something very niche and overlooked, where you can:
- Quickly become an expert, by virtue of no competition
- Be able to quickly move into and profit from that niche using your broader skill set.
Ben Thompson from Stratechery.com has explored it from a journalist angle in his essay âNever Ending Nichesâ:
What is important to note, though, is that while quality is relatively binary, the number of ways to be focused â that is, the number of niches in the world â are effectively infinite; success, in other words, is about delivering superior quality in your niche â the former is defined by the latter.
There will always be more work and more niches. The same disruptive force that disrupts the establishment also creates new job titles.
The trick is to be flexible enough to be able to move into those niches once they appear.
Last night I started watching the HULU show Devs, starring Nick Offerman.
In the first episode, we learn that Nickâs character – Forest is building a quantum computing powered machine to model the universe to a great degree of fidelity.
In the scene pictured above, Forest is launching into a monologue that Universe is deterministic. If he indeed succeeded in building a working model of the universe with predictive powers, then indeed, his conclusion would be accurate. I havenât watched the whole series, but I suppose we will learn more.
In a second episode, we hear that they have a problem with the âfidelityâ part. Their modeling is crude, and one proposed explanation is that:
modeling the universe may need an entire universe – one qubit per particle.
Why I donât think this is possible
What struck me as wrong in this statement is that even if we somehow get a universe-size quantum computer with each particle tracked, the universe is made from more than particles.
In the model proposed in the series, we would model all of classical physics, but what about all the quantum soup?
What about the modeling machine itself and itâs interference? How do we model all those qubits?
The universe is a second-order chaotic system, which means that it reacts to predictions. This aspect is beaten to death in every pop-culture product featuring time travel, and implications are well-explored in the grandfather paradox.
Another Science-Fiction cliche, the Shroedingerâs Cat experiment presents problems with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics:
The scenario presents a hypothetical cat that may be simultaneously both alive and dead, a state known as a quantum superposition, as a result of being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.
The Copenhagen interpretation states, that the ârandomnessâ of the uncertainty principle collapses to a state on observation. Deterministic universe (and an ability to run a simulation) would require us to predict this collapse.
Modeling only particles, how can we predict that? And since we cannot discount non-particles from the simulation, the question is:
Can the Universe be modeled using the tools we have in this universe?
Bootstrapping compilers
Bootstrapping is a process of compiling a new programming language. The idea is to write a programming language (they are created as any other program – people write them) using the language itself. Then, a bootstrapping compiler will compile the kernel of the ârealâ compiler, and it will take it from there.
The bootstrapping compiler is written in a different language – a one that already has a compiler (or assembly language that does not need one).
So my question may be translated: Is the universe a bootstrapping compiler or does it need one?
Living in a deterministic universe means no free will.
Humans are meaning-making machines. When Elon Musk proposed, that we may live in a simulation, people felt a little taken aback. However, it does not really matter if we do – and SingularityHub has a good explanation of why.
We will never be able to access âthe layer running the simulationâ, so for intents and purposes – it does not matter, itâs purely theoretical.
That is also why we wonât be able to model THIS universe. We may be able to model A universe – in that sense, we are a bootstrapping compiler. We may be a model running in some other universe – a bootstrapping compiler for us.
The term âbootstrapping” came from the expression âpulling oneself by oneâs bootstrapsâ:
Widely attributed to The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, (1781) where the eponymous Baron pulls himself out of a swamp by his hair (specifically, his pigtail), though not by his bootstraps; misattribution dates to US, 1901
Wiktionary
Bootstrapping itself is used as an example of a tall tale – something impossible and contradictory.
Even if it’s impossible, it will prompt us to learn more about reality
My coworkers and I had a chance to listen to a private keynote by Stephen Wolfram. While explaining the story behind Mathematica, he shared a quote that stuck with me:
If we are building models, one of the things we could make the model of is the universe
Stephen Wolfram
When you introduce yourself, what do you say?
“I am Kate Maria Artur, and I am an accountant journalist engineer at  Apple SpaceX Automatticâ… Most of us will use the job title as a representation of who we are.
My mom infuriates me, and itâs teaching me a lesson about work. She infuriates me with a particular voice, a type of preachy âMaybe you should think about THISâ type of tone. Iâm going somewhere with this, I promise.
See, it took me a pandemic to figure out WHY itâs so annoying.
My wife and I are living in a summer house together with my mom and a new dog. Itâs a journey of self-discovery, and one of the lessons I received is seeing my mom work. She is a high school teacher and tries to teach remotely, over Zoom.
And she uses THE VOICE when teaching. The same one I hate. My mom tries to literally lecture me when we have a disagreement!
I, on the other hand, am an engineer. My default reaction is to diagnose and solve every problem. This is what Iâm good at. Surely, if we address the core issue of every discussion, we can move on, right? Donât try this at home.
Turns out, sometimes people sometimes want you to listen to them. Shocker, right? They donât want to be lectured, they donât want their problem solved, they just want to get their emotions out. You may not think of this as a professional behavior to have at work, but in your personal relationships, that may be a thing.
We all play our roles.
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players
William Shakespeare
Mammals are hell-bent on protecting their identity and acting accordingly. The famous, (but now under reevaluation) Stanford Prison Experiment concluded, that regular people can do horrible things when assigned a new identity. Acting against our identity and assumed roles introduces Cognitive Dissonance, which causes heavy psychological stress. Every cell in our body wants to act according to what we are.
Applied behavioral science recognizes this. Master Key System, Think and Grow Rich, and The Secret all focus on addressing identity first and letting behavior follow. Tony Robbins says that “Identity is everywhere. We do what we believe we areâ.
When we tie our identity to work, we continue to perform similar functions at home, which can cause issues.
Information processing choices
When faced with a new piece of information, you can do a couple of things with it. Your reaction can be:
- Reflexive
fight or flight, etc - Pattern matching/ problem solving
- Empathy / Connection
Seek to understand the experience - Mining for potential
Most professionals’ job description will fall on the spectrum of â#2 – Pattern matching/problem-solvingâ.
Recognizing patterns as âanother one of thoseâ (as Ray Dalio puts it) is a cornerstone of not only Engineering and Medicine but also Law, Investing.
Modern economy rewards jumping straight into problem-solving mode. “World’s biggest challenges are also the world’s biggest business opportunitiesâ, according to Peter Diamandis. The more problems you solve, the bigger the big shot you are. And then you get back home.
Every cell in your body will ache to do what you have done all day – solve problems and bark orders.
But at home, you are not a bigshot any more. You are an accountant journalist engineer husband, mother, or a son. Leave the bigshot voice and, better yet – identity at the door. Be human, emphatise or help somebody explore the potential.
I am a big believer in taking notes and working on my personal infrastructure. I find joy in polishing the “Artur OS” and removing little pockets of friction in my setup. Have a look at my automation philosophy:
Recently, we adopted a dog and I have quite a bit of time spent walking. What if I could use it for some deep thinking?
So I wrote a bot.
How does it work?
A: I record an audio note on my phone:
B: I run my magical code
C: A transcription shows underneath
D: Profit!
There are other ways to solve this problem. Particularly, Otter.AI is a great service to transcribe your notes. However, it requires extra manual steps to open the app, export recordings, etc.
If you don’t have an elaborate setup behind your Evernote account, I recommend you check out Otter.
What do you need:
- You need to set up the PHP (Yes) SDK for Evernote
- You need an API key to Google Cloud Speech API. You don’t need a client library! Just follow these steps:
- Enable the API for your project here
- Create a new “API Interface Key” here
This code assumes you already search for a note and pass it in. I tag a note with `Tools`. A cron job periodically checks the label and does certain magical things on the notes tagged with it.
Code
It finds the audio recording in your Evernote note and transcribes it:
More of my adventures in automation:
In the olden days before the pandemic, there were conferences and meetings. People would gather together to discuss matters in person, looking at each other, not through the screen, but face-to-face.
Meetings, naturally, are most productive when you take notes. Without action items and concrete takeaways, there are just chit-chats between friends. So people whip out their laptops and tablets to âjot down something.â
Have you ever participated in a meeting where everybody is walled off behind a screen? I did, and it was entirely unproductive. Iâm sure it had great notes, though.
Last year, during our company offsite in Orlando, I had a series of meetings regarding a feature I was responsible for. There were many stakeholders, and I wanted to use the time to discuss strategy. I met with the Head of Product, President of our product line, and the CEO of the company. And I noticed something quite interesting:
The more senior the person, the more minimalist their note-taking approach.
All the people I met used Pen&Paper. But it really clicked when we invited the amazing Stephen Wolfram on stage. He would carry a stack of post-it notes, just like our CEO!
I wanted to have something that the average theoretical physicist can use
Stephen Wolfram on why he created Mathematica. He could have been talking about post-its, too.
What is it about paper notes and post-its in particular?
Note-taking is something I take seriously. I type about 500 new notes per month and I am very fond of the search function of my Evernote account. But I have to admit – the paper is superior for note-taking.
- Analog (pen & paper) note-taking lets you stay present. There is no wall of screens between you and the other person,
- Your posture is different when you take notes on paper, making it easier for you to use body language. (With hands on the keyboard, your back is rounded, just like when your ancestors were hiding from danger. This is not the body language of successful people),
- Itâs clear and even encouraging that you are noting things down. The other person does not have to worry, that you are playing Animal Crossing,
- Post-it notes are easy to carry and convenient to pull out when needed. You can keep them in your pocket,
- You can use them while standing, which is useful during conferences,
- One idea, one note is a neat, self-contained information nugget. Post-it note is big enough to note the important stuff but too small to take your bloat. Just like a tweet.
- You can easily re-arrange, combine, and process them after the meeting. Itâs like the are made for this.
Now, that you are in on the secret, you can carry a stack of post-it notes to your high-stakes meeting. Let them know you are a professional too.
Communication is Oxygen. If you feel bad, breathe. If a project is stuck in a rut – communicate. So if you see fire somewhere, you just pump more oxygen into it, right?
Oh, wait.
David Perell has recently shared a page from the CIA Sabotage Field Manual:
This document was created in 1944 to help incite enemy to
“make faulty decisions, to adopt a non-cooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suitâ
In my corporate experience, I have seen genuinely well-meaning employees act in any of these ways. The bigger the organization, the more of these behaviors become defaults. You default to committees to shift risk. You insist on proper channels to be a âTeam Player.â
I will not explain why these behaviors are not conducive to innovation or, for that matter, even operating of a healthy organization. Have a look at the source document.
Open communication in a bigger organization encourages most of these behaviors and that is what I marked in red.
At Automattic, we kind of take the âApple Oppositeâ approach. We are distributed in 75 countries, work without a spaceship HQ, and default to open communication whenever possible. I can snoop in on all internal projects and our VIP clients, see source code of upcoming releases and chime in on a product line strategy that has zero overlap with my responsibilities.
I found our instincts to be much closer to how Pixar operates and it makes me very proud:
A companyâs communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.
If there are people in your organization who feel they are not free to suggest ideas, you lose. Do not discount ideas from unexpected sources. Inspiration can, and does, come from anywhere.
âCreativity Inc.”
Unfortunately, everything in life has a downside and Open communication does as well. Every positive behavior can become a subterfuge tactic if overused:
| My intent | Subterfuge tactic I fall into |
| Async communication, by definition, can be read at any time. I donât know what the context of the other party is, so I will make a long-winded explanation of my reasoning, so we can skip the back-and-forth | (2) Make âspeechesâ. Talk as frequently as possible at great length⊠|
| When I stumble upon a thread or conversation, I try to provide additional value by looping in knowledgeable people. Connecting people who talk to each other is great for creativity. | (3) When possible, defer all matters to committees for “further study and considerationâ This one is particularly effective as subterfuge – people I loop in will reciprocate, ensuring exponential growth of a committee. |
| Sometimes I try to provide additional value by sharing ideas and concerns. Did you thought about X? Maybe they didnât, and I just saved them a discovery in the future? | (4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible Also known as Bikeshedding. Extremely powerful combined with the above (3). Random people looped into a conversation will feel compelled to provide value, sharing shallow unrelated concerns. Since Async communication does not really have the concept of the âmeeting finishedâ, we can hit another tactic for bonus points if we âshare our thoughts too late”: (6) Refer back to matters decided upon the last meeting, in an attempt to re-open the question (…) |
Hippocrates said, that everything to the excess is opposed to nature.
Excess communication can have detrimental effects. It introduces noise for everybody, but more importantly – piles on more work for people trying to solve a problem. I am not advocating for hiding the communication but cutting on self-serving comments.
Are you making that comment to:
- Show that you are smart? Pass.
- To prove that you have taken action, even it is contributing very little? Pass.
- Because you feel concerned, that âproper channelsâ were not used? Pass.
- Project shipped, but you feel compelled to share a concern that should be addressed earlier? Pass.
- You have helpful information, that will make them achieve goals faster? Go ahead.
- You are certain a major risk was overlooked? Go ahead.
- You have a genuine question and answer will help you or others in future pursuits? Go ahead.
Breathe and communicate. Within reason.
Ridiculous as it sounds, even before the lockdowns, I missed the commute.
The gentle rocking of the bus, The camaraderie of workers returning home, and the blank stares filling the space. The commute is universally recognized as bad, right?
- It eats into your schedule, robbing you of your life
- It starts your day off rushed and stressed, which limits your performance and happiness
- You share the rush hour traffic with half of the known universe, all competing for the same 10cm in a bus to squeeze in.
- You get infected with every possible ailment your fellow travelers can carry.
And yet, a few times a year, this feeling comes back. Especially during challenging periods of focused work, I sometimes yearn for this transition period that will let me decompress between work and private engagements.
Now when we all are sheltered in place, these boundaries get blurred. We carry our stresses from work to home, because, well, both happen on the same couch!
The unexpected benefits of commuting are much more apparent now During summertime, it was quite enjoyable. I love cycling to the office and am in a fortunate position where I have 8 km of parks between the coworking spot and me.
- On the way to the office, I get my daily fix of cardio and spent some time in nature. I identified some time ago that on the days that I see the trees, my mood goes up.
- On the way back, I sometimes cycle quite slowly, reflecting on the day and some times maybe even sit in one of those parks.
On those exhausting days, the way home lets me decompress and maybe even put a border between times of the day.
- The commute helps switch gears mentally
- Me cycling to work produces mental energy
While stuck at home, you may want to reproduce the benefits of a commute:
After a challenging day, the most appealing thing is to sink into a couch and start the mindless consumption of Netflix. But if you try exercising, you will discover being more rested after the exercise than before it. Your mind will notice a transition between work and rest.
Hopefully, the lockdowns will end, because the commute can be quite OK if you choose it. With a flexible work schedule, going to the office on any given day is my decision, and I can make specific arrangements to avoid rush hour traffic.
Hopefully, I wonât have to always work from home, nor will I have to commute every day. I can choose whatever works for me, and that is the point.
The promise of fast, seamless micropayments (by micro I mean <$1) has been circling around the web for a while now. The original HTTP status codes, created over 30 years ago, even contain a âplaceholderâ for such a system, which is still reserved for future use:
The HTTP 402 Payment Required is a nonstandard client error status response code that is reserved for future use.
With the advent of Bitcoin, related arbitrage opportunities, and attention economy problems, cryptocurrency experts have renewed interest in providing micropayments solutions.
But I am not convinced this is a problem worth solving.
The administrative cost of accepting payments
Accepting payments and donations has their administrative cost. Taxes, fulfillment, answering support questions, upkeep of the payment system – most of this stuff can be automated, but you are never able to get rid of these pesky details.
Of course, the answer is easy – just make it up with higher volume!
But there is a catch-22. With more volume, there is more upkeep, more treadmill, more support, and bigger risk that you will run into a problematic customer. This constant administrative cost is a reason why every Credit Card processor charges a roughly similar rate for processing payments. They have overhead too.
2.9% + 30c of the fixed cost.
Dire reality of Paypal, Stripe and other processors
The cognitive cost of the purchase
Each payment has not only a material cost but also a cognitive cost. While you are purchasing something, you not only whip out your hard-earned cash, but you also have to make a purchase decision.
- Is this really worth paying for?
- From the myriad options available, is this one the best?
- How much did I spend already this week?
All these decisions go through the customerâs head each time they are trying to buy something on the web (and IRL). That means, that each customer can only make so many purchases, regardless of their price.
While customer pays a higher price, you benefit. If they pay a high cognitive cost, everybody loses.
Subscriptions and bundles
Bundles and Subscriptions are both ways of addressing this issue.
- The purchase decision is made only once. In case of a bundle, its spread over items and in case of a subscription – over time.
- The administrative cost for the seller is also more manageable. Itâs one customer instead of many, one fulfillment and one line item in a tax sheet.
That is why you are witnessing an explosion of subscription services – Spotify, Disney+, Netflix… Even Apple is moving to Apple TV+ because iTunes pay-for-a-single-episode model didn’t work out.
Micropayments are never taking off.
There are a million exciting technical ways of making micropayments work. Cryptocurrencies, in particular, are a favorite tool of those working on technical details.
The problem is human nature (and isn’t it always?). By putting the value of 50c on something, you are signaling that this is what itâs worth. Higher price means higher perceived value, and as recounted by Robert Cialdini, raising prices can, surprisingly, bring more customers.
Micropayments are a favorite excuse of non-customers. If you have something worth paying for, it will be worth paying more than $1. People not willing to shell out a $5 will find an excuse not to shell out 50c either. You donât want these people as your customers. Pricing psychology and market economics are against < $1 transactions, and maybe that is why there is not a single successful micropayment startup.
Provide real value, raise your prices, and start solving $300 problems instead of 30c problems. Better yet – start a subscription!
In the words of Patrick McKenzie:
And if you came here from Hacker News, you might like another one of my articles:
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of me helping the WordPress.com users earn a living.
We are building a whole suite of products and features that would unlock the economic potential of the people starting their journeys as the publishers. Our goal has just the right keywords to suggest that we are building a âpaywall.” But, Paywall is not a straightforward affair. Let me explain how I think about Paywalls:
Traditional Paywall – letâs call it âbig publisher paywall.â
This is the paywall we all think about and see in leading publisher sites like New York Times, Washington Post, and similar ones. Since the business model of those sites is publishing, they produce news articles. That is what they get paid for, and that is what they are meant to guard.
They are usually monetizing through the quantity of content. There are several modes of operation here:
- âMetered Paywallâ is the most popular approach of â3/ month freeâ articles
- âNagwallâ is where you get progressively worse reading experience, or they would badger you to sign up, but they will not block the content outright.
- âHard paywallâ, where you have no way of accessing the content without a subscription
That technical solution is tightly coupled with:
Producing a lot of content with a short shelf life.
If a site had 3 evergreen, amazing pieces that are bringing the majority of traffic and the rest would be meh content, then there would be no reason to pay! A quota of 3/month is enough to consume this great content, and there is no reason to sign up for more. Because there IS no more. So these sites are producing content that is enough to draw the traffic and give you a taste of future goodies, but not enough to fill you up. Additionally:
- Since you pay for quantity, it incentivizes larger teams or news organizations
- Itâs best to have a uniform quality. If there is a breakaway hit, it is used to draw traffic and not be value in itself
- They tend to focus on general topics (news, sports) to have the biggest possible total addressable market.
- They have already a huge back-catalog of existing content when starting a paywall (hard to pay for quantity when there are only 20 pieces on a site)
- The signup messages are short and minimal because itâs clear what you pay for â more of the same
Publishers using these paywalls have other, complex needs â customization, email newsletters, corporate strategy. They donât exist in a vacuum and are usually connected to a bigger organization and budgets.
âMember featuresâ / âNiche blogger paywallâ
Now, letâs consider a case of the smaller blogger, maybe even a 3-person team running a site.
- They have no hopes of competing with NYT or Washington Post on quantity and broad-spectrum journalism
- They cannot put out more than one piece per day
- They tend to be very niche, and their Unique Value Proposition lies in being practical and having a perspective not found anywhere else
- They donât have an institutional brand like NYT, so they have to earn trust by producing great (free) content as well
- They have a tiny (or non-existent) back-catalog of existing content.
Because of these traits, bloggers overwhelmingly are separating free and premium content.
- Promotional content is what made them famous. Free articles with great quality and unique perspective are bringing traffic to the site
- Paid content usually has a very clear value proposition, based on the bloggerâs expertise.
Some of the ways for bloggers to monetize is to offer:
- Drip feed, where you get access to âprivate blogâ, with new relevant content being consistently added
- All-In membership, where you get access to the back catalog of private content
- Online Course
- Online Community â where you pay for ongoing relationships with the blogger but also other people that paid for the same access (being connected to a bloggerâs message enough to pay is a good filter for other people willing to do so, hence you can connect with similar-minded folks easily while skipping the internet randos that never pay.)
- Product â (software download, excel spreadsheet for job hunting, or a physical product like a planner)
- A Service â say coaching, private lessons, etc..
- Hybrid â any mix of the above
The Source of this list is Membership Guys.
None of these business models are compatible with readers being able to âpeekâ pieces of content of their own choosing. Bloggers/site owners are making a clear distinction of what pieces of content are free and which ones are âpremiumâ worth paying for. Sure, they tease whatâs inside the âpremiumâ, but they are explicitly choosing which parts can be accessible.
Additionally, the âfreeâ section has to be pretty accessible as well. Before a customer trusts a blogger âout of nowhereâ, she has to form a relationship based on time and trust. There is no brand like NYT to help with this decision. It will often take way more than 3 or even 30 free articles to convince a customer to pay.
If you are starting up, you are better off starting with:
- Building up your catalog of the entirely free content that will help others discover your site
- Once you have some free content, you should introduce âmember onlyâ section with something extra
- Donât concern yourself with the fancy mechanics of content blocking. You can start by sending your paid content manually via email. Donât spend time on site features! If you are on WordPress.com, you can use the Premium Content feature we just released.
