for a year i forgot i hate paywalls – in part because it was a soft one
you could go to 5 articles a month for free
and on social i always included a Friend link that wouldn’t subtract from your 5
but the interesting thing with having a 79 year old mom is
if i can make things foolproof for her, then i know they’ll be foolproof for anyone
and she was always getting stuck at the paywall.
thats not good.
behind the scenes i am trying to work on a proper website for the thing instead of having it hosted on Medium
but the problem is it’s a lot of work and weirdly i dont have a lot of time and i have even less money to throw at it
speaking of money, the only reason i was having Hear in LA be behind a paywall is in hopes that if something took off, Medium would pay me a handsome sum.
i did have a few things take off, but i was paid a fugly sum.
worse: any time i wrote something non-Hear In LA related, something topical and slightly click baity i would have pretty big traffic numbers and still only make $5-$10.
is it worth $10 to have my pride and joy behind a wall that even my dear mother can’t get to easily? of course not.
so now it’s down and hopefully that will bring more people
and then all will be well
even though i am not doing this for huge traffic
im doing it because it’s the right thing for me to do right now.