today i removed the Hear in LA paywall

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.