It’s incredibly easy to ask people to pay for your content these days. Is that an entirely good thing?

If you use Wordpress, you can now start charging people to read your blog. I’ve always been of the opinion that people should not expect everything for free on the web. At the start, there always seemed to be the assumption that as no physical resources seemed to be involved, the whole thing about having a website, and creating resources that people could access, was costless. I remember one person asking, on Twitter I think, “Why doesn’t Terry Freedman make his books available free of charge? After all, they’re not that long, and they’re PDFs.”

I wondered if, on the same basis, he expected supermarkets to let him have small bars of chocolate free, or small cups of coffee. The resources I create are not costless: they cost me time and money to acquire the expertise embodied in them. As it happens, I give a lot away, and always have done, but everyone is entitled to earn a living I think.

So I was quite pleased when it started to become much easier to levy subscription fees, because it implied that public expectations had changed. People were acknowledging the validity of the idea that if people make their expertise available on the web, they are entitled to expect payment for it if they want it.

I am not taking advantage of all this new-found ease myself though. The reason is that I tried it, and it was extremely hard. Around ten years ago I started a paid-for newsletter called Practical ICT. I had to maintain the database myself, on a server, which was OK, except for having to drop everything and install security updates whenever they came out.

What was worse was having to continually come up with new content that wasn’t readily available elsewhere on the web — otherwise why would anyone wish to subscribe? As it happens, I was able to do that, and I had enough subscribers to make the effort profitable. However, I didn’t much like the constant worry that if I became ill I would not be able to give subscribers value for money. In the end, I ended the service, and refunded everyone a pro rata proportion of the their subscription fee.

But now, it has become all too easy to create a subscription service, in my opinion. The technical barriers to entry are no longer there. As a potential provider, this is wonderful. But how much can the market bear? I subscribe to one service for $5 a month, and another one for $7 a month. That total of around £10 in my currency doesn’t amount to much, but it’s not insubstantial either. I don’t want to keep subscribing to all these separate services even if each one costs “only” a few dollars a month, because it all mounts up.

I can’t be the only person who thinks like this, and what that means for any new entrants to the market is this: If you’re going to charge a subscription to your newsletter or blog, you had better be sure that you can provide good content on a consistent basis, that offers fresh insight, or inside information that subscribers can’t easily obtain elsewhere. That was always the case, but now that there is so much competition for subscription services (not just in education but in entertainment and other fields too), the time must surely be coming soon when people will not sign up to one more paid service unless it offers something quite extraordinary. Unfortunately (or fortunately from my bank balance’s point of view), very few subscription services I’ve considered seem to meet that criterion.