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April 04, 2005
Subscribing to Bleeding Edge
"Payment," as one of our friends once noted, "is the sincerest form of flattery." We've therefore been highly flattered by the fact that several of our readers have suggested that they'd be willing to become paid subscribers to keep Bleeding Edge going.
Steve put it this way:
Tell me a reasonable sub, suck me in with some give aways that I don’t need and my funds transfer will be on the way. Sure you will lose some blog purists, but you will survive to do what you want to do.
And Maureen had this to say:
I worry about expecting everything for nothing. I have learnt heaps from the column, radio show, blog and forum, and have been inspired to learn more.
We appreciate the thoughts, but we’re not thinking of charging a subscription. We’d like it to be completely voluntary. That’s why we’ve come up with the Patrons idea. If you think you get some value out of the various Bleeding Edge activities, and you’d like to support us, you can either make a credit card payment through Pay Pal, or send us an email to arrange an electronic bank deposit.
We’re trying to come up with some ideas for additional value, as Steve suggests, and we’ll continue with our plans for display advertising. We’ve also pursuing an idea for another blog venture, that might produce some income. We’re going to hang in there for a while yet.
Posted by cw at April 4, 2005 05:14 PM
Comments
I'm not sure what "display advertising" is, but a couple of comments:
I subscribe to your RSS feed, and typically read 90% of your content that way, except when I feel I need to comment on something!
Clicking the link in the RSS feed takes me from my ad-free RSS feed to an ad-free post display, at which point I make a comment without ads, and end up back on the same ad-free page afterwards. So while I consume your content, I'm not viewing any ads to do so. And bluntly, as long as I'm not asked to cope with pop-ups or interminable delays, I'm not averse to a few ads. The web has trained me well.
So, just as a little food for thought:
- Some sites have introduced ads to their RSS feeds (Ars.Technica tend to see-saw between ads and none), I think feedburner may have some inbuilt facility for it, though the relevance typically seems low.
- Implement ads on every page that has value, including individual blog posts. I think that's something the old site used to do, but not this one.
Posted by: TristanK at April 4, 2005 06:37 PM
How about showing what costs need to be met? That could help people get an idea about why they should donate, and what sort of amount would be good...
Posted by: Raoul at April 6, 2005 12:34 AM
I read with interest your Age item and also listen into 3LO program on Thursday
Posted by: Ivan Kayne at April 6, 2005 03:47 PM