Should You Automatically Paywall Your Substack Archives?
Exploring the Pros and Cons of Paywalling your posts older than a certain period of time to make them no longer be available to free subscribers
One way to increase the chance of someone becoming a paying subscriber is to automatically paywall your archive.
img src: Masaaki Komori
In this post, we explore the the Pros and Cons of Paywalling your posts older than a certain period of time in order to entice people to becoming a paying member.
If you go into your publication’s settings, right above the “Sections” area, you can find the settings regarding how to Paywall your archives and how to set an automatic archive date:
This allows you to automatically change your public posts to private based on a certain number of days, weeks, months, or years.
Three reasons this can make sense are:
Once a person has read your recent work they may want to go back and check out what else you have written about a certain subject. So paywalling your archive increases the chance that they’ll become a subscriber.
You may forget to go back and paywall a certain post, so being able to have the Substack service automatically paywall it is very helpful.
If you are posting very frequently, it can be a pain to go back and have to paywall a bunch of posts based on looking at the calendar to make sure you are keeping inline with what you’ve told your subscribers.
There reasons this can be a bad idea are:
If the paywall archive is very recent, there’s a large chance that someone isn’t going to see enough of your work to get enticed to subscribe.
If you are not posting very frequently, your last post may go from public to private because it’s past the automatic paywall threshold and then suddenly your publication will no longer have any available work for public Consumption.
If you have linked to a particular post as a great example of your work and it goes past Substack’s automatic paywall setting, then when people click onto your publication from other sites (like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook/Meta, etc), they will immediately run into the paywall and won’t be able to see the work you are trying to showcase.
So when you go to set your Substack’s automatic paywall setting, make sure you think through all the various situations described above to make sure you are going to be happy with how the various situations pan out.
Until next time!
All the best,
Sebastian
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