I like LessWrong and I visit the site quite often. I would be willing to pay a monthly subscription for the site especially if the subscription included extra features.
Maybe LessWrong could raise money in a similar way to Twitter: by offering a paid premium version.
A Fermi estimate of how much revenue LessWrong could generate:
As far as I know, the site gets about 100,000 monthly visitors.
If 10,000 of them signed up for the premium subscription at $10 per month, then LessWrong could generate $100,000 in revenue per month or $1.2 million per year which would cover 20-40% of the $3-6 million funding gap mentioned.
Ehh… feels like your base rate of 10% for LW users who are willing to pay for a subscription is too high, especially seeing how the ‘free’ version would still offer everything I (and presumably others) care about. Generalizing to other platforms, this feels closest to Twitter’s situation with Twitter Blue, whose rates appear is far, far lower: if we be generous and say they have one million subscribers, then out of the 41.5 million monetizable daily active users they currently have, this would suggest a base rate of less than 3%.
Strictly, the 78k is for subscribers (probably meaning people who get the emails), not readers; someone who uses RSS to keep up or just visits the site every now and then won’t be counted. I don’t have much intuition for how many readers will be subscribers.
I like LessWrong and I visit the site quite often. I would be willing to pay a monthly subscription for the site especially if the subscription included extra features.
Maybe LessWrong could raise money in a similar way to Twitter: by offering a paid premium version.
A Fermi estimate of how much revenue LessWrong could generate:
As far as I know, the site gets about 100,000 monthly visitors.
If 10,000 of them signed up for the premium subscription at $10 per month, then LessWrong could generate $100,000 in revenue per month or $1.2 million per year which would cover 20-40% of the $3-6 million funding gap mentioned.
Ehh… feels like your base rate of 10% for LW users who are willing to pay for a subscription is too high, especially seeing how the ‘free’ version would still offer everything I (and presumably others) care about. Generalizing to other platforms, this feels closest to Twitter’s situation with Twitter Blue, whose rates appear is far, far lower: if we be generous and say they have one million subscribers, then out of the 41.5 million monetizable daily active users they currently have, this would suggest a base rate of less than 3%.
ACX is probably a better reference class: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2023-subscription-drive-free-unlocked. In Jan, ACX had 78.2k readers, of which 6.0k subscribers for a 7.7% subscription rate.
Strictly, the 78k is for subscribers (probably meaning people who get the emails), not readers; someone who uses RSS to keep up or just visits the site every now and then won’t be counted. I don’t have much intuition for how many readers will be subscribers.