On tip jars for writers

Substacking about Substack, sorry sorry

Every so often, I wonder why bother paywalling any of the content on here. It makes taxes more complicated, even though (I think?) I sorted out the genuinely keeping-me-up-nights concern that I would owe the British government some kind of blog-tax that I have since learned does not exist. Then I crunch the numbers, as it were, and yeah no, the side-gig money can’t go, not unless life in Toronto becomes dramatically less expensive.

Ah, you might say, but I have a husband! (Commonly googled: Phoebe Maltz Bovy husband.) I do! He works, as do I, and this is how we support ourselves. If it were financially possible for me to pivot to SAHM or socialite or full-time righteous activist then… I would continue doing the work I’m doing, because I’m fortunate that it’s all stuff I can’t picture not doing, and for all the usual feminist reasons. But also, there’s a reason I started the previous sentence with an “if.”

People are—as Cartoons Hate Her, my apparent brain-mate, has already brilliantly explored—weird weird weird about Substack paywalls. Paywalls generally but these in particular.

I get it, as a reader. It would be nice to be able to read the whole post! But the thing is: you can. If you got as far as the paywall, it’s not an issue of the platform being banned in your locality. If you care to enough to read the thing, and are not destitute, you can pay for it. You can even sign up for paid and then cancel! (I got a note recently from someone letting me know they’d signed up for paid and planned to cancel after reading one article. Fine! You can do that. You’re not even obliged to tell me, but if you feel you must, that’s fine too!)

If you don’t care to pay to bypass a paywall, you can decide—as we all do, about so many goods and services, on a daily basis—that full blog access is not something you wish to purchase, and proceed accordingly. There’s no shortage of free content out there, often by the very same person whose paywall isn’t for you.

I have seen people refer to paywalled content as ‘I can’t read that post’ and have doubtless used this phrasing myself but the thing is, is it that you can’t, or that you’ve decided against?

I have seen an ethos on here about how, ethically, writers with newsletters shouldn’t paywall but rather should have a tip-jar option, a kind of pay-what-you-can. I’m sure it’s well-meaning (am I sure of this? what does that phrase even mean?) but it’s also, the more I think about it, bizarre. It treats blogs sorry “newsletters” like some kind of charitable endeavor, on two levels.

Level one is the idea that it wrongs the needy to withhold even some of your musings. (The needy, but realistically, also the not-needy who nevertheless have finite budgets and therefore spend their money on a finite set of goods and services and your blog ain’t it.) That if you’re putting content out there, it is so precious the world deserves to see it. I find this a bit mysterious because we don’t otherwise live in a pay-if-you-can economy, and it’s hard to see an ethical case for having one specifically for reading blogs.

Level two is that people who do pay for your writing are not compensating you for a widget but rather donating to the cause that is keeping you fed and housed. This framing is on the one hand true—people work to earn a living!—but on the other, not how working, uh, works. We’re not in communism, not even up in here what is still I believe called Canada. You aren’t meant to work until you reach some kind of subsistence level and then it is unethical for you to work any more, or rather you must instead go on working but provide the thing for free. This is not expected of salaries, nor should paywalling a Substack only happen once you’ve demonstrated that if you did not do this, you would literally not eat.

You don’t or rather shouldn’t owe your Substack followers your financial records so that they can see all your other income streams and decide, on that basis, whether to pay for your blog. I can see how in times of crisis it can function as one, but at the end of the day, a paywall is not a Go Fund Me. You’re paying for writing you want to read, which isn’t altruism. AND YET I do sometimes feel obliged to point out that if I could give or take the money this earns, I’d chuck the paywall. I shouldn’t feel obliged, though, is the thing. I don’t think it should matter.

I can also see how it can be received as unseemly if someone who seems to have a lot of money and a nice job is paywalling content, and have silently hmm’d at the occasional ‘support my work’ from someone with the sort of salaried job that feels like it must pay well, but 1) you don’t know their finances (or, as a rule, their salary!) and 2) let’em try, you’re not obligated to pay for the content!

I was going to say that as a rule, people aren’t bothering to paywall unless they need to, but is that even true? There are rich-lady fashion blogs with paywalls, but somehow the crisis is more like what if somewhere someone is topping up a modest but non-zero salary with a side hustle, how do we make that stop?? Which seems completely the wrong approach!

In the blogosphere days, for which one is meant to be ever so nostalgic, I remember disliking how tenured professors* would blog for free or freelance for peanuts because what was it to them, and it always at least felt like this was driving down rates for commentators who did need the money. And they would always seem like they were doing this because they were above such crass concerns, too dignified to send the ‘and what is the fee for this?’ email to an editor. Well cost of living has skyrocketed now hasn’t it, and even the profs want to be paid for side gigs.

What paywalls have done—what Substack has changed—is, it has made paying bloggers for their work less like a tip jar, less like a plea for patrons. Instead it’s like, here is some free stuff, and some stuff you have to pay for. It stops being about abstract notions of whether writing should pay, and starts to be a blunt question of, will people pay for your writing? If the answer is yes, then your blogging is by definition worth paying for.

Or that other anxiety: what if someone is writing for publications and has a paywalled Substack? As though there ought to be some kind of equality-of-outcomes among writers specifically, such that if you’re already making anything whatsoever from your writing, the gallant thing is to step aside for those trying to get a foot in. As though newsletters were the equivalent of writing competitions where you can’t enter if you already have an agent. I can understand pointing out that the people making it big with paid newsletters tend not to be true media outsiders, and therefore not hailing Substack as this beautiful democratizing force. But if you look at what writing pays, it would be utterly bizarre if people making a living that way were not wanting and needing to earn more.

Weirdly, the weirdness about paywalls seems not to extend to people who simply do very well on Substack, such that that is how they earn their entire living. There doesn’t seem to be a norm whereby if you have a certain number of paid subscribers, you have to donate everything past minimum wage or living wage to charity. To offer free or discounted subscriptions more regularly, perhaps, but not to put a cap on the number of subscribers paying in full. Once you reach the threshold where it is someone’s job, it’s more like, props to that person for having cracked the bloggy code and made it their livelihood.

*This is nothing against tenured professors. Some of my best friends, some of my best husbands, have that job.