WordPress.com releases paid newsletter features

Recently, Renard Moreau commented that I’ve been publishing my content on Substack instead of the website. The honest to goodness truth is I have a lot of incomplete blog drafts to complete and I’ve been a wee distracted from building my Substack cotent to finish them.

As a staunch Indie Web believer, I’m not going to make Substack my hub of content any time soon because I believe you should always park your content in a space you own. But I was a little stumped about where to publish my fiction-related content because a lot of them are gated, and I hope to build a subscriber base on Substack and hopefully one day earn some income from there. There was just no easy way to implement gated or paid content on my blog.

When WP.com announced its newsletter feature in December, I was super excited … only to discover that you can’t implement paid content. However, recently, they announced that they will now support paid and premium content. Woot!

WordPress.com publishers will be able to add paid subscriptions and premium content, allowing them to generate income from their newsletter operations. The option to use these features is available to all WordPress.com blogs, even those on the free plan, the company says.

WordPress.com challenges Substack with launch of paid newsletters

I’m definitely very excited about this development, as it helps me gain more control over my content.

I like Substack in general. Heck, I even like its Notes features despite initial misgivings. But I am uncomfortable that I’m just writing content purely for the platform.

A writer I follow, Justin Cox, created a Substack lifeboat with Ghost. Now, his newsletter is published directly from the website itself. I did consider Ghost once upon a time, but it’s pretty pricey, and I cannot afford (or rather prefer not to) fees of up to a few hundred ringgit a year just to put up my content about my favourite Kdramas or musings about the Internet.

I think WP.com is a very viable alternative, even if its new Guttenberg editor is wonky that sometimes it gets brain freeze when I place blocks on a page. (Sigh.)

The only unfortunate thing is that as I’m on a personal plan, WP.com takes an 8% cut off my profits. It is slightly better than Substack’s 10%, but is something to consider when my newsletter grows big enough for it to be a consideration.

I’m curious, however, if WP.com enforces a “minimum” subscription on its users. For example, on Substack, the lowest Subscription I can give is US$5. This has always been a pain point for me as that means I can’t really adjust the rate to suit folks from countries with less robust currencies, such as Malaysia.

Should I mirror my Substack content?

I’ve been in the communications field for some time, and one of its core tenets is that we should tailor content for each “distribution channel” . Also, Google hates duplicate content, so I’ve been scared off mirroring my content anywhere else.

However, since I’m not going to play “optimise SEO” games anymore, Google rankings may not be a big factor now.

So I’m seriously considering to mirror my content in the following places:

• Medium
• WP.com website

I’d like to mirror my content for these reasons:

• To cater to readers who prefer to read via WordPress’s Jetpack or Medium
• To offer readers as many options to read my content as possible
• To diversify my sources of income.

So, if there happens to be a sad day when Substack falls, I can just transfer my Substack readers to wordpress.com. Hopefully, their journey there would be relatively seamless.

What do you think about my plan?