Last week, I spent $20, the minimum possible amount, and became a subscriber to Andrew Sullivan’s current events blog “The Dish.” While I don’t agree with all of his positions and points of view, I am consistently impressed with his voice as a writer and his refusal to pigeonhole the blog to topics which are his traditional strengths. His tendency to use “ctd” posts to showcase responses to his posts or to the ideas in general is an especially interesting way to do business.
But what I what you to take away from this is the fact this is the first time I’ve ever paid for a blog. And now I’m scratching my head on a general idea that comes from this fact: what is a blog worth to me? I understand that this idea is hardly new and has already been debated ad nauseum by some in the blogosphere and MSM, but it’s the first time I’ve had to consider it myself.
On the one hand, a professional blog such as The Dish is little different from my subscription to the New Yorker. I’m paying for news and opinion and analysis which are rich enough and numerous enough to warrant hours out of my week spent on it. Now that I’m paying, I visit it daily, when before I was only visiting it when another site or friend (AB) had recommended something to me. But that is itself ipso facto logic. Still, it is certainly interesting enough to warrant a daily visit and the voice of the blog is distinct enough to offer me something I can’t get elsewhere. So time spent and the exclusivity of materials are two factors on my side here.
Next is the price. $20/year? Too much? I’ll skip the usual Save the Children type comparison (for the record, this works out to about $0.05/day) and instead focus on personal value. How much would I spend for the free blogs I currently enjoy and MUST visit at least once a day? If I’m really being honest with myself, if one of my main blogs (io9 [the sci-fi blog], Towleroad [the gay news blog], or Politico [guess what it’s about]) were to suddenly become a paywall, I’d probably cough up a bit of cash. In fact, for io9 definitely, I’d probably cough up a bunch of cash. If someone were to quote me the price of $1 per day, I’d probably think that is fair for the value I get out of it. I’d balk at the $365 price tag but might very well end up paying it. (I NEED sci-fi, much like Bill Kristol needs puppy blood.)
The issue I think a lot of us have over price is that this price comes before the value. I’d say this is the default way we do transactions in society. Cars, food, apartments, etc. But the internet has made us think differently about something as intangible and, seemingly, fungible as blogs. For so long they have been relegated to the domain of “they should just be happy I’m paying attention” that they have had an infinitely weak bargaining position.
Has that changed? I suppose. For me it has, at any rate. After years of enjoying and being impressed by how much a professional blog can influence my life, I’m willing to take a leap of faith based on good reviews, good “samples”, and over a decade of built-up respect for a medium that I have come to consider irreplaceable.
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