Why would you be embarrassed about how much you make from it? It’s a direct window into the value you’re providing other people. I’m not a paid subscriber, but I’m considering it. You should be proud, not embarrassed of the money you make from it.
I have always thought this way of thinking is bullshit (no offense to you or others who think in it).
If the majority of ACX subscribers were like starving or something, then yes, I guess you can base a lot on them paying 10$ per month. But otherwise, no. People buy things for no particular reason, just because. People buy things that actively and unambiguously harm them, like cigarettes. People buy things and then forget about them.
Perhaps you have a very torturously unintuitive definition of "Value" that all of the above counts as value added, but then why would anybody else use it ?
(This is independent from my evaluation of ACX's value, which I think is high. More a rant on Economics' bullshit way of reasoning of "X is rich, (s)he must have provided a lot of """""Value""""" to people, otherwise they wouldn't have given money, because as we all know people are rational agents who never spend a dime without thinking it all through".)
No, people don’t buy things for no particular reason. They buy things because the thing they are buying is worth more to them than the price they are paying.
I think with autorenewing subscriptions this is only partly true. I certainly sometimes subscribe to stuff, then forget about it, then pay for it for much longer than it's worthwhile to me. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who does this
People pay $10/month Patreon subscriptions to producers who release all their content for free, they are literally buying nothing. Clearly, money is given for more reasons than just "buying a thing of value".
Nope, it’s the exact same thing. They are happier to give the money to their patron than they are to have that $10 be in their bank account. You guys seem to be conflating your own values with the values of others.
In some sense, no matter what you do with money, you can say that sort of thing; even if I set my $10 on literal fire, you can say that my revealed preference is that I value the experience of seeing my money burn more than I value the $10 I previously had. This isn't limited to money, either.
On the other hand, there are different kinds of motivations for giving someone money, and the Patreon situation gets at some of them. I can spend money on something and think it's overpriced: it has a price I'm willing to pay, but not the price I think it should have. In the Patreon situation, this wouldn't make sense; if I am paying $10/month, it's because I think the recipient deserves it.
(Also, a patron is a person who gives money to a creator, not the other way around.)
Yes, that is correct, it applies to the burning of money. Which people did at certain times of history during periods of hyperinflation. There is no escaping the fact of reality: people act in pursuit of their values.
Whether those values are good or bad is a different question.
What I'm saying is : the metric that "worth more" is referencing here isn't an unambiguously good thing like health or "IQ points gained per month" or whatever, but simply a wishy washy, spur-of-the-moment electrical signals in their brain that mean nothing in reality (or negative value) and is often quickly forgotten.
Consider people who become (b)millionaires through youtube reaction videos, or through promoting snakes oil products, or through grifting investors' money on bullshit startups that never go anywhere. Are *those* providing a lot of value to their benefactors ? You have to accept that they do if you think that Scott's earned money is an indicator of the value he is providing.
Reaction videos and snake oil are very different cases. Snake oil is fraudulent, in which case, the buyer was duped into buying something they were not. Fraud is different because while the exchange is voluntary, there is no “there” there, hence the reason fraudulent empires always collapse. Reaction videos are absolutely a value to the person who enjoys them. Just because they aren’t a value to you says nothing about their value to another.
Yes, there is no question they value the drugs. It's a bad value IMO, and probably objectively, but a value nonetheless. Everybody pursues their own values--whether those values are rational and good is a different question. A person who buys heroin is placing more value on heroin than cash. One can't say, "Well, that guy bought a Ford and Fords are junk vehicles, therefore he doesn't value Fords."
So what do you make of alcoholics trying to quit, going through the trouble of attending AA meetings, committing suicide if they fall off the wagon, or other things like that?
I make that the reasons people have for holding certain values are varied. Some people soak their values in from the culture. Others intentionally set about choosing them--some choose rationally, others not. Some people default into them by the way they are raised. Most people (probably?) hold values with a mix of sources. Trying to quit addiction sucks because one has realized one of their values is bad/irrational/destructive and wants to replace it with a better one, but the nature of addiction makes that super hard. Upon relapse for example it’s exactly the realization that one has chosen a bad value that brings the shame and other associated negative feelings.
I was super addicted to heroin for years and it was ruining my life, and I wished I didn't want it — but there's no question that I kept spending all my money on it because I really, really wanted it way more than anything else the money could have gotten me.
In addition to what Sliver_Swift notes, I will add that you're only rationalist about the things you care about.
You are not rationalist about, say, the exact color of the tshirt that you wear to work. You don't wake up 2 hours earlier and ponder all the pros and cons of wearing the green shirt vs wearing the grey one, being careful to look at disagreeing opinions more charitably than your instincts say. Who fucking cares, it's just a shirt.
The above applies to anyone such that 10$ per month is not a lot of money to them, i.e. the vast majority of ACX readers. Who cares, it's the price of 2 overpriced starbucks coffees. X thousand people, each unthinkingly giving 10$ dollars, adds up to a whole lot of dollars and 0 thinking or rationality or any sort of cost-benefit processing going into them.
You can be the most superficial, airheaded, and inane, uninspired person and still get billions, if you expose your 0-value contributions to enough people and demand a sufficiently low amount of money per person per contribution. Your wealth reflects nothing except the shameless hustle of marketing 0- or negative- value bullshit relentlessly.
"you expose your 0-value contributions to enough people and demand a sufficiently low amount of money per person per contribution."
It's not 0-value, it's low value. Your customers do in fact want what you're selling, at least enough to part with a small amount of money and enter their card info.
Providing a low (but still positive) value product to thousands of people for a low price is both a big contribution to society and a way to get rich, especially in the arts.
(Some people do provide negative-value products, like payday loans to stupid people who don't understand interest or getting people hooked on cigarettes. Or taking advantage of government or other principle-agent issues. But the vast majority of wealthy people, Scott included, do not do this.)
A person buys things for weird reasons. People tend to law-of-large-numbers into buying things for more legible reasons. Or, put another way, do you believe that if you start your own substack and post garbage to it, that you have a chance of making even a fraction of that Scott does?
I don't believe that's how the law of large numbers work, people in aggregate are just as susceptible to the exact same manipulation tactics a single person is susceptible to, and more. The entire industry of advertising is built on that. Funny quips, naked women, sexy celebrities saying that they use the product daily (yeah right), and people eat it up like it's chocolate icecream.
>you have a chance of making even a fraction of that Scott does?
Me ? I don't think so, I'm not shameless enough to pull it off. But, say, Kim Kardashian ? Absolutely. She wouldn't post literal randomly-generated garbage of course, that's too strong of a claim that I never made (although modern art is literal randomly-generated garbage and it earns at least 2 or 3 orders of magnitudes more than Scott's carefully crafted words), she would post "updates" of daily inane bullshit, and I bet you my right arm it would get at least an order of magnitude more than Scott.
Kim Kardashian and her family very effectively sell the illusion/fantasy of being friends with popular and successful people. It's only "daily inane bullshit" to people who don't want what she's selling.
Many people struggle to earn an annual income that is the equivalent of what he makes by doing what he simply enjoys doing - and was previously already doing - for free. So it's not as if he needs the money, but by asking for more he's embarrassed of appearing to be greedy. I think he's probably still slightly conflicted about getting paid for his blogging.
Just because he doesn’t need the money doesn’t mean his service/product isn’t worth the money. I get the sentiment, I’m saying it’s wrong. He shouldn’t be conflicted (if he is).
You're correct, but this is not at all intuitive. I'm a software developer, which is a much more normal sort of labor than blogging, and I *still* sometimes get thrown off by how much I'm getting paid versus how much I feel like I'm doing Hard Work. Economics is weird.
This will sound incredibly silly, but when I first discovered your blog the way I interpreted the onboarding message was "90% of the posts are free and subscribing is really a means of supporting the project or like connecting with other subscribers" it wasn't until recently I realized how many posts I was actually missing out on (And that is pushing me to subscribe now).
I don't know if that experience is unique to me (That i'm a dum dum) or if other newbies like me got the same impression. Figure I'd mention it as someone whose been reading for half-a-year.
Wait a sec. I'm also under the impression that ~90% of the posts are free. And looking at e.g. December 2022, that vaguely looks like the right ballpark. Is that not the case?
This could absolutely be me wrongly equating what 90% feels like verse what it actually is but the amount of locked posts was way more than I initially expected there to be when reviewing past posts.
It's worth noting that some (though not all) of the locked posts are early drafts of what will later get released as an unlocked post, so in terms of content they effectively apply more to the 90% unlocked side, just on a bit of a delay.
> This will sound incredibly silly, but when I first discovered your blog the way I interpreted the onboarding message was "90% of the posts are free and subscribing is really a means of supporting the project or like connecting with other subscribers" it wasn't until recently I realized how many posts I was actually missing out on (And that is pushing me to subscribe now).
That does sound incredibly silly, mostly because your first impression was correct and as a nonsubscriber you're missing very little.
As a paid subscriber who basically reads everything, I think that more than 90% of the content is free.
The subscriber-only posts are often a lot shorter. I think Scott also selects them because he thinks they are less relevant. In one case just a silly poem. That is still enjoyable, but I don't think you miss important things. In a few cases, he makes them subscriber-only because they seem too controversial, or too easy to get wrong by a random passer-by, but that's rare.
So the free content gives you everything that is *relevant*. The subscription will give you a small extra amount of *enjoyable, but no deep insights*.
A small exception: the hidden open threads are like the normal open threads, but with 1/3 of the volume (same frequency, 1/3 volume per thread), and with a more selected audience. If you read a lot of open threads, this *will* give considerably extra value.
I am strongly in favor of annual posts like this as opposed to
> their usual “please subscribe” popups and “teasers” of subscriber-only posts
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that, insofar you feel like you might be imposing with this post, you should take this as (N=1) confirmation that it really isn't much of an imposition at all.
what's wrong with a little teasing? I remember before I subbed I would check the "archive" periodically to see what I'm missing cause I just need to know lol
Other Substacks have posts that chop off in the middle with a "please subscribe to finish reading this article you've gotten curious about". This is doing the thing Scott complained about in Problems with Paywalls - tricking someone into making their life worse and then charging money to fix it.
I too. This post caused me to ask myself, "do I get $100 of value from Astral Codex Ten each year?" And answer, "compared to most other things: yes." And subscribe.
This happened because its novelty made it salient, and the salience made me see what an oasis of calm this substack is.
Ever-present popups and subscriber-only blocks become "just part of the background" after a while. Part of the general shittiness of the web that gets tuned out.
I'm noticing this is a situation in which the "like" button would be pretty useful! I'm aware of the general badness of a likes based system, but I think in this situation it would provide the exact kind of information contribution I'm hoping to make.
A big perk of subscription is the OTs. I assume a lot of people initially subscribed because they loved the SSC open threads, but when they found substack open threads lacking they let their subscriptions expire.
I remember the NYT disturbance and pre-ACX uncertainties ... I'm really glad it worked out that well. Not very surprised maybe, but still glad. And yes, there should totally be more paid subscribers each year, not less.
I would like to renew my subscription, but due to sanctions, cards issued in Russia are blocked abroad and I assume that Substack simply cannot charge me for renewal.
I'd like to support the blog, and I can afford to pay 10$ a month. I just kinda refuse to pay 5-10$ per bonus article... I used to give 2 dollars per month on patreon I think, but that was shut down.
I think best to ignore the locked posts and just give if you think it’s the right thing to do. For me I get so much pleasure from the blog I’m happy to. But if your enjoyment is less I’d not feel guilty in the least. In fact I’m not sure guilt comes into it however you view it. It’s voluntary!
No, but if you can afford it, where else are you going to have the luxurious feeling of being a Medici patron of the arts like this, without having "Getty" as part of your surname?
Paying for roughly 0.02% of Scott's substack income will hardly give me a luxurious feeling of being a patron of the arts. If looking to pay this feeling, there are plenty of patreons/substacks where the same amount of money can put you at full percentages or more! They might not be as cool as Scott, but are they 100 times less cool?
For a tenner, feeling like I am a person of wealth, taste and influence is good going. If you feel you get more bang for your buck with other Substacks, that's your choice!
I pay for a subscription because I get value for my money. Yes, Scott makes a heck of a lot more money than I do, but I would rather donate to him than the NYT or the Irish Times or the other news sites that won't let me read articles online unless I pony up for a sub. He does a lot more to inform and entertain me than they do.
So yah boo to them, and huzzah for the Rightful Caliph!
There is so much substack content I would pay to read in principle, but in practice the minimum subscription amount of $5-$10 per month per substack adds up to more than I can afford (and more than I could read) when multiplied by the number of substackers I like. Has there been any talk of some kind alternative payment structure, not linked to individual substackers? I don't even know what that would look like, some kind of pay-per-article scheme, or you pay a monthly fee to access a certain number of articles per month across the platform?
It's not great for writers if a few celebrity writers hog all the subscribers. Ten dollars a month for the content of one person is a lot, compared to the subscription prices of magazines or the prices of books.
I agree - it would be nice if there were some sort of bundle deal, or a significantly reduced price if you commit to a year or whatever.
I like this blog more than others I DO pay for, but adding another $10 subscription would make my total blog budget hard to swallow and Scott paywalls the least amount of content I like so he’s the one I cut first. Which is weird.
I am pessimistic about pay per article systems. Since the dawn of online newspapers, some publisher coalitions as well as several startups have been unable to succeed in that. I think it is supposed to be a use case that crypto and other micropayment technologies can solve, but I think the issue is not the technology but the pricing model.
Popularity of individual Substack newsletters is primarily due to highly differentiated content. Unless a group is complementary, it is hard to justify bundling.
I guess Substack could try to create the market. e.g. It could analyze free subscribers of newsletters, find clusters and propose bundles. I'm skeptical about its viability. Good clusters with very large number of newsletters (equivalent to a newspaper) are unlikely to exist. If a bundle is just a handful of newsletters, even if it is a highly engaged subscriber base, the overhead of sharing revenue and risk (e.g. a controversial post from one writer that loses subscribers to all participants in the bundle), weighed against the fact most of the famous writers have moved to Substack and created their audience explicitly in the name of freedom in editorial choices, it might not seem worth the hassle from their perspective.
Giving us just the names is cruel to people with high curiosity. I'm guessing "The Onion Knight" is not an essay about my favorite character Ser Davos Seaworth? (And if it is, can I just donate something to a charity of your choice for just that one article?)
The Onion Knight is a post I've started to link someone to several times, and was sadly turned back by remembering that it was subscriber only. :(
It's a short fiction about an unaligned AI that grew out of a prediction market, that is ultimately defeated by having internalized the regulation of onion futures.
The title "Current Affairs' Marxist Critique Of Toddler Show Blippi Isn't Marxist Enough" is one of the best titles I've seen of your articles, and I'm half tempted to pay $10 just to read that single article.
Once I tracked down the said Marxist critique ("The Dead World of Blippi", was the name), the title was sufficient for me to take a pretty-good guess at what was in it.
(Specifically, tDWoB absolutely drips with anti-industrial sentiment and white cringe, which are incredibly un-Marxist. Marxist theory preaches race-blindness, not multiculturalism, and he outright says that industrialisation is a precondition of establishing communism.)
I'm curious: how do you deal with filing sales tax for states that charge sales tax for digital goods since some states consider out of state sellers to be liable for dealing with sales tax if they have 200 or more transactions from the state?
I've been considering a substack and asking them how to deal with sales tax but their support keeps telling me to ask a tax professional: with the problem that substack would need to provide me with the data needed to file any taxes. It doesn't seem worth the hassle to use substack if it risks getting in trouble if there is ever a crack down (perhaps driven by the mainstream media getting government to crack down on their newsletter competition).
No experience with this. My understanding is that for paid publications, the creator is expected to setup their own Stripe account and then connect it to Substack[1]. Stripe provides a 1099-K[2] which has the necessary details, including about state and local taxes.
Stripe's information is about income taxes: which are trivial to deal with and aren't the issue. The issue is: with Substack's way of using Stripe: as far as I can tell (I haven't set up a paid substack due to this issue) you don't know how many transactions were in what location so there is no way to determine what sales tax you owe.
I saw on reddit that there may be criminal as well as civil penalties for not dealing with sales tax, and that Substack itself may be violating the law if its considered a "market facilitator". These are the links I saw:
There can be significant consequences for not paying sales tax appropriately, both civil and criminal in nature. In general, if you do not collect and remit sales tax where you owe it, you may be subject to substantial penalties and interest. Any penalties assessed are determined by state policy, described in detail below."
" Within a year of the June 2018 decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair,[1] nearly every state had adopted laws and regulations taking advantage of the newfound authority to tax remote sales in which the seller lacked physical presence, with most following those up with the implementation of tax regimes obligating marketplace facilitators (entities that do not sell goods directly but provide a platform for sellers) to collect and remit taxes on remote sales on behalf of their sellers. "
I am tempted to go for 2.50 for the poor (hey, I am on zero salary for months now; our only regular income is child support for ze kids. We feed'em rice, mostly.) - Otoh, I am paid-subscribed now to Eric Hoel (he is young and needs the money - also brilliant) and Razib Kahn (he had a discount day and too many post pay-walled). - So, if your paid numbers next year are any worse than now, I shall join the laudable community of paid subscribers to S.A.S., the essayist. - Here is hoping for 100k free ACX-subscribers soon, as if that were enough to return my faith in humanity. ("Bukowski quote of your choice")
First I want to say thank you for including a list of some posts that I can read now that were hidden at the time they came out.
Secondly I want to give some inside into the reasons that motivated me to overcome the hurdle of signing up for the paid subscription. It was 100% FoMo. I’m using an rss reader and you get that headlines of the paywalled posts so I got courious. The first time my credit card was to far away to get it (about 4 meters), the second time it was in my pocket so I pulled it out and signed up.
How could I subscribe by check? I'm reluctant to use credit cards over the web.
That's not quite right, though correct. I'm reluctant to expose my credit card to each new domain. When a charity stops accepting donations by check, I stop donating, even if I've donated for decades.
Not sure that makes sense... in the US, you're not liable if something goes wrong when using credit cards, though it is a bit of a hassle since you'll have to get a new number. The situation with checks is much messier as Don Knuth found out the hard way: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html
This seems a trifle irresponsible to me, since people have wildly-different tastes. I'm struggling through Higurashi no Naku Koro ni at the moment, and have NFC why everyone loves it.
The Onion Knight mentions Abe’s story that doesn’t go anywhere? No, I haven’t read it. It was a hilarious line when I heard on the Simpsons though. Funny stuff sticks with me pretty well.
Trying to think of a reminder that would be regular but not annoying...
Maybe put once in a while (e.g. once every three months), at the end of an Open Thread introduction, one extra paragraph containing one line: "by the way, you can also subscribe to ACX and get some extra paid content" + the subscribe button. The words "paid content" would be a hyperlink to some longer explanation, for example this article.
In my opinion, that would be completely non-annoying for old readers. If that paragraph/line always contained exactly the same text, they would even more easily skip it. But all the new readers would be notified that this option exists.
Scott already does basically this every open thread (check out the (next to) last sentence of the first paragraph). It's like you said, it's the standard boilerplate, so it's extremely easy to ignore. Perhaps making it a numbered item or including the substack subscribe button would make a difference, dunno.
I subscribed a week ago after getting a raise and binged the locked posts, of which The Onion Knight was very, very good and was some of your best fiction. Enjoyed it a lot!
The fact that you asked Substack to remove those teasers and ads in itself makes me want to subscribe. But I already have more Substack reading than I can read in a reasonable amount of time so for now I’m staying with the free content. I cannot believe how much content you write, when you apparently also continue to work in your profession.
Don't, because everyone here that are constant *blog readers* of yours are already addicts of your writing that another post about whatever is a net-positive to them...
Alright. You got me. Wife is happy with the raise this year so her questions about why I subscribe to so many damn substacks have eased up. Also, this will make me less annoyed with myself when I try too hard to be funny in the comments.
Do you have an option for subscribing with crypto? The primary reason I am not a patron to most content I like is because I don't like it *enough* to give out my credit card and continue to support the broken legacy financial system. If I could subscribe with crypto I would be far more likely to throw money at you (or others) just to signal "this is good, I want to see more like this in the world".
Another way to put this:
I want to signal to the world that this sort of content is good.
I want to signal to the world that the legacy financial system is bad.
I want to signal to the world that crypto is good.
Sum of Above: Only subscribe to Astral Codex Ten if I can pay with crypto.
Since the overwhelming majority of coins have lost a majority of their value in the past year, wouldn't Scott have to charge a significant premium for crypto subscriptions?
1. Calculate the cost denominated in the coin of choice at time of sale. This is akin to how foreign exchanges work, where the exchange happens at the exchange rate at the time of sale.
2. Only accept coins that Scott has belief in future value of (if there are any).
3. Only accept coins that are stable such as USDC (centrally managed pegged to USD) or RAI (automatically managed, stable against but not pegged to USD).
Most non-crypto people go with (1), and pretty much any payment provider out there will handle (1) for you.
(2) is usually chosen by crypto enthusiasts who want to support their favorite coin.
(3) is common for people who don't want any crypto risk but want to "reach" crypto people with their offerings. Usually something like USDC is chosen because it is effectively backed by a big US financial institution which gives people confidence.
I don't see a $2.50 option. I see a $10, $8 discounted and $20 a month.
I would *love* to be a patron. But $10 is about double what I'm willing to spend.
(I happily support a few creators that have $3-5/mo tiers).
I don't think I'm special. So seems likely there are many other out there like me.
If you create a lower tier, some of the current $10 sponsors may downgrade. But I think you'd gain more $4 subscriber over time. Wether that makes up for the lost one... IDK.
Since I'm gambling with YOUR money, I'd say: take a chance! Live dangerously! Take a leap of faith.
I've been conflicted about this as well. I was a die-hard reader of SSC, but never signed up under Patreon (because reasons). Since the ACX revival, I'm only a casual reader.
I'd probably pay $5, but definitely not $10 (though I could "afford" it in the sense that it wouldn't break my budget). However, since there is no $5 option, and I don't feel the $2.50 offer specifically includes my case, I take the $0 option. But surely Scott would rather have $2.50 than zero?
We can't blow $10 or the amount of our choosing on a Substack subscription?
If you feel $10 is too much and that does impact on your disposable income, then pay the lower price. "Half a loaf is better than no bread", and if you feel that it's not worth the full tenner, then having to pay that to subscribe would make you unhappier and spoil the experience.
I loved the onion knight! Seeing just the title is what made subscribe actually.
I have to confess - I saved a pdf version and shared with a couple of friends, when trying to spread the gospel of Scott Alexander, teaching about AI risk and as a gateway to help me convince them to read UNSONG. I hope I may be forgiven for my sins.
I woke up this morning and have decided by the newly found power invested in me by investing $10/month here that I should tell you to not feel embarrassed to create these posts and should instead look at them as an opportunity to do things that are fun like have a short story week, or contests, or something like that. Then if you feel guilty over being too rich you could do something like start the Scott Alexander Foundation for Children Who Need a Sandwich but Don’t Have One.
I’m sure with this one comment, I have now totally removed any lingering conflicted feelings you have about this.
I don't think you should be embarrassed but a bit confused why the price is so high if you are embarrassed. Personally $100 a year was just too much. but $30-$40 I would happily pay. Which is fine the price is what you set it and I can choose to pay or not pay, but I bet there are many others like me.
Same thing here. A make a quite low amount of money by american standard and $100 a year is a bit too expensive for me but I would like to contribute. May be a lower price for "poor" readers??
"Perpendicular lives" and "What your doctor spends" were wonderful posts and absolutely worth the subscription price; even more valuable, of course, is that most of your posts are open and I can share and discuss them with friends.
Question for paying subscriber ( and first of all THANK YOU) - how many other substacks do you pay for ? I find that I would consider paying for several, but can't seem to justify paying for as many as I read, so end up paying for zero.
Well, why not pick two you pay for, and read the rest for free? Either your two favorites, or the two that you believe most need your support, or a mixture. You could also settle on one or five, depending on your possibilities.
Echoing some of the other comments here. The substack subscription options I see are typically too high and I cannot justify the cost. I admit that’s for irrational reasons not actually applied on the margin. Maybe if I really think about it I do get $100/yr worth of insights and good chuckles and a sense of community from reading your blog, Scott, but I *want* to subscribe to quite a few others. If I did so for as many substacks as I get value from and appreciate to a degree comparable to yours, like I do for podcasts, I’d actually be spending thousands of dollars a year. I just can’t make that work, so I don’t subscribe to any, I think out of a misplaced sense of fairness since I’d prefer to spread the love around. Concretely, I could probably justify something around a $25-35/yr model ($2-3/mo) for most substacks I really care about, with maybe one or two $5/mo tiers thrown in there if the option was available.
I think it’s a collective action problem that Substack itself must address, probably by changing default tiers and/or emphasizing lower cost subscription options for authors. If more substacks had lower tier default options (say, idk, $3/mo instead of $10) I suspect there would be way more money going around in aggregate.
I think this is a very natural way to think, and certainly there are some out there who might make up on volume what they lose in every individual sale. But I'll note that the big advantage of Substack, for the biggest writers, is that it allows price discovery - it's much easier to figure out what people will actually pay. They're probably charging as much as they are because they have found that the market will bear that price. I say that as someone who has kept his newsletter cheap at $5/$50 where a lot of other people have adjusted upwards for inflation.
Good reply, I suppose that makes sense. I do wish there were more tiers, like in Patreon, but there’s also an obvious lack of granularity of benefits you can provide through substack so I don’t think that’s workable.
Sliding scales, like a ‘pay what you think this is worth to you above a given floor’ model might be a nice feature. That would easily get me over the edge and arguably allow for even better price discovery and a more direct feedback mechanism to authors.
According to my survey, 21% of readers are subscribers, and 11% of nonsubscribers say they would subscribe if the price were less.
Assuming a 50% price cut was enough to get all of these people, I would be losing half my revenue per customer in order to get 50% more customers, which seems like a bad deal. But in fact I expect a lot of the people who said they would subscribe if the price was lower wouldn't.
My current plan is to wait for inflation to bring the price down, then see what happens.
That’s a very good point, I didn’t know the percentage of paying subscribers for you was so high. The math makes sense, so I concede you’re probably at a good price point.
Maybe I just need to get over it and pay for a small handful of substacks. I’ll mull it over some more.
Dang. I recently filled out the survey and said that I had never been a member and had no intention of becoming a member, and yet I just subscribed. Proof that I'm economically irrational, I guess.
I've been reading SSC/ACX since I was in high school (I'm now a post-uni "real adult"); I've definitely gotten way more that $100 value from your blogs + Unsong.
Was the one about the three idols a subscriber-only post? when I read that I thought "great, the subscription already paid off, everything that comes now is extra"
I'm surprised to see your concern about losing 10% of your subscribers after a single year and even moreso about your assumption that you will "continue losing ~10% per year indefinitely". I subscribe to some substacks and later discover I don't visit often enough, or enjoy the postings often enough, to keep going, so I cancel. That strikes me as completely normal behavior. (I hope I'm not overly flattering myself. :-) ) So I think you can expect it to be "two steps forward, one step back." In fact, you're ten steps forward and one step back, so count your blessings!
There's nothing wrong with sending out announcements like this one, though I wish you had skipped what seems to me to be the excessive introspection, apologetics, moralizing and analysis. Most of the comments seem to be about these (what I regard as) extrinsics — folks saying things like "There, there, Scott, don't feel bad about making a killing on your substack." I'm not sure you're asking to be petted, but that appears to have been the outcome.
One thing you might do that I would appreciate would be, at the end of each email (to both subscribers and non-subscribers who receive emails), to list how many open and how many closed postings you have put up over (say) the past year. That would at least let non-subscribers get a sense of what they are missing without trying to hit 'em in the heartstrings.
I enjoy the blog and don't mind paying for it. I can afford it, so that 's why I'm here. I don't read every posting and sometimes discover I've missed some I would have read. So I do go back and read a few of those. I can't keep up with reading them all and I'm amazed that you can keep up with writing them all.
Point taken, but on the other hand, If the graph goes up to the day of your posting (does it?), then there has not been anything like the end-of-2021 loss of subscribers at the end of 2022. In fact, it appears that there has been a very slight gain of subscribers from mid-October to the end of the year.
You got me Scott. I've been free-riding on the assumption that you probably write this from a huge Bay Area mansion and don't need my pittance but all of those posts you unlocked are excellent and when I think about it I love this blog and your well worth the $100.
EA people please do not reply with your logical analyses of why I should have donated that $100 to some malaria-net charity and saved 3.7 children lives instead. I cancelled another subscription to pay Scott. No children will die of malaria as a result of this I promise.
>”but not so much that I can continue losing ~10% per year indefinitely.”
Yea, you absolutely can do that, and it’s insane that anyone would defend such a statement.
Estimating that 25% of your subs are on the cheap plan, you make $48,693.12 PER MONTH.
I live very happily on an income of $80k. Losing 10% per year, you’d reach my current income in 17 years. That’s an entire career. That’s enough time to have saved up investments to account for the lost income. I don’t care how much people make, but when rich people (and I consider myself rich) act like they’re on the edge of poverty it really grinds my gears. Blow me, bro.
Or maybe consider that he's not referring solely to financial motives, but that consistently losing so many subscribers would be emotionally demotivating, being an obvious indication that people no long find you interesting or your writing compelling.
1. I'm assuming it's 10 percentage points, not 10 percent, on the grounds that a fixed fraction of those who subscribed at the beginning leave each year due to credit card expiration and stuff. I agree if it was 10% of current then I could do it for longer. If it's percentage points then at most I can do this for ten years.
2. 80K/year is a nice salary and I have lived on approximately that amount before. Unfortunately, https://bpfund.com/bay-area-mortgage-payments-2021/ . Buying a house in the Bay Area is a decision you can and should blame me for, but I think "would not be able to pay my mortgage" can fairly be described as "cannot continue doing this". Obviously if I lost a lot of money I could sell my house, move away, and figure out another way to make things work. But I would rather try holding a yearly subscription drive.
You are what we know in the business as "rich"; while Bay Area housing costs (and the cost of living) is famously sky-high, to say that you "can't continue doing this" sounds more than a little out of touch. You're a wealthy man, a skilled and insightful writer, probably an excellent psychiatrist. It would have been better to say that you simply want people to keep subscribing to your blog because you want to keep raking in those big piles of money. As it was, you seemed to appeal to charity, rather than a straightforward "My blog is awesome and I'd like to keep making piles of money off of it; thank you very much".
I wrote "Even though I’m still getting an embarrassingly large amount, I figure I’ll start holding once-a-year subscription drives now instead of waiting until I’m actually needy.P lease don’t feel guilted into buying a subscription unless you really want to and can easily afford it - again, the amount of money I’m making blogging really is embarrassingly large."
I don't know how to make it any clearer than that that I am not "appealing to charity".
Of course you’re not asking for charity, you are a successful entrepreneur, getting rich from a combination of opportunity, talent, and Hardwork! Don’t be embarrassed about drumming for subscribers, it doesn’t make you a huckster, look at Iglesias, who makes a lot more than you do, and is shameless about trying to attract more subscribers every day.
But if you give non subscribers a couple of paragraphs from each paid post when you post it, like a lot of people do on Substack, you might entice more people to join. 
Indeed, what you actually wrote is not an appeal to charity. The not-fully-explicit implication of what you did write is something like “on this trend there will come a point where I need (or want) to avoid my paid readership falling into a death spiral, leading to revenue falling below the MRR level where I can continue this endeavor.” The death spiral dynamic is key, success begets success, and a trend of sustained loss begets sustained loss - at least in business is where sustained loss is visible to customers.
And something like “Well before that trend leads to the event horizon, I want to begin preparing and building the skill to at least maintain my paid subscriber base.” If this is not a misreading your intentions here, your logic is sound, and responsible. 
Fine, you guilted me into subscribing... Just kidding well worth it. FWIW, my hesitancy in subscribing prior to now is a desire to see Substack do some sort of multi-subscription plan. I know that doesn’t mesh with Substack’s current business model and I’m not thinking through how it would work, but I don’t think I’m alone in resisting the splurge of paying for five or ten Substack subscriptions. This is my second paid subscription -- I’d be surprised if that ever doubled to four.
100% agreed. I’m at 4 paid subscriptions now, and at this rate of adding paid subs to authors on Substack in ~1 year my Substack bill will exceed my Economist bill.  The issue is not affordability in the strictest sense, I already spend about $2000 a month on various science journals, legal references, Crunchbase+ and other paid funding-news sources, Economist + WSJ + NYT + FP etc - expensed through my company (thanks, VC friends). Plus 2-5 books per month that I pick, sometimes read, and add to the company library (Knuth’s series and other >> $20 volumes).
The issue with adding more paid subs on Substack is that I feel bad when I’m considering each new one, despite the learning-new-domains virtue it feels decidedly unthrifty and simultaneously like I’m running the risk of slipping down the first 1% of the SBF slope.
Please consider my $8.33 per month as a big thank you and as payment not for just the excellent articles, but even more for the wonderful job you have done moderating the comments so that they are worth reading as well.
1. There's no reason to feel bad for asking for subscriptions. People find your work valuable, and the ones that find it valuable enough are willing to pay for the bonus part of it.
2. You write "thousands of people bought subscriptions when I started the blog in January 2021, several hundred expired after a year in January 2022, and I expect several hundred more to expire this January" as if that's somehow an unexpected evil. But that's unsurprising and irrelevant, of course you're going to have turnover in subscriptions; the essential point is that the number of subscribers has been constant at around 6,000 for two years, and is likely to stay that way as long as you periodically ask for subscriptions.
3. You say that you're embarrassed by the amount of money you make from the blog, but you then go on to reveal how much you make. If you were actually embarrassed, you'd hide it. OTOH, if you were *guilty* about it, you would either make the blog free, cut the price, or donate a large fraction of the proceeds to charity (either conventional or EA). As it is, you get the money but seem to think that publicly emoting about it makes some sort of difference.
Why would you be embarrassed about how much you make from it? It’s a direct window into the value you’re providing other people. I’m not a paid subscriber, but I’m considering it. You should be proud, not embarrassed of the money you make from it.
I have always thought this way of thinking is bullshit (no offense to you or others who think in it).
If the majority of ACX subscribers were like starving or something, then yes, I guess you can base a lot on them paying 10$ per month. But otherwise, no. People buy things for no particular reason, just because. People buy things that actively and unambiguously harm them, like cigarettes. People buy things and then forget about them.
Perhaps you have a very torturously unintuitive definition of "Value" that all of the above counts as value added, but then why would anybody else use it ?
(This is independent from my evaluation of ACX's value, which I think is high. More a rant on Economics' bullshit way of reasoning of "X is rich, (s)he must have provided a lot of """""Value""""" to people, otherwise they wouldn't have given money, because as we all know people are rational agents who never spend a dime without thinking it all through".)
No, people don’t buy things for no particular reason. They buy things because the thing they are buying is worth more to them than the price they are paying.
I think with autorenewing subscriptions this is only partly true. I certainly sometimes subscribe to stuff, then forget about it, then pay for it for much longer than it's worthwhile to me. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who does this
People pay $10/month Patreon subscriptions to producers who release all their content for free, they are literally buying nothing. Clearly, money is given for more reasons than just "buying a thing of value".
Nope, it’s the exact same thing. They are happier to give the money to their patron than they are to have that $10 be in their bank account. You guys seem to be conflating your own values with the values of others.
In some sense, no matter what you do with money, you can say that sort of thing; even if I set my $10 on literal fire, you can say that my revealed preference is that I value the experience of seeing my money burn more than I value the $10 I previously had. This isn't limited to money, either.
On the other hand, there are different kinds of motivations for giving someone money, and the Patreon situation gets at some of them. I can spend money on something and think it's overpriced: it has a price I'm willing to pay, but not the price I think it should have. In the Patreon situation, this wouldn't make sense; if I am paying $10/month, it's because I think the recipient deserves it.
(Also, a patron is a person who gives money to a creator, not the other way around.)
I definitely misused patron in haste.
Yes, that is correct, it applies to the burning of money. Which people did at certain times of history during periods of hyperinflation. There is no escaping the fact of reality: people act in pursuit of their values.
Whether those values are good or bad is a different question.
What I'm saying is : the metric that "worth more" is referencing here isn't an unambiguously good thing like health or "IQ points gained per month" or whatever, but simply a wishy washy, spur-of-the-moment electrical signals in their brain that mean nothing in reality (or negative value) and is often quickly forgotten.
Consider people who become (b)millionaires through youtube reaction videos, or through promoting snakes oil products, or through grifting investors' money on bullshit startups that never go anywhere. Are *those* providing a lot of value to their benefactors ? You have to accept that they do if you think that Scott's earned money is an indicator of the value he is providing.
Reaction videos and snake oil are very different cases. Snake oil is fraudulent, in which case, the buyer was duped into buying something they were not. Fraud is different because while the exchange is voluntary, there is no “there” there, hence the reason fraudulent empires always collapse. Reaction videos are absolutely a value to the person who enjoys them. Just because they aren’t a value to you says nothing about their value to another.
I think this is just a restatement of the way of thinking that Bi_gates was objecting to. What about people who buy addictive drugs? Do you bite the bullet that they "value" drugs? Some economists do, see: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1830469 and http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/pdfs/szasz.pdf
Yes, there is no question they value the drugs. It's a bad value IMO, and probably objectively, but a value nonetheless. Everybody pursues their own values--whether those values are rational and good is a different question. A person who buys heroin is placing more value on heroin than cash. One can't say, "Well, that guy bought a Ford and Fords are junk vehicles, therefore he doesn't value Fords."
So what do you make of alcoholics trying to quit, going through the trouble of attending AA meetings, committing suicide if they fall off the wagon, or other things like that?
I make that the reasons people have for holding certain values are varied. Some people soak their values in from the culture. Others intentionally set about choosing them--some choose rationally, others not. Some people default into them by the way they are raised. Most people (probably?) hold values with a mix of sources. Trying to quit addiction sucks because one has realized one of their values is bad/irrational/destructive and wants to replace it with a better one, but the nature of addiction makes that super hard. Upon relapse for example it’s exactly the realization that one has chosen a bad value that brings the shame and other associated negative feelings.
I was super addicted to heroin for years and it was ruining my life, and I wished I didn't want it — but there's no question that I kept spending all my money on it because I really, really wanted it way more than anything else the money could have gotten me.
"Not going through heroin withdrawal" seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to value to me...
This may apply in some businesses (like cigarettes or payday loans), but I'm pretty confident that ACX readers are rational(ist) agents.
If we already were rational agents, the rationality movement would have nothing to offer us.
Touché
In addition to what Sliver_Swift notes, I will add that you're only rationalist about the things you care about.
You are not rationalist about, say, the exact color of the tshirt that you wear to work. You don't wake up 2 hours earlier and ponder all the pros and cons of wearing the green shirt vs wearing the grey one, being careful to look at disagreeing opinions more charitably than your instincts say. Who fucking cares, it's just a shirt.
The above applies to anyone such that 10$ per month is not a lot of money to them, i.e. the vast majority of ACX readers. Who cares, it's the price of 2 overpriced starbucks coffees. X thousand people, each unthinkingly giving 10$ dollars, adds up to a whole lot of dollars and 0 thinking or rationality or any sort of cost-benefit processing going into them.
You can be the most superficial, airheaded, and inane, uninspired person and still get billions, if you expose your 0-value contributions to enough people and demand a sufficiently low amount of money per person per contribution. Your wealth reflects nothing except the shameless hustle of marketing 0- or negative- value bullshit relentlessly.
"you expose your 0-value contributions to enough people and demand a sufficiently low amount of money per person per contribution."
It's not 0-value, it's low value. Your customers do in fact want what you're selling, at least enough to part with a small amount of money and enter their card info.
Providing a low (but still positive) value product to thousands of people for a low price is both a big contribution to society and a way to get rich, especially in the arts.
(Some people do provide negative-value products, like payday loans to stupid people who don't understand interest or getting people hooked on cigarettes. Or taking advantage of government or other principle-agent issues. But the vast majority of wealthy people, Scott included, do not do this.)
A person buys things for weird reasons. People tend to law-of-large-numbers into buying things for more legible reasons. Or, put another way, do you believe that if you start your own substack and post garbage to it, that you have a chance of making even a fraction of that Scott does?
I don't believe that's how the law of large numbers work, people in aggregate are just as susceptible to the exact same manipulation tactics a single person is susceptible to, and more. The entire industry of advertising is built on that. Funny quips, naked women, sexy celebrities saying that they use the product daily (yeah right), and people eat it up like it's chocolate icecream.
>you have a chance of making even a fraction of that Scott does?
Me ? I don't think so, I'm not shameless enough to pull it off. But, say, Kim Kardashian ? Absolutely. She wouldn't post literal randomly-generated garbage of course, that's too strong of a claim that I never made (although modern art is literal randomly-generated garbage and it earns at least 2 or 3 orders of magnitudes more than Scott's carefully crafted words), she would post "updates" of daily inane bullshit, and I bet you my right arm it would get at least an order of magnitude more than Scott.
Kim Kardashian and her family very effectively sell the illusion/fantasy of being friends with popular and successful people. It's only "daily inane bullshit" to people who don't want what she's selling.
How come people never make this argument about Netflix
Many people struggle to earn an annual income that is the equivalent of what he makes by doing what he simply enjoys doing - and was previously already doing - for free. So it's not as if he needs the money, but by asking for more he's embarrassed of appearing to be greedy. I think he's probably still slightly conflicted about getting paid for his blogging.
Just because he doesn’t need the money doesn’t mean his service/product isn’t worth the money. I get the sentiment, I’m saying it’s wrong. He shouldn’t be conflicted (if he is).
You're correct, but this is not at all intuitive. I'm a software developer, which is a much more normal sort of labor than blogging, and I *still* sometimes get thrown off by how much I'm getting paid versus how much I feel like I'm doing Hard Work. Economics is weird.
Many people struggle to provide value to society, this is true.
It's also true that many people don't provide value and are highly compensated; others provide value and are woefully under-compensated.
This will sound incredibly silly, but when I first discovered your blog the way I interpreted the onboarding message was "90% of the posts are free and subscribing is really a means of supporting the project or like connecting with other subscribers" it wasn't until recently I realized how many posts I was actually missing out on (And that is pushing me to subscribe now).
I don't know if that experience is unique to me (That i'm a dum dum) or if other newbies like me got the same impression. Figure I'd mention it as someone whose been reading for half-a-year.
Wait a sec. I'm also under the impression that ~90% of the posts are free. And looking at e.g. December 2022, that vaguely looks like the right ballpark. Is that not the case?
This could absolutely be me wrongly equating what 90% feels like verse what it actually is but the amount of locked posts was way more than I initially expected there to be when reviewing past posts.
Scott publishes a ton. None of the gated posts are ever very important. They’re just kind of fun.
It's worth noting that some (though not all) of the locked posts are early drafts of what will later get released as an unlocked post, so in terms of content they effectively apply more to the 90% unlocked side, just on a bit of a delay.
> This will sound incredibly silly, but when I first discovered your blog the way I interpreted the onboarding message was "90% of the posts are free and subscribing is really a means of supporting the project or like connecting with other subscribers" it wasn't until recently I realized how many posts I was actually missing out on (And that is pushing me to subscribe now).
That does sound incredibly silly, mostly because your first impression was correct and as a nonsubscriber you're missing very little.
He writes a ton. That ratio sounds about right to me; maybe closer to 80/20 or 85/15, but it really could be 90/10 in favor of free posts.
As a paid subscriber who basically reads everything, I think that more than 90% of the content is free.
The subscriber-only posts are often a lot shorter. I think Scott also selects them because he thinks they are less relevant. In one case just a silly poem. That is still enjoyable, but I don't think you miss important things. In a few cases, he makes them subscriber-only because they seem too controversial, or too easy to get wrong by a random passer-by, but that's rare.
So the free content gives you everything that is *relevant*. The subscription will give you a small extra amount of *enjoyable, but no deep insights*.
A small exception: the hidden open threads are like the normal open threads, but with 1/3 of the volume (same frequency, 1/3 volume per thread), and with a more selected audience. If you read a lot of open threads, this *will* give considerably extra value.
I am strongly in favor of annual posts like this as opposed to
> their usual “please subscribe” popups and “teasers” of subscriber-only posts
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that, insofar you feel like you might be imposing with this post, you should take this as (N=1) confirmation that it really isn't much of an imposition at all.
Agree
Strongly this. Very strongly this. The once-a-year pitch, I am here for; constant pitches to free users are annoying.
I am very OK with your making serious money with the blog, and I'm delighted to subsidize others' free access of the blog.
+1
what's wrong with a little teasing? I remember before I subbed I would check the "archive" periodically to see what I'm missing cause I just need to know lol
Other Substacks have posts that chop off in the middle with a "please subscribe to finish reading this article you've gotten curious about". This is doing the thing Scott complained about in Problems with Paywalls - tricking someone into making their life worse and then charging money to fix it.
+1
I too. This post caused me to ask myself, "do I get $100 of value from Astral Codex Ten each year?" And answer, "compared to most other things: yes." And subscribe.
This happened because its novelty made it salient, and the salience made me see what an oasis of calm this substack is.
Ever-present popups and subscriber-only blocks become "just part of the background" after a while. Part of the general shittiness of the web that gets tuned out.
I'm noticing this is a situation in which the "like" button would be pretty useful! I'm aware of the general badness of a likes based system, but I think in this situation it would provide the exact kind of information contribution I'm hoping to make.
That is to say, +1 to this sentiment
Good for you! Don’t be embarrassed, you do good work.
A big perk of subscription is the OTs. I assume a lot of people initially subscribed because they loved the SSC open threads, but when they found substack open threads lacking they let their subscriptions expire.
If I see correctly, you ommited your paid post about travelling through Europe? As an European, I thought it was great
I think that was 2021. There's lots more 2021 subscriber content, this is just this year's.
Oh, I see
i'd love to live in a world where you became a billionaire from this blog. I'm very happy to keep sending checks either way.
I remember the NYT disturbance and pre-ACX uncertainties ... I'm really glad it worked out that well. Not very surprised maybe, but still glad. And yes, there should totally be more paid subscribers each year, not less.
Whatever you do, please never send an article with 2-5 paragraphs preview and then paywall. I’m sure that’s effective but incredibly annoying.
Congratulations on all your success Scott and thanks for building a community that let me find internet friends.
Fuck yeah man
I would like to renew my subscription, but due to sanctions, cards issued in Russia are blocked abroad and I assume that Substack simply cannot charge me for renewal.
I'd like to support the blog, and I can afford to pay 10$ a month. I just kinda refuse to pay 5-10$ per bonus article... I used to give 2 dollars per month on patreon I think, but that was shut down.
Am I a stingy asshole?
I think best to ignore the locked posts and just give if you think it’s the right thing to do. For me I get so much pleasure from the blog I’m happy to. But if your enjoyment is less I’d not feel guilty in the least. In fact I’m not sure guilt comes into it however you view it. It’s voluntary!
No, but if you can afford it, where else are you going to have the luxurious feeling of being a Medici patron of the arts like this, without having "Getty" as part of your surname?
Paying for roughly 0.02% of Scott's substack income will hardly give me a luxurious feeling of being a patron of the arts. If looking to pay this feeling, there are plenty of patreons/substacks where the same amount of money can put you at full percentages or more! They might not be as cool as Scott, but are they 100 times less cool?
For a tenner, feeling like I am a person of wealth, taste and influence is good going. If you feel you get more bang for your buck with other Substacks, that's your choice!
I pay for a subscription because I get value for my money. Yes, Scott makes a heck of a lot more money than I do, but I would rather donate to him than the NYT or the Irish Times or the other news sites that won't let me read articles online unless I pony up for a sub. He does a lot more to inform and entertain me than they do.
So yah boo to them, and huzzah for the Rightful Caliph!
Impressive!
I'm at 160 paid subscribers
maybe this year I will hit 500 if I am lucky and work hard
WAGMI :)
I will subscribe if you promise to tell us how many people subscribed due to the subscription drive.
There is so much substack content I would pay to read in principle, but in practice the minimum subscription amount of $5-$10 per month per substack adds up to more than I can afford (and more than I could read) when multiplied by the number of substackers I like. Has there been any talk of some kind alternative payment structure, not linked to individual substackers? I don't even know what that would look like, some kind of pay-per-article scheme, or you pay a monthly fee to access a certain number of articles per month across the platform?
Medium does that. Not great for writers.
It's not great for writers if a few celebrity writers hog all the subscribers. Ten dollars a month for the content of one person is a lot, compared to the subscription prices of magazines or the prices of books.
Well there’s the Medium model out there if you want that.
I agree - it would be nice if there were some sort of bundle deal, or a significantly reduced price if you commit to a year or whatever.
I like this blog more than others I DO pay for, but adding another $10 subscription would make my total blog budget hard to swallow and Scott paywalls the least amount of content I like so he’s the one I cut first. Which is weird.
I am pessimistic about pay per article systems. Since the dawn of online newspapers, some publisher coalitions as well as several startups have been unable to succeed in that. I think it is supposed to be a use case that crypto and other micropayment technologies can solve, but I think the issue is not the technology but the pricing model.
Popularity of individual Substack newsletters is primarily due to highly differentiated content. Unless a group is complementary, it is hard to justify bundling.
I guess Substack could try to create the market. e.g. It could analyze free subscribers of newsletters, find clusters and propose bundles. I'm skeptical about its viability. Good clusters with very large number of newsletters (equivalent to a newspaper) are unlikely to exist. If a bundle is just a handful of newsletters, even if it is a highly engaged subscriber base, the overhead of sharing revenue and risk (e.g. a controversial post from one writer that loses subscribers to all participants in the bundle), weighed against the fact most of the famous writers have moved to Substack and created their audience explicitly in the name of freedom in editorial choices, it might not seem worth the hassle from their perspective.
I think you're missing https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-is-bigger-256000-or-a-deer! (The date says Dec 1, 2022.)
Thanks, added.
Giving us just the names is cruel to people with high curiosity. I'm guessing "The Onion Knight" is not an essay about my favorite character Ser Davos Seaworth? (And if it is, can I just donate something to a charity of your choice for just that one article?)
The Onion Knight is a post I've started to link someone to several times, and was sadly turned back by remembering that it was subscriber only. :(
It's a short fiction about an unaligned AI that grew out of a prediction market, that is ultimately defeated by having internalized the regulation of onion futures.
I think the twist is surprising/funny enough that you should weakly consider editing this comment to use spoiler tags or rot13
It's in the first half of the first chapter.
In similar news, old ben kenobi is a jedi, and tony stark makes a power-armor suit.
Seconding, please
Delet spoilers dude come on
The title "Current Affairs' Marxist Critique Of Toddler Show Blippi Isn't Marxist Enough" is one of the best titles I've seen of your articles, and I'm half tempted to pay $10 just to read that single article.
Once I tracked down the said Marxist critique ("The Dead World of Blippi", was the name), the title was sufficient for me to take a pretty-good guess at what was in it.
(Specifically, tDWoB absolutely drips with anti-industrial sentiment and white cringe, which are incredibly un-Marxist. Marxist theory preaches race-blindness, not multiculturalism, and he outright says that industrialisation is a precondition of establishing communism.)
It was excellent, but the Onion Knight was even better.
I'm curious: how do you deal with filing sales tax for states that charge sales tax for digital goods since some states consider out of state sellers to be liable for dealing with sales tax if they have 200 or more transactions from the state?
I've been considering a substack and asking them how to deal with sales tax but their support keeps telling me to ask a tax professional: with the problem that substack would need to provide me with the data needed to file any taxes. It doesn't seem worth the hassle to use substack if it risks getting in trouble if there is ever a crack down (perhaps driven by the mainstream media getting government to crack down on their newsletter competition).
No experience with this. My understanding is that for paid publications, the creator is expected to setup their own Stripe account and then connect it to Substack[1]. Stripe provides a 1099-K[2] which has the necessary details, including about state and local taxes.
[1] https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037459952-How-do-I-set-up-a-paid-publication-
[2] https://support.stripe.com/questions/1099-k-forms-issued-by-stripe
Stripe's information is about income taxes: which are trivial to deal with and aren't the issue. The issue is: with Substack's way of using Stripe: as far as I can tell (I haven't set up a paid substack due to this issue) you don't know how many transactions were in what location so there is no way to determine what sales tax you owe.
I saw on reddit that there may be criminal as well as civil penalties for not dealing with sales tax, and that Substack itself may be violating the law if its considered a "market facilitator". These are the links I saw:
https://thetaxvalet.com/blog/what-are-the-penalties-for-not-paying-sales-tax/
"What Are the Penalties for Not Paying Sales Tax?
There can be significant consequences for not paying sales tax appropriately, both civil and criminal in nature. In general, if you do not collect and remit sales tax where you owe it, you may be subject to substantial penalties and interest. Any penalties assessed are determined by state policy, described in detail below."
https://taxfoundation.org/state-remote-sales-tax-collection-wayfair/
" Within a year of the June 2018 decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair,[1] nearly every state had adopted laws and regulations taking advantage of the newfound authority to tax remote sales in which the seller lacked physical presence, with most following those up with the implementation of tax regimes obligating marketplace facilitators (entities that do not sell goods directly but provide a platform for sellers) to collect and remit taxes on remote sales on behalf of their sellers. "
I am tempted to go for 2.50 for the poor (hey, I am on zero salary for months now; our only regular income is child support for ze kids. We feed'em rice, mostly.) - Otoh, I am paid-subscribed now to Eric Hoel (he is young and needs the money - also brilliant) and Razib Kahn (he had a discount day and too many post pay-walled). - So, if your paid numbers next year are any worse than now, I shall join the laudable community of paid subscribers to S.A.S., the essayist. - Here is hoping for 100k free ACX-subscribers soon, as if that were enough to return my faith in humanity. ("Bukowski quote of your choice")
Re Jason Shea: this should really be tried with ChatGPT!
I am a paid subscriber since about two month.
First I want to say thank you for including a list of some posts that I can read now that were hidden at the time they came out.
Secondly I want to give some inside into the reasons that motivated me to overcome the hurdle of signing up for the paid subscription. It was 100% FoMo. I’m using an rss reader and you get that headlines of the paywalled posts so I got courious. The first time my credit card was to far away to get it (about 4 meters), the second time it was in my pocket so I pulled it out and signed up.
Who’s the guy in the photo?
real question? this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders
Why him?
I think his fundraisers have become a bit of an internet meme. "I am once again asking you for support...."
Ah, I see.
He looks so angry ... wouldn't you want to look all charming and inviting when you ask people for money?
Had it been polished and inauthentic Bernie wouldn't have been a meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-am-once-again-asking-for-your-financial-support
So this is the most authentic Bernie?
Looks very authentic in any case.
What do you do with a Bernie Sanders?
https://youtu.be/kRRmQ1Tz-Ao
:)
How could I subscribe by check? I'm reluctant to use credit cards over the web.
That's not quite right, though correct. I'm reluctant to expose my credit card to each new domain. When a charity stops accepting donations by check, I stop donating, even if I've donated for decades.
Not sure that makes sense... in the US, you're not liable if something goes wrong when using credit cards, though it is a bit of a hassle since you'll have to get a new number. The situation with checks is much messier as Don Knuth found out the hard way: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html
There are virtual credit cards: https://privacy.com/virtual-card
Also, if you are using something like Apple Pay/Google Pay/Paypal/Venmo, they make it easy to use virtual cards for all transactions.
>>I make an embarrassingly large amount of money from this blog<<
This is good to hear!
This means that a publishing model which allows excellent unfiltered opinion is available and vital.
I greatly appreciate the free option. Most of my modest income goes to helping Haitians and Dominicans around me in the DR.
Peter
For anyone on the fence: The Onion Knight alone is worth the cost.
This seems a trifle irresponsible to me, since people have wildly-different tastes. I'm struggling through Higurashi no Naku Koro ni at the moment, and have NFC why everyone loves it.
Definitely worth those 2000 bees.
“Back then nickels had bumblebees on them. Give me 5 bees for a quarter we used to say.”
$0.05 * 2000 = $100?
If that’s it, it’s a pretty oblique reference.
Gotta remember an Abe Simpson story that doesn’t go anywhere and do arithmetic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6Dc7W6jXCo
Gunflint, if you got that without reading The Onion Knight, I am impressed.
The Onion Knight mentions Abe’s story that doesn’t go anywhere? No, I haven’t read it. It was a hilarious line when I heard on the Simpsons though. Funny stuff sticks with me pretty well.
Trying to think of a reminder that would be regular but not annoying...
Maybe put once in a while (e.g. once every three months), at the end of an Open Thread introduction, one extra paragraph containing one line: "by the way, you can also subscribe to ACX and get some extra paid content" + the subscribe button. The words "paid content" would be a hyperlink to some longer explanation, for example this article.
In my opinion, that would be completely non-annoying for old readers. If that paragraph/line always contained exactly the same text, they would even more easily skip it. But all the new readers would be notified that this option exists.
Scott already does basically this every open thread (check out the (next to) last sentence of the first paragraph). It's like you said, it's the standard boilerplate, so it's extremely easy to ignore. Perhaps making it a numbered item or including the substack subscribe button would make a difference, dunno.
I subscribed a week ago after getting a raise and binged the locked posts, of which The Onion Knight was very, very good and was some of your best fiction. Enjoyed it a lot!
The fact that you asked Substack to remove those teasers and ads in itself makes me want to subscribe. But I already have more Substack reading than I can read in a reasonable amount of time so for now I’m staying with the free content. I cannot believe how much content you write, when you apparently also continue to work in your profession.
> I feel awkward doing a subscription drive
Don't, because everyone here that are constant *blog readers* of yours are already addicts of your writing that another post about whatever is a net-positive to them...
Happy subscriber here. Heartily recommend the warm glow.
Your insightful discourse is a bargain 🙏🏽
Well you crack me up - you
Wicked funny = subscribe
Alright. You got me. Wife is happy with the raise this year so her questions about why I subscribe to so many damn substacks have eased up. Also, this will make me less annoyed with myself when I try too hard to be funny in the comments.
Do you have an option for subscribing with crypto? The primary reason I am not a patron to most content I like is because I don't like it *enough* to give out my credit card and continue to support the broken legacy financial system. If I could subscribe with crypto I would be far more likely to throw money at you (or others) just to signal "this is good, I want to see more like this in the world".
Another way to put this:
I want to signal to the world that this sort of content is good.
I want to signal to the world that the legacy financial system is bad.
I want to signal to the world that crypto is good.
Sum of Above: Only subscribe to Astral Codex Ten if I can pay with crypto.
Since the overwhelming majority of coins have lost a majority of their value in the past year, wouldn't Scott have to charge a significant premium for crypto subscriptions?
There are a number of solutions to this problem:
1. Calculate the cost denominated in the coin of choice at time of sale. This is akin to how foreign exchanges work, where the exchange happens at the exchange rate at the time of sale.
2. Only accept coins that Scott has belief in future value of (if there are any).
3. Only accept coins that are stable such as USDC (centrally managed pegged to USD) or RAI (automatically managed, stable against but not pegged to USD).
Most non-crypto people go with (1), and pretty much any payment provider out there will handle (1) for you.
(2) is usually chosen by crypto enthusiasts who want to support their favorite coin.
(3) is common for people who don't want any crypto risk but want to "reach" crypto people with their offerings. Usually something like USDC is chosen because it is effectively backed by a big US financial institution which gives people confidence.
I don't see a $2.50 option. I see a $10, $8 discounted and $20 a month.
I would *love* to be a patron. But $10 is about double what I'm willing to spend.
(I happily support a few creators that have $3-5/mo tiers).
I don't think I'm special. So seems likely there are many other out there like me.
If you create a lower tier, some of the current $10 sponsors may downgrade. But I think you'd gain more $4 subscriber over time. Wether that makes up for the lost one... IDK.
Since I'm gambling with YOUR money, I'd say: take a chance! Live dangerously! Take a leap of faith.
You could subscribe twice at the $2.5 level under two different emails.
Except I literally don't see a $2.50 option. Maybe requires a special link/code from Scott?
Duh, was at the bottom of this post: http://astralcodexten.substack.com/932d293e
Now I'm conflicted, it explicitly says students and low income. I am neither. Would genuinely like to pay $3-5 without cheating.
I’m pretty sure Scott would love to be cheated in this way if the other choice is $0.
Fair enough. Subbed for $2.50. It feels wrong cheat, but I can live with that.
I hope Scott gives us an option for $5/mo, I'd upgrade.
I've been conflicted about this as well. I was a die-hard reader of SSC, but never signed up under Patreon (because reasons). Since the ACX revival, I'm only a casual reader.
I'd probably pay $5, but definitely not $10 (though I could "afford" it in the sense that it wouldn't break my budget). However, since there is no $5 option, and I don't feel the $2.50 offer specifically includes my case, I take the $0 option. But surely Scott would rather have $2.50 than zero?
What is this life, if, full of care
We can't blow $10 or the amount of our choosing on a Substack subscription?
If you feel $10 is too much and that does impact on your disposable income, then pay the lower price. "Half a loaf is better than no bread", and if you feel that it's not worth the full tenner, then having to pay that to subscribe would make you unhappier and spoil the experience.
I responded to the sibling comment because it was earlier. But your comment is the one that pushed me over the line and opened my wallet. Thank you.
I take full responsibility if you later feel "Dammit this wasn't worth subscribing" 😁
don’t let perfection get i. the way of the good right?
The Onion Knight is brilliant!
I loved the onion knight! Seeing just the title is what made subscribe actually.
I have to confess - I saved a pdf version and shared with a couple of friends, when trying to spread the gospel of Scott Alexander, teaching about AI risk and as a gateway to help me convince them to read UNSONG. I hope I may be forgiven for my sins.
I woke up this morning and have decided by the newly found power invested in me by investing $10/month here that I should tell you to not feel embarrassed to create these posts and should instead look at them as an opportunity to do things that are fun like have a short story week, or contests, or something like that. Then if you feel guilty over being too rich you could do something like start the Scott Alexander Foundation for Children Who Need a Sandwich but Don’t Have One.
I’m sure with this one comment, I have now totally removed any lingering conflicted feelings you have about this.
I don't think you should be embarrassed but a bit confused why the price is so high if you are embarrassed. Personally $100 a year was just too much. but $30-$40 I would happily pay. Which is fine the price is what you set it and I can choose to pay or not pay, but I bet there are many others like me.
Same thing here. A make a quite low amount of money by american standard and $100 a year is a bit too expensive for me but I would like to contribute. May be a lower price for "poor" readers??
I’ve just paid up. Anybody got recommendations from pre 2022, for paid content.
"Perpendicular lives" and "What your doctor spends" were wonderful posts and absolutely worth the subscription price; even more valuable, of course, is that most of your posts are open and I can share and discuss them with friends.
Question for paying subscriber ( and first of all THANK YOU) - how many other substacks do you pay for ? I find that I would consider paying for several, but can't seem to justify paying for as many as I read, so end up paying for zero.
Well, why not pick two you pay for, and read the rest for free? Either your two favorites, or the two that you believe most need your support, or a mixture. You could also settle on one or five, depending on your possibilities.
Dying to read the extra-Marxist critique of Blippi omg
Echoing some of the other comments here. The substack subscription options I see are typically too high and I cannot justify the cost. I admit that’s for irrational reasons not actually applied on the margin. Maybe if I really think about it I do get $100/yr worth of insights and good chuckles and a sense of community from reading your blog, Scott, but I *want* to subscribe to quite a few others. If I did so for as many substacks as I get value from and appreciate to a degree comparable to yours, like I do for podcasts, I’d actually be spending thousands of dollars a year. I just can’t make that work, so I don’t subscribe to any, I think out of a misplaced sense of fairness since I’d prefer to spread the love around. Concretely, I could probably justify something around a $25-35/yr model ($2-3/mo) for most substacks I really care about, with maybe one or two $5/mo tiers thrown in there if the option was available.
I think it’s a collective action problem that Substack itself must address, probably by changing default tiers and/or emphasizing lower cost subscription options for authors. If more substacks had lower tier default options (say, idk, $3/mo instead of $10) I suspect there would be way more money going around in aggregate.
I think this is a very natural way to think, and certainly there are some out there who might make up on volume what they lose in every individual sale. But I'll note that the big advantage of Substack, for the biggest writers, is that it allows price discovery - it's much easier to figure out what people will actually pay. They're probably charging as much as they are because they have found that the market will bear that price. I say that as someone who has kept his newsletter cheap at $5/$50 where a lot of other people have adjusted upwards for inflation.
Good reply, I suppose that makes sense. I do wish there were more tiers, like in Patreon, but there’s also an obvious lack of granularity of benefits you can provide through substack so I don’t think that’s workable.
Sliding scales, like a ‘pay what you think this is worth to you above a given floor’ model might be a nice feature. That would easily get me over the edge and arguably allow for even better price discovery and a more direct feedback mechanism to authors.
According to my survey, 21% of readers are subscribers, and 11% of nonsubscribers say they would subscribe if the price were less.
Assuming a 50% price cut was enough to get all of these people, I would be losing half my revenue per customer in order to get 50% more customers, which seems like a bad deal. But in fact I expect a lot of the people who said they would subscribe if the price was lower wouldn't.
My current plan is to wait for inflation to bring the price down, then see what happens.
That’s a very good point, I didn’t know the percentage of paying subscribers for you was so high. The math makes sense, so I concede you’re probably at a good price point.
Maybe I just need to get over it and pay for a small handful of substacks. I’ll mull it over some more.
Dang. I recently filled out the survey and said that I had never been a member and had no intention of becoming a member, and yet I just subscribed. Proof that I'm economically irrational, I guess.
I've been reading SSC/ACX since I was in high school (I'm now a post-uni "real adult"); I've definitely gotten way more that $100 value from your blogs + Unsong.
Comment on my blog and I'll think about it.
Was the one about the three idols a subscriber-only post? when I read that I thought "great, the subscription already paid off, everything that comes now is extra"
[SA discovers churn, takes the marketing black pill ]
I'm surprised to see your concern about losing 10% of your subscribers after a single year and even moreso about your assumption that you will "continue losing ~10% per year indefinitely". I subscribe to some substacks and later discover I don't visit often enough, or enjoy the postings often enough, to keep going, so I cancel. That strikes me as completely normal behavior. (I hope I'm not overly flattering myself. :-) ) So I think you can expect it to be "two steps forward, one step back." In fact, you're ten steps forward and one step back, so count your blessings!
There's nothing wrong with sending out announcements like this one, though I wish you had skipped what seems to me to be the excessive introspection, apologetics, moralizing and analysis. Most of the comments seem to be about these (what I regard as) extrinsics — folks saying things like "There, there, Scott, don't feel bad about making a killing on your substack." I'm not sure you're asking to be petted, but that appears to have been the outcome.
One thing you might do that I would appreciate would be, at the end of each email (to both subscribers and non-subscribers who receive emails), to list how many open and how many closed postings you have put up over (say) the past year. That would at least let non-subscribers get a sense of what they are missing without trying to hit 'em in the heartstrings.
I enjoy the blog and don't mind paying for it. I can afford it, so that 's why I'm here. I don't read every posting and sometimes discover I've missed some I would have read. So I do go back and read a few of those. I can't keep up with reading them all and I'm amazed that you can keep up with writing them all.
Cheers,
-P.
"So I think you can expect it to be "two steps forward, one step back." In fact, you're ten steps forward and one step back, so count your blessings!"
This would be true if I net gained subscribers, but I've had two years to check if that is true, and it isn't.
Point taken, but on the other hand, If the graph goes up to the day of your posting (does it?), then there has not been anything like the end-of-2021 loss of subscribers at the end of 2022. In fact, it appears that there has been a very slight gain of subscribers from mid-October to the end of the year.
You got me Scott. I've been free-riding on the assumption that you probably write this from a huge Bay Area mansion and don't need my pittance but all of those posts you unlocked are excellent and when I think about it I love this blog and your well worth the $100.
EA people please do not reply with your logical analyses of why I should have donated that $100 to some malaria-net charity and saved 3.7 children lives instead. I cancelled another subscription to pay Scott. No children will die of malaria as a result of this I promise.
>”but not so much that I can continue losing ~10% per year indefinitely.”
Yea, you absolutely can do that, and it’s insane that anyone would defend such a statement.
Estimating that 25% of your subs are on the cheap plan, you make $48,693.12 PER MONTH.
I live very happily on an income of $80k. Losing 10% per year, you’d reach my current income in 17 years. That’s an entire career. That’s enough time to have saved up investments to account for the lost income. I don’t care how much people make, but when rich people (and I consider myself rich) act like they’re on the edge of poverty it really grinds my gears. Blow me, bro.
Or maybe consider that he's not referring solely to financial motives, but that consistently losing so many subscribers would be emotionally demotivating, being an obvious indication that people no long find you interesting or your writing compelling.
1. I'm assuming it's 10 percentage points, not 10 percent, on the grounds that a fixed fraction of those who subscribed at the beginning leave each year due to credit card expiration and stuff. I agree if it was 10% of current then I could do it for longer. If it's percentage points then at most I can do this for ten years.
2. 80K/year is a nice salary and I have lived on approximately that amount before. Unfortunately, https://bpfund.com/bay-area-mortgage-payments-2021/ . Buying a house in the Bay Area is a decision you can and should blame me for, but I think "would not be able to pay my mortgage" can fairly be described as "cannot continue doing this". Obviously if I lost a lot of money I could sell my house, move away, and figure out another way to make things work. But I would rather try holding a yearly subscription drive.
You are what we know in the business as "rich"; while Bay Area housing costs (and the cost of living) is famously sky-high, to say that you "can't continue doing this" sounds more than a little out of touch. You're a wealthy man, a skilled and insightful writer, probably an excellent psychiatrist. It would have been better to say that you simply want people to keep subscribing to your blog because you want to keep raking in those big piles of money. As it was, you seemed to appeal to charity, rather than a straightforward "My blog is awesome and I'd like to keep making piles of money off of it; thank you very much".
I wrote "Even though I’m still getting an embarrassingly large amount, I figure I’ll start holding once-a-year subscription drives now instead of waiting until I’m actually needy.P lease don’t feel guilted into buying a subscription unless you really want to and can easily afford it - again, the amount of money I’m making blogging really is embarrassingly large."
I don't know how to make it any clearer than that that I am not "appealing to charity".
Of course you’re not asking for charity, you are a successful entrepreneur, getting rich from a combination of opportunity, talent, and Hardwork! Don’t be embarrassed about drumming for subscribers, it doesn’t make you a huckster, look at Iglesias, who makes a lot more than you do, and is shameless about trying to attract more subscribers every day.
But if you give non subscribers a couple of paragraphs from each paid post when you post it, like a lot of people do on Substack, you might entice more people to join. 
Indeed, what you actually wrote is not an appeal to charity. The not-fully-explicit implication of what you did write is something like “on this trend there will come a point where I need (or want) to avoid my paid readership falling into a death spiral, leading to revenue falling below the MRR level where I can continue this endeavor.” The death spiral dynamic is key, success begets success, and a trend of sustained loss begets sustained loss - at least in business is where sustained loss is visible to customers.
And something like “Well before that trend leads to the event horizon, I want to begin preparing and building the skill to at least maintain my paid subscriber base.” If this is not a misreading your intentions here, your logic is sound, and responsible. 
Fine, you guilted me into subscribing... Just kidding well worth it. FWIW, my hesitancy in subscribing prior to now is a desire to see Substack do some sort of multi-subscription plan. I know that doesn’t mesh with Substack’s current business model and I’m not thinking through how it would work, but I don’t think I’m alone in resisting the splurge of paying for five or ten Substack subscriptions. This is my second paid subscription -- I’d be surprised if that ever doubled to four.
100% agreed. I’m at 4 paid subscriptions now, and at this rate of adding paid subs to authors on Substack in ~1 year my Substack bill will exceed my Economist bill.  The issue is not affordability in the strictest sense, I already spend about $2000 a month on various science journals, legal references, Crunchbase+ and other paid funding-news sources, Economist + WSJ + NYT + FP etc - expensed through my company (thanks, VC friends). Plus 2-5 books per month that I pick, sometimes read, and add to the company library (Knuth’s series and other >> $20 volumes).
The issue with adding more paid subs on Substack is that I feel bad when I’m considering each new one, despite the learning-new-domains virtue it feels decidedly unthrifty and simultaneously like I’m running the risk of slipping down the first 1% of the SBF slope.
For those who bought subscription and want to catch up, there is list of all subscriber-only articles:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-2575/comment/11969135
Please consider my $8.33 per month as a big thank you and as payment not for just the excellent articles, but even more for the wonderful job you have done moderating the comments so that they are worth reading as well.
I'd like to, but if I subscribed to every substack where I thought "hey I like this and I'd like to support them", I'd be spending $200/month.
Claro Amigo
If you give people the first paragraphs of locked posts they’re more likely to subscribe
Three points, I think:
1. There's no reason to feel bad for asking for subscriptions. People find your work valuable, and the ones that find it valuable enough are willing to pay for the bonus part of it.
2. You write "thousands of people bought subscriptions when I started the blog in January 2021, several hundred expired after a year in January 2022, and I expect several hundred more to expire this January" as if that's somehow an unexpected evil. But that's unsurprising and irrelevant, of course you're going to have turnover in subscriptions; the essential point is that the number of subscribers has been constant at around 6,000 for two years, and is likely to stay that way as long as you periodically ask for subscriptions.
3. You say that you're embarrassed by the amount of money you make from the blog, but you then go on to reveal how much you make. If you were actually embarrassed, you'd hide it. OTOH, if you were *guilty* about it, you would either make the blog free, cut the price, or donate a large fraction of the proceeds to charity (either conventional or EA). As it is, you get the money but seem to think that publicly emoting about it makes some sort of difference.