Freedom

As a creator or freelancer, you're always dependent on advertising revenue, sponsorships, or billed sessions with your clients. Even if it's going well, there aren't many opportunities to slow down and focus on what you enjoy the most - you have to constantly think about the commercial viability of your endeavors. The content must have certain qualities or include certain things to get the views your sponsors expect or generate the required advertising revenue, and that's not exactly what freedom sounds like.

If you're in a stage where you think your audience will be willing to pay you a monthly fee to have access to your content, you can start thinking about creating a membership your followers can subscribe to and access your premium content. It doesn't mean you have to move some of your current production output behind a paywall - you can create entirely new formats that will be available only to subscribers.

It will give you a safety net - you will know that no matter how your public content performs or how many client sessions you make, you have a certain guaranteed monthly income. How big this safety net will be is another matter - if it's big enough, it can give you complete freedom to create whatever you want. We all know that content you have to monetize directly is different from content you would do if you didn't have to think about monetization and could express your creativity or knowledge without any constraints. The quality content isn't necessarily great for monetization. If your followers are hungry for this type of content, it can all work out very nicely.

You don't have to be entirely dependent on your subscription income. It can simply complement your overall income. The point about freedom stands, though.

If you approach it correctly, you may be able to build a nice community from your subscribers, which has many benefits down the road. It can help you get to know many interesting people and allow you to have fruitful conversations with your most loyal audience without trolls and spammers. We'll explore community building in more detail in a dedicated lesson.

Finding the balance

Your subscription-based membership's main driver of interest will be your free content published on the most popular social networks. There is no other financially sustainable way to promote it. Even after you start your subscription, keep your public channels and content as active as before. You don't want to fall behind by only posting content behind a paywall. Your public channels must keep you relevant and drive new potential subscribers. If all the great content is behind a paywall and there is nothing to lead people to it, they won't come. Therefore, moving all your new content behind a paywall would be a risky move that would very likely backfire sooner or later.

Podcasters or other creators doing long-form content have a big advantage here - they don't have to do barely any extra work to figure out what to build their subscription on. They can simply split their videos into two halves - one half will be available for free on YouTube and other relevant social media platforms as before, and the other half will be behind a paywall. The key is that the content is long enough to provide value, even if you only hear the first part of it. If the interview is two hours long, you still have an hour available for free. So, people who aren't subscribed will still have the motivation to listen, and it can intrigue them enough to become paid members and access the other half of the interview - and all other interviews, too, of course. With shorter content like monologues, it doesn't work so well. It will be hard to watch if your channel is full of incomplete 10-minute videos of you explaining a point.

Should you do it?

When considering creating a paid subscription for your audience, it's good to realize that people don't take paid subscriptions lightly. Whenever Netflix or Hulu raise their prices even by a couple of dollars, there's an uproar among the subscribers, some even declaring they'll cancel their subscriptions. Subscriptions are the first thing people cut when they get into a tough financial situation. Of course, you'll never build a content library like Netflix, and your subscription will always be an overall worse deal, but that's not the point. The point is that you should think twice about whether what you plan to offer will be something people will pay for and keep paying for.

If you don't operate a membership yet and want to evaluate the state of your community or whether a community is being formed around you, check out the comment section of your content. If people discuss things and respond to one another, it's a good indicator that they have something in common and that there's a cornerstone for creating a community.

We recommend the approach we mentioned with digital products to evaluate whether creating a paid subscription is a good idea. Just ask your audience whether they would be interested in paid premium content, and if so, what that content should look like. You don't even have to create a dedicated post about it if you're worried about a negative or non-enthusiastic response being there for everyone to see and easy to find. A more low-profile option would work, too. You can just casually mention it at the end of some video about a different topic or float that question in the comments.

What is a churn rate?

If you decide to learn more about the subscription membership space, one term that you'll be constantly bumping into is churn rate. The churn rate is expressed in percentage points and illustrates the percentage of a subscription base you lost. If at the beginning of the month you had 50 subscribers and during the month 5 of them unsubscribed, your monthly churn rate is 10%. It's the easiest indicator to evaluate how you're able to retain subscribers. If your churn rate is high, you have to do something about it because it means a relatively big number of subscribers don't see the continual value of the membership.