[walterbell]

We need more articles and venues for discussion of new business models and publishing/marketing toolchains for high-quality content, so your post and efforts are much appreciated.

What do you think of the economic boundary between timeless content (foundational principles) and time-sensitive/perishable content? LWN segments their free/paid offerings by time. One could argue that there's another, missing category: review/summary articles which contextualize the perishable content and extract implications for long-lived assumptions.

On one hand, there are ecosystem-wide benefits from removing financial barriers to entry, e.g. free and high-quality content on foundational principles, proven over time by competition between many alternatives. On the other hand, there is economic value to be created from high-quality synthesis, for audiences which can afford and apply this synthesis to immediate commercial problems.

How can we segment these two audiences? Softcover.io seems to have been successful, with the Rails tutorial as one data point with substantial revenue (6 figures) even though the core content was free to read.

[sandal]

I've been focusing only on timeless content (for as realistic of a definition of "timeless" as technology allows) for Practicing Ruby, because I think it's more compelling and sustainable as a work for the benefits of the commons.

In other words, if I can look at my archives as being a body of materials that mostly holds their value over time, then supporters can be comfortable knowing that their money is stretching far and wide.

Also, although we don't do it as often as I wish we could, I like the idea of periodically going back and revising or replacing old works with updated content, to extend their life even longing and take advantage of new thoughts that come along. Having paid supporters really helps there, because it feels less like a chore and more like a service.

As for perishable / time sensitive content... I don't really know. I guess in that case you're funding people for their time and expertise rather than the lasting value of the work they do. I think this would come with a very different set of challenges, but I'm not seeing where the economic problem would be.

In the first couple years of Practicing Ruby's development, we did release the content only after it had been available to paying subscribers for a while. (There would be 10-20 articles available to subscribers only at any point, with a sharing mechanism that allowed folks to post links for others to jump the paywall)

When we stopped that and moved to directly releasing content when it was ready to be published, there was no major change in subscribers immediately, or even within a six month window after that decision was made. Actually, the cancellation rate went way down, so that might be a sign that the supporters were supportive of the idea.

The problem (and I'm sure some folks here may have guessed it), is that once everything was made available for free right away, the number of new subscriptions went way down. Whereas before we might see 30 new subscriptions a month and lose 20 people, we started seeing 1 new subscription a month and lose 2 people.

A sequence of events that happened since then has slowly bled the business of its revenue, although our traffic improves every week, even without new content being published for several months at a time. The most notable one is that I decided that the business ought to run on its own revenue, something that is ultimately a good thing but was a harsh change because previously I'd work 120+ hours a month on the project and only just barely squeak by on a subsistence level.

So basically, the project went dormant for the better part of a year, and although I did some small things from time to time, I mostly saved up the revenue so that I could pour more dedicated time into things down the line. In that process, we understandably lost supporters over time, but the main issue was bringing in new subscribers.

At this point, I'm burning the modest reserves I stored up, and that's given me a few months of runway before the project needs to go dormant again. If the collaborator model works and the kickstarter I set up gets funded, I think I'll be able to stretch things a lot farther. I do a very intensive process with anyone who contributes their work, but at this point it's still much easier for me to collaborate with someone who's contributing ONE article to Practicing Ruby than it is for me to research and write ten more pages when I've already produced something like 1000 pages of work.

So in a way, the death knell rang, and that's what motivated me to try to fix the business problems. In the process of doing that, I remembered the motivation for doing the project in the first place (which was to provide a functional example of a top-notch free documentation project), and that's what got me excited about things again.

Who knows what will happen from here? Maybe the project will still die. But either way, I'm sure I'll learn a lot from it.

[walterbell]

Thanks for the additional context. Have you tried collecting feedback from those who cancelled (20 of 30)? You may also want to consider editing a subset of articles into a themed ebook and distributing it via softcover.io, since that business model has been proven to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars from Ruby developers.

[sandal]

I actually may plan to do some feedback with cancellations in the future, but "you not publishing for half a year and giving everything away for free" seems like a pretty compelling reason to quit a service.

However, the main feedback I got from people (and it happened often enough where I'm convinced it was a common line of thinking) was that folks just weren't involved in Ruby anymore, or weren't doing a ton of online reading because got busy with other things. When the average age of our remaining supporter accounts is something like 3-5 years), that's understandable.

I've had two children since Practicing Ruby was started. Things were hard for a while. I wanted to quit the business many times, but left it in a zombie state in the hopes to do right by my subscribers sooner or later.

Now things are getting a little better for me, so that's what I'm going to try and do.

As for eBooks, I've thought about that 100 times. I would love to get some of the existing content into a nicely tied together collection and release it as an eBook. But it's a big enough undertaking where I feel it'd take me away from other more valuable work I could do.

If we get our cashflow situation to be even a little better where I could fund a couple days a month to work on that, I'll go ahead and do it. But for now, I only really can afford to fund about 1.5 days a week of my own work, so that isn't much to spread around.