I just read this Boing Boing piece about the rise of paywalls and the rise of paywall prices. Following that I read a Tech Crunch article about Bloomberg’s new $35/month paywall and the rise of paywalls and subscriptions in general. It got me thinking about where I spend money on digital content, which I think is higher than the average person, but who knows, I might be surprised.

So in lieu of any critical perspective on the nature of subscriptions or paywalls, I’m going to use today’s post as a reminder to myself on where I spend my leisure time and money. Enjoy an incomplete overview of how I spend money online!

Individual Creators

I think that it’s important to support creators, especially those working for themselves. The financial support is obviously important, but a side benefit is a form of virtue signaling. I contribute about $100/month to creators on Patreon, but that’s spread out over several dozen individuals. The amount of support isn’t generally higher than $5/month/creator.

On occassion I purcahse one-off digital products from creators on platforms like Gumroad, Itch, Drip (Kickstarter’s Patreon emulator), and Kickstarter/IndieGogo.

What matters to me in this case is a vote of confidence in that creator. Not only do I like and appreciate your work, but I’m willing to give you a bit of money and promote you to others in exchange for and appreciation of that work.

Magazines and Digital Subscriptions

When it comes to larger organizations, I am just as fine with support, but I am also more concerned about the output of that support. As an example, I cancelled my NY Times subscription last year because I was tired of the hot takes about all of the opinion pieces that seem designed more to outrage their readership than actually provide alternative points of view.

Wired is one that I’ve stuck with off and on for about fifteen years now, thoguh with so many forms of subscription that they offer it can be a challenge. They recently moved from a $4/month digital only plan to a $20/year plan that includes both digital and physical subscriptions. Considering I’d been paying for both separately in the past they’re making it a savings of about $50/year for me now, yet the old program was in place for about a year before moving to this, so who knows what it will be later.

I consider some consolidation services as part of this section as well. I pay $5/month to Medium, which I’m told goes 100% to the authors of works that I read and applaud. I don’t read a ton on the Medium site though, as I pay $45/year for Pocket premium to

Video and Music

Of course the subscription services that have done best in the past few years are the music and video streaming services. Thankfully most of these are easy to share with friends and family, so I’ve got access to Hulu, Netflix, HBO, and some other cable channels without paying for those myself. I probably watch too much as is, but I can get into that another time.

Amazon Prime just went up $20 in price per year, and with the recent reveal that they had over 100 million Prime subscribers and a low attrition rate, I can see the meeting going “Hey, want to make an extra $2bn/year?” and being done. I plan on keeping that on renewal this year.

I pay for YouTube Red and Google Music, and have a family plan that allows six users for $15/month. I use both multiple times per day, as do the other users on the account. My understanding is that Google Music itself will be going away later this year and be replaced with YouTube Remix. I’ve never been a fan of loading a music video with all of the bandwidth and additional content that entails to listen to a song that I want, but I also prefer playlists and full albums over single tracks. Hopefully that experience won’t go away with this refocus.

Almost forgotten while compiling this list is MoviePass, which I finally got in February. We paid for four unlimited passes with a Costco deal that gave us a year for $90 each, versus the $10/month that they were offering on their site at the time. I would estimate that I’m just about getting my money’s worth on it compared to paying full price for those tickets, but I’d also argue that half of the movies that I’ve gone to with it I would have waited to see otherwise.

Books

I get a lot of ebooks and audiobooks from the Orange County library, which has a great selection from a variety of partners, mainly Overdrive and Hoopla. In addition to physical books which I check out from the library and track via Goodreads, I’ve got a lot to keep myself busy here.

Outside of that I’ll buy the odd ebook on Amazon, Google Play, or other services depending on where they come from or are easier to get. I buy Humble Bundles every few months, mainly ones around books or comics.

Educational Material

This is another area where I have a mix of free spending and frugality. Working in tech, I want to keep my skills regularly updated. It’s pretty easy to get online courses for free, but some of the paid courses are easily worth the cost for the skills that they provide.

Recently I’ve purchased Zac Gordon’s Gutenberg Development course, a Wes Bos course, and some additional Stack Skills courses. I also signed up for Sitepoint last week, which had a unique upsell offering me six months of course for $30, over the $9/month they were otherwise charging.

I subscribe to Post Status, which is $99/year. Off the top of my head that’s the only subscription that I have that I consider purely industry related.

Other Services and Overview

The above doesn’t include things like cloud storage, server costs, domains, licenses for tools, and subscriptions to any SaaS that I use. That list is regularly changing and mainly applies to things that I buy for the business. Still, I consider them when it comes to monthly credit card bills, and the amount of money that goes into something that I never physically hold.

For those of you keeping score at home, the above is in the range of $2500/year spent on digital subscriptions. The majority of this ends up being things purely for personal enjoyment and enrichment, and the overwhelming majority of that is for things that I could get free or ad-supported but helps the creators support themselves.

I know that it’s not always polite to talk money, but what do you think: am I paying a lot for digital content, or am I underestimating what most people consume?

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