Hi Everyone,
Starting November 1st, I’m making some big changes to how Moldova Matters paywalls content. Here’s how things will work going forward:
The Ratio of Paid to Free posts will move to 50:50. This will affect new, original posts1, including the Weekly Roundup and will roughly rotate2.
Free subscribers will get 2 free-unlocks of articles per month. These will reset on the 1st of each month.
Paid Subscribers: Nothing changes for you, thank you again for supporting the work that goes into Moldova Matters.
Why the Change and Why Now?
Moldova Matters is independent and funded by its readers. This work is not funded by grants or donor money. Right now fewer than 1 in 10 readers pay for their subscription.
When I first launched this newsletter, my plan was to keep the Weekly Roundup freely available while paywalling most other content. I dropped this plan in February 2022 as I felt that making sure English language information about Moldova broadly available was critical, and part of the public interest mission of this newsletter. This switched Moldova Matters to a kind-of “freemium” model, and many readers were kind enough to support the work.
Starting last year, I started bringing the paywalls back for Perspective and some Analysis pieces. But this has been an unsatisfying balancing act for me. Outside writers contribute to the Perspective section, and some analysis created important context for people just tuning in. This is a group that I think about a lot - people who do not follow Moldova but suddenly tune in when there is a crisis - real or fake. Last January a fake story that Moldova had blockaded Transnistria was going around in the English language press3. It’s been a running concern of mine that stories like my analysis of that information operation be accessible to journalists and policy makers tuning in during a crisis.
Substack recently rolled out the free-unlock feature which is called metering. With that new tool, my new paywall policy is my effort to balance a lot of competing ideas. There pretty good evidence that a 50:50 ratio of free to paid posts is the right way to run a business of this type with this niche. The 2-free unlocks a month helps me cover edge cases. People just tuning in during a crisis should find ready access, while people who read every article are asked to contribute to the costs that make this all possible. At the same time, casual readers who skim headlines before deciding if they want to dive in can pick and choose the topics for their free unlocks.
My hope is that this new structure is a good balance between these different values and demands.
Group Subscriptions for Companies and Organizations
Recently, I realized that most readers did not know about group subscriptions - mostly because I didn’t communicate about them very well.
Group administrators sign up their team of 2+ “seats” which each get a 10% discount on the yearly price. The administrator adds colleagues’ emails to their list, or swaps them out if someone leaves the organization or post and needs to be replaced. This allows for easy management and invoicing so that all the team members get full access to Moldova Matters content.
I create a page explaining groups in more detail and answering some FAQs:
Thanks again for reading…
Your support makes Moldova Matters possible. If you have any questions about the changes announced above, or about group subscriptions reply to this email - it comes straight to me.
Not re-posts like my recent re-share of the article about Grigory Potemkin, or cross-posts from other publications.
My plan is go free-paid-free-paid-etc. That said, I’m sure there will be some exceptions that I’ll handle case-by-case, affecting the neat rotation (e.g. choosing not to paywall a major investigation). That said, the average over time will show a 50:50 rotation.
The local press barely covered it because it was so absurd - leaving quite an information gap.