Singing the Chicken Cordon Blues
Hello. Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool. Your weekend challenge will appear below. Far below.
First, a brief news alert from
… a logo that I am publishing quite small today because the news is at least mildly encouraging. On Friday the Washington Post finally, if reluctantly, allowed the truth to emerge about its owner’s disastrous decision to dictate what opinions its opinions staff might have. After spiking one columnist’s column on the subject, and waiting several days, they allowed a second person — veteran op-ed person Dana Milbank — to tell it. Milbank’s column pulled some punches (we do not hear of the devastating effect on Post newsroom morale, nor the ominous signal it sends about strangulation of opinion) — but it was a fine, nuanced, honest piece, focused right where it should be, on Jeffrey Bezos’s new bro, Donald Trump, and the threat he poses to America. Here it is, gift-linked.
Sadly, we also learned that on the very evening after Bezos issued his sycophantic, MAGA-friendly edict, he had dinner with Trump. Surprise, surprise.
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The photo atop this column is of me, taken yesterday. It refers back to a prior Gene Pool column about how a shopper at Union Market mistook me for the guy below, the Costco rotisserie chicken pitchman who wears a Costco upc code on his T-shirt so he can go through checkout without subjecting his food to a laser scanner, which he believes poisons the meat and causes him to have a lot of colonoscopies. I promised you I would buy one of those shirts and model it. It just arrived in the mail. As you can see, I was grievously calumnized. I look NOTHING like this desiccated, cranky, deluded old man in a straw hat.
Finally, an announcement. I’ve been putting it off for roughly a year.
I think you know by now that I am a neurotic person. This dysfunction often reflects inward. When something bad happens, I tend to blame myself even if the bad thing is, like, a deadly hailstorm in Indiana. But sometimes it is, in fact, my fault. In this case, it is.
In a limited way, I am going to start charging everyone for full access to the Gene Pool posts. It is something most successful substacks eventually do, and this one, tragically, has become successful. It is, in my case, a long-overdue, foot-dragging Monetizing Moment.
One of my choices was a popular one among newsletter hosts — to raise the price of a subscription from $50 a year to $80 a year — but I didn’t want to do that. I like being able to tell people, truthfully, that The Gene Pool costs only $4.15 a month. (Donald Trump would say it is only 4 cents a month, hoping people won’t do the math.) What I’ve settled on is a middle ground.
Starting today, non-paying subscribers will get ten free newsletters per month. These will appear in mailboxes intact: You can read them from start to finish and vote in Polls and make Observations just as before, though you still won’t be able to Comment or participate in the Invitational. On other days, you will still get an email notification, and you will be able to begin reading the posts, and see what they are about, but at some point tantalizingly high in the story you will encounter a really ugly alert saying that the rest is only for paid subscribers.
I value all subscribers. You have all helped us thrive, those who pay and those who do not. Those who do not have been playing by the rules. I know that. And I also know that for some of you, paying would be a burden you cannot absorb right now. I am hoping you understand my agony here, even if it brings you no solace; but if it helps, I am writhing pitifully in guilt and shame and self-loathing. (It is a lifelong affliction. I blame my ma. I am Jewish.)
Anyway, you still get the ten. The clock is reset at the first of every month. I am hoping this will work for most of you.
I will be deciding on a case-by-case basis which posts to make pay-only, and I promise not to intellectually redline you. The free ones will not just be those where I’m writing about, say, my dog’s hemorrhoids.
I am also going to institute a new policy: At the end of each month, in the Weekend Gene Pool, I will hold a contest to win a free year’s subscription. Twelve of you will get that each year, on my dime. The newsletter announcing the contest will never be paywalled.
Let’s just see how this goes. I am wary, but also weary. This is a harder job than I imagined. But I have come to love it.
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Weekend challenge: Tell us how you’ve been feeling during the First Six Weeks of the Kakistocracy. Make it funny, or poignant, or interesting, and anecdotal if possible. Funny is best.
Send it here:
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And finally, the Gene Pool Gene Poll:
Good. Thanks.
Without further adieu, please upgrade if you can:
Regarding your decision to tweak the subscription model: As an experienced marketer, I approve.
I suspect that you might find this more distressing than comforting, given that you probably don't hold marketers in high regard.
Fair enough.
But I consider subscription marketing to be a specialty, and in my professional opinion, you're a natural.
The "freemiun" model, in which the majority of subscribers never pay a cent but get limited access, is often the best formula for growth, revenue, and overall reach.
But most creators get it wrong.
They consider their content too precious.
Either they don't value the free subscribers enough, and resist giving them anything of real value, or they operate in fear of losing them and hesitate to remind people to "upgrade," and resist putting too much behind a paywall.
I think you're nailing that balance. You keep the reminders to pay constant and relentless but fresh and funny, and you've made them integral to the experience of being a subscriber. Yet you clearly value those who aren't paying. You understand that reach is important, and that the more free subscribers you have who are seeing real value, the more paid subscribers you'll eventually get as well.
No notes.
“…It refers back to a prior Gene Pool column…”
“Refers back”? What would Mister Language Person say?