What I am seeing recently is a trend toward high-pressure sales or shills. I may subscribe to a free newsletter that initially has a small amount of promotional or marketing content but mostly useful insights, but see over time it becomes more slanted toward sales or commission-based referrals. As this income-demanding content goes up, the quality of the free content usually goes down and starts to have a desparate tone to it. At this point I am unsubscribing because it feels so yucky.

If you are a blogger, how would you know if this sort of transformation isn’t what’s choking off your revnue stream?

I really appreciate all the intelligent input here.
Thanks for a breath of fresh air.

Dunno how old you are, but when people first tried selling water, there were jokes all over TV and radio about how next they’d be selling bottled air. Nobody in the developed world bought water except business offices and the 5-gallon glass bottle on the water cooler.

Now, you can’t walk through a public space without knocking over someone’s imported tropical all natural filtered infused and UV protected custom water.

No doubt about it, it doesn’t matter what folks are used to paying for; if they see value, they’ll buy it. (People don’t buy needs, they buy wants. Make them want it, and money is no object.)

as for my own blog i do re read it all over again as such of my own brain ruminations tat i sometimes forget what i was thinking just a few seconds ago! so blogs are useful and its the trend now

I find that i would not pay for opinion at all. What I would pay for are the resources that influential people use to get their opinions.

For example, If I am in any niche where an influential blogger comes out with a very strong opinion that changes how my niche is perceived… I would not pay for the opinion but would pay for an in-depth case study or data set (visualized) that got them to their opinion.

For me its all about the data. I would pay to see what Copyblogger knows through data analysis. #1 If it was in-depth and accurate and #2 if it was visualized.

The data would change the discussion for me because I would then have the ability to choose for myself how I would react using the same opinion. I also force myself psych. to commit to the decision and actually carry it out. Thus increasing my productivity.

If you charged very little for a data set… $0.10 and had the readers that copyblogger did.. even with smaller conversion rates you’ve just paid yourself for all the hours you spent writing the post and forming the opinion.

That’s a business lesson, by the way . . .

I pay my ISP to access the internet. At first, everything was free and there were no ads…

I was thinking that I might pay for a blog that delights me – I love words & if the person has a way with words I want to come to see “how” they say it as much as to see what they say.

Currently, I feel overwhelmed trying to read all that I would like to read. If I invested even a few dollars to subscribe to a site, I would be pledging my loyalty. While this would potential be good for the blogger, psychologically, it would be good for me. The 2 or 3 blogs that I could keep up with regularly (like subscribing to the newspaper) would direct my browsing. I would follow the recommended links from those blogs when I had a bit of time & curiosity.

In our metropolis, there are 3 major newspapers to choose from when subscribing. People remain loyal for decades, shunning the others. In spite of the enormous amount of choice, I think people are looking for ways to limit that choice. Putting down a few dollars might just be the way.