“Am I supporting the thing I say I value, or am I waiting for somebody else to pay for it?”
Over the weekend, I sent a shorter version of that question to my free subscribers. It was meant as a simple fundraising email, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized the idea was bigger than my Substack and worth expanding a little.
If you already pay $8 a month, $80 a year, or $1,200 a year, this is not for you. Thank you. I mean it. You’re already helping make the work possible, and I appreciate it.
A lot of the people who read my work hate socialism
They believe people should work, contribute, pay their own way and take responsibility for themselves. They especially dislike arrangements where one group carries the cost while somebody else gets the benefit. I agree, which makes the economics of independent media kind of funny: a few people pay for it while everybody gets to consume it.
Reading a free Substack is not literally socialism. Nobody has nationalized my laptop. The point is simpler. A relatively small group pays for something a much larger group gets to use.
Economists have a term for the underlying problem: the free rider problem. When people can receive a benefit without paying for it, each person has an incentive to let somebody else cover the cost. That can work for a while, but if enough people make the same decision, eventually there may not be enough paying customers left to support the thing everybody enjoys.
Independent media runs into a version of this problem all the time. The internet made information incredibly cheap to distribute, but it did not make it free to produce. Some essays take a few hours. Others have me digging through government reports and databases, checking numbers against original sources and rewriting an argument because one piece of evidence changed what I thought I knew. The internet makes the finished article cheap to deliver. It doesn’t make the work required to produce it disappear.
Once the finished piece exists, however, letting one more person read it costs almost nothing. Readers understand that arrangement pretty well.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in December 2025 found that only 16 percent of American adults had directly paid or given money to a news source during the previous year through a subscription, membership or donation. Eighty-three percent had not. Pew also found that only 8 percent of Americans believe individuals have a responsibility to pay for news at all.
The local-news numbers are even more revealing. Only 12 percent of Americans said they had paid or given money to local news in 2025. Among those who had not, half said the main reason was that they could find plenty of local news for free. Another 29 percent simply weren’t interested enough to pay, while 10 percent said it was too expensive and 9 percent said the news wasn’t good enough.
That 29 percent matters. If you don’t care enough about something to pay for it, fair enough. I’m not trying to convince someone to finance work he doesn’t value. I’m talking about the people who clearly do value it and keep coming back for more.
Free is a hell of a price.
That brings me back to this publication. I have about 2,400 subscribers, and roughly 200 of them are paid. In other words, only a little over 8 percent pay. By coincidence, that’s almost exactly the percentage of Americans Pew found who believe people have a responsibility to pay for news.
I’m not complaining about the arrangement. I created it. I could put everything behind a paywall tomorrow, but I don’t want to. If somebody is broke, unemployed, on a fixed income, young, struggling or just having a lousy year financially, I still want that person to be able to read what I write.
Some readers have also supported me through Venmo, Buy Me a Coffee and individual donations instead of becoming paid subscribers. Some have done it more than once, and I appreciate every one of them. Sharing my work matters too because it helps me reach people I could never reach on my own.
But there is a difference between free and costless. Sharing helps spread the work. It does not finance the work that produced it. Free does not mean nobody paid. It means the cost landed somewhere else.
That is where the personal-responsibility part gets interesting. If I believe people should support the things they value, why should that principle disappear the moment I discover somebody else is willing to pay for me?
There is no coercion here. Nobody is taxing you, reaching into your paycheck or sending you a bill because you read three essays last month. You decide whether the work is worth supporting. This is voluntary.
People also say they want independent media. They complain about corporate owners, advertisers, wealthy benefactors, political organizations and governments having too much influence over what they read. Sometimes those complaints are justified and sometimes they aren’t, but the basic economics never go away.
I don't want to be a billionaire.
I don't even want to be a millionaire.
I want to change things.
Starting with us.
Independent media costs money. Somebody has to pay the writer, reporter, researcher, editor or whoever else is doing the work. There is no mysterious fifth source of money that appears because everybody agrees independent media is important.
If readers do not provide enough support, the money has to come from somewhere else. It may come from advertisers, wealthy owners, institutions or from the person producing the work continuing to subsidize it himself. None of those arrangements automatically corrupts the product, but every source of money comes with its own interests and incentives.
Reader support has one enormous advantage: the people financing the work are largely the same people who value and consume it. The relationship is remarkably simple. I produce something you think is worth reading, and enough of you decide it is worth helping me continue to produce it.
Convincing people to do that is difficult. The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report found that only 17 percent of people across the 20 wealthier countries it tracks had paid for online news during the previous year. Reuters says payment rates in most markets appear stuck between roughly 10 and 20 percent.
Of course people prefer free. So do I. If two gas stations across the street from each other sell the same gas and one charges $3 a gallon while the other charges nothing, I am probably not stopping at the first one because I want to teach myself a lesson about capitalism.
Human beings respond to incentives. The interesting part comes later, when the free gas station looks around and asks who is going to pay for the gasoline. Independent media eventually has to ask the same question.
If you read me once every six months, I’m not talking about you. If you genuinely cannot afford a subscription, I’m not talking about you either. Keep reading.
But if you read almost everything I publish, send essays to friends, share them on social media, argue with me, agree with me, laugh at something I wrote, get pissed off at something I wrote and then come back a few days later to see what the hell I wrote next, you’ve already answered one question.
The work has value to you.
Which leaves the harder one:
Am I supporting the thing I say I value, or am I waiting for somebody else to pay for it?
Right now, about 200 people are helping pick up the tab for everybody else. I’d like to make it 300 by finding 100 more people willing to support the thing they say they value.
“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” — Thomas Sowell
Independent media is no exception. Somebody always pays. The only question is who.