Money Talk
Okay, let’s talk about money. I hope you won’t mind if I drop the editorial voice I’m using on the rest of the site.
Opposite of Nihilism’s central product is our weekly email newsletter featuring one guest contributor each week. There will also be occasional web-only content (“web” also includes the substack app, another way to follow this newsletter), and maybe a stray email here or there but nothing to crowed the inbox. But mostly it’s that central product, which will always be free for all subscribers, paying or not.
For the foreseeable future, all of the occasional side content will be free as well. A lot of that will be me experimenting with ways to further serve the community of subscribers. As that community it grows, some of those experiments could turn into paid-only features.
My long term goal is for O/o/N to generate revenue for two reasons:
To pay contributors
To earn money for my labor as editor and publisher. This is a .com not a .org. O/o/N even has its own checking account.
My first financial goal is to generate enough revenue that I can compensate writers at $.25/ word and pocket whatever is leftover each month, until I get to the point that I would be pocketing as much per word as the contributors. When I hit this point I will set a new growth goal.
Let’s run some numbers about what it would take to hit that first financial goal.
First off, the goal is to publish weekly, 52 weeks a year, so for the sake of this exercise, one month is 28 days and there are 13 in a months in a year.
Each month will have four Sundays, which means four contributor essays. Let’s say each of them are at the word limit, 1000 words each. This means each author is earning $250, and O/o/N is spending $1000/month on contributor compensation. So I would need to bring $2000 in order to hit my first financial goal. (Running the site comes with associated costs, but for the sake of this exercise we will consider them sunk, like the fallacy.)
Monthly subscribers pay $6/month. Some subscribers are either price-conscious or interested enough long term to make the annual subscription, $60/year, saving $12 and paying $5/month.
Substack and its payment processor take a cut of every subscription which amounts to roughly 15%, rounding up. So O/o/N is netting $4.25 per month per annual subscriber and $5.10 per month per annual subscriber.
With this back of the envelope math, I will reach that first goal at 471 annual or 393 monthly subscribers. However, I only need to be halfway to that goal to begin compensating the writers at $0.25/word–235 annual or 197 monthly subscribers. The revenue the newsletter brings before I get to the point where I can reliably pay writers at the $0.25 rate
That’s about the extent to which I’ve thought through the particulars on the money side of this newsletter. This is as transparent as I can be. Of course, I believe in what I am doing here and aspire to make a big impact, which will take time, attention, and resources, and a probably a bigger footprint than weekly email. Let’s see where this goes. Here’s the pitch:
Sign-up or upgrade to a paid subscription using the button below if you’d like to help O/o/N compensate contributors, and me, founding editor Adam Zemel.