Predirections is returning to fully open access
I tried the newsletter paywall playbook for a year and ended up with fewer supporters. Here is why I'm taking them down.
Two and a half years ago I started writing Predirections because peer-reviewed papers weren’t reaching far enough. The ideas I work on — biodiversity change, forecasting ecological futures, ecological consequences of shifting seasons, managing river flow regimes, and why our timelines don’t match the systems we’re trying to manage — needed a wider audience than a journal gives them. (If you’re new here, I’m a professor of ecology in New Zealand; more on that here.)
For a period of that time, I ran a pay-what-you-can model inspired by Radiohead’s In Rainbows experiment. Back in 2007, Radiohead famously removed the price gate on their album, trusted their audience, and let people pay whatever they felt the music was worth. That let me, as a broke student, support them at a rate I could afford and pay more later on when I reached a better financial point in my life.
That model worked better than anything else I tried, with more people supporting my writing than at any point before or since. But I talked myself out of it. I worried it undermined the seriousness of what I was doing, and that I was leaving support on the table by not setting a firm price.
So I moved to the standard model, including paywalling some posts and a fixed annual rate. This is the standard newsletter playbook. But a year on, I have fewer paid subscribers than I did then. So I’m changing the model back — and going further.
Everything free, from today
Every new essay on Predirections is now open to everyone. No paywalls, no locked posts going forward. If you’re here, you get all of it.
Why this and not just a price change
Paywalling some of this content was supposed to help make this venture of mine more sustainable. I spend huge amounts of time writing here because I care deeply about communicating the messages I write about. I care deeply about the world my kids are inheriting. But gating my work did the opposite of what I came here for — it reduced how many people my work reached without actually building financial support. I’d rather keep everything open, and let readers decide what it’s worth to them the way pay-what-you-can already showed me they will.
How to support this, if you want to
Predirections now runs on voluntary support rather than paywalls. If the writing has been useful to you, there are three options:
Community Patron — $20/year ($2/month): An accessible entry point if you want to support open science at a light, low-friction rate.
Supporting Patron — $60/year ($6/month) [Recommended]: The standard rate that keeps this research open and sustainable for everyone.
Founding Patron — $100/year ($10/month): For readers who want to deeply support open-access environmental synthesis.
Supporters at any level get a monthly live Office Hours session with me: an hour of conversation instead of an essay. We’ll chat about recent essays, new research, half-formed ideas; dig into methods and questions; and talk through what’s happening in the field. The first one is next week.
Moving forward
I’ve experimented with a few different models over the last couple of years, but this is the approach that sits most comfortably with me. Writers deserve to get paid for their work, but I would much rather trust you to support this publication than put up a barrier. Every supporting patron helps keep these essays free and open for those who couldn’t otherwise access them.
Predirections exists to make complex environmental data understandable and widely accessible. Removing paywalls gets us back to that core mission.
If you’ve valued being here, I’d appreciate your support at whatever level makes sense for you. And either way — thank you for two and a half years of reading.
Jono
Stick with it. I think Substack will soon offer better options that will make the effort worth it. My thinking is keep writing important information and the rest will eventually follow.
For about 6 months about 12 years ago, I was living Ina small mountain town in South Africa's Easter Cape region. The town was situated in some of the most beautiful forestry in the country, with mountains, and valleys and waterfalls and meadows, and a wonderfully diverse biosphere.
In those 6 monthsI lived with a nature guide. An old man who had grown up in the town and knew pretty much every root of every tree, and every bend in every creek. He had been struggling for years to get the tourists that visited the town to pay set fees for guided walks through the surrounding area, which was a shame, because he was a delightful combination of funny and informative. So I suggested he do the walks for free and let people pay what they thought the walk was worth. Within 3 weeks, he had a waiting list of tourists wanting him for their walks, and every single person paid him between 3 and 10 times what he had previously been charging as a set fee.
Sadly, he passed away last year, but all the money he had made in the last decade went toward conservation societies in the area, and as it turned out, he had made an insane amount of money with the pay-as-you-like walks, enough to support those societies for several years with expanded mandates.
So I obviously think this is the exact right move by you. Good on you.