One thing I hear from many of you is that while you understand that we now restrict some of our posts to members only you’d still like to share them with friends or colleagues who are not members. That totally makes sense – both for you and also for us since we want to bring new readers into the TPM world. We hope to make it one of the features we add to your membership next year. Let me explain some of our thinking.
First, as you know, I put an increasingly large number of my posts as members-only. The thinking is pretty straightforward. We want and need more regular readers to become members. And that’s a basic way of driving those sign ups. We know that comes with limiting the reach of some of things we publish. But that’s in the nature of building a viable and vital business model that can help TPM thrive.
That’s one of the reasons I apply that most aggressively to things I write. For the same reason we keep virtually all of our original reporting available to the public and plan to keep it that way.
We’re a small operation with a long backlog of tech projects, many of which we have to put first because they’re critical for revenue reasons or keeping the site online. But we hope to add a feature like this in 2020.
Basically, you’d be able to share a one time link either via email or some other kind of sharing. So your friend or work colleague or daughter or father can read the piece that is behind our paywall. But it only works for that one person. So it can’t be shared on social media in ways that defeat the purpose of having the paywall in the first place.
