About that damn paywall

• Apr 18, 2018 • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

I’m in a bit of a mood about the paywall today. All my nice new content about dry needling is behind the PainScience.com paywall, and it’s making me queasier than usual.

Unfortunately, I have to lock some premium content up back there. I have to sell books, or the lights go out. It’s the only viable alternative to running ads on PainScience.com … which I will never do, because “lousy ads are ruining the online experience,” and I do not want to contribute to that, no matter how much money I’m leaving on the table. Which is quite a lot: I have the traffic I need to sell out in that way. I just couldn’t sleep at night.

Ads make me grumpy. Paywalls make me grumpy. But paywalls make me slightly less grumpy than ads.

So paywall it is … which means that a lot of good stuff is unavailable to most of my readers, which is a bitter pill. I’m a writer—I like attention. I want to write stuff and flaunt it, not hide it away from 90% of my readers!

Which is why I share some excerpts here — in an ephemeral, limited fashion that isn’t going to kill book sales. 😉