(I'm keeping this sort of pseudonymous to avoid the no-advertising rule. This is more of a discussion.)

A known audio host that has been used by the community for a long time has recently announced that it's going to launch a for-pay tier and that free users will be limited to shorter uploads of 8 minutes. The guy running the host has ordinary monthly bills of ~$400-$500 and sometimes more and ads and voluntary donations/support ads add up to ~$150. The new tier would cost $3 per month or less for a year in advance.

This seems to elicit one of two reactions, but sometimes both simultaneously:

A. Good for him - he deserves to be paid/to not have to foot the bill.

B. Not good for performers or listeners - the community has always been mostly free or people who use it as a hobby.

My reaction to this is a thought experiment. This happened because the guy running the host was either tired of footing, or increasingly unable to foot, the bill each month. GWA has ~1.2 million subscribers and Backstage has ~19000. There's already a way of providing voluntary donations/support each month. What if instead, a few more people had donated?

All the amounts above come out to $600. There's a cut taken by the payment/donation platform which varies and which can be disproportionately larger on small donations, but assume up to 20% or so is gone.

Not everyone can donate, not everyone should donate. Many people quite understandably have other things they need to do with their money, people to clothe and feed and support, family and friends to take care of, personal interests to nurture. Voluntary things should remain voluntary.

That said, I ran the numbers because it looks like if 1 in 8000 people who go to GWA chose to donate $4 once a month, there is a good chance that the audio host in question would not have to foot most of the bill each month and could have continued offering longer uploads to people who do not pay.

There are plenty of people who value having good, free audio hosts around and who can also spare the cost of a coffee shop latte. If you are rubbed the wrong way by the potential consequences of events like these, it's worth thinking about.

Two more things:

1. I do not know if this happening now will put the toothpaste back in the tube. But it will certainly give the opportunity to do so. And this does apply to other audio hosts.

2. I do not think that a for-pay tier is a bad idea. The argument above is not that one shouldn't exist, but that with more headroom, it wouldn't need to exist for the cost of serving all the free uploads to be borne and the limits on free uploads, etc, could be much more relaxed.

And a final thing: so. Can't people just pay for the for-pay and this will sort itself out? Yes, sure, but with a big caveat. At that point, there's already a for-pay tier in place. Those people will then be people the host may be afraid of pissing off by easing the limits for free uploads. Maybe all of them will think it's great, maybe all of them will be mad, and there's no good way to gauge it. This is why I think donations are a lot clearer. And when applied to other hosts, they might not have for-pay tiers yet. (This is currently the case even for this host, since this is just a plan.)