Going Paid Party - Critical Consent Now Offering Paid Subscriptions

Important update for all subscribers about this exciting milestone for the newsletter

First of all, thank you so much for reading this newsletter, liking and sharing my posts, and supporting me. Whether you have been with me since the beginning, or have just joined, I am glad to have you here. That is why I am so excited to share this new development for the Critical Consent newsletter: I am going to start offering paid subscriptions!

What does this mean for your subscription going forward? In a nutshell, most of the existing content will remain freely accessible to all subscribers, paid or not. This is because I think access to honest and factual information is crucial if we want to meet the vast challenges of our time, like the breakdown of the Earth’s natural environment and antiquated political systems that are unable to serve our common interests. Paid subscribers will get extra perks and bonus content, and shall help sustain this newsletter so that it remains accessible to everyone.

If you're a long-time subscriber, you may have noticed you have been getting more posts in your inbox the past few months. This is the result of some new developments in my life, which I talked about in this post. Because of this shift I managed to make in my work/life balance and way of thinking, you can now expect a new post about once every two weeks. This also means that the newsletter has now reached the point where I can start offering paid subscriptions, feeling confident that I can offer you not only something of value, but offer it with more consistency. In this post, I'm going to explain what this means for the future of this newsletter, and for your subscription.

I recently updated the About page on my Substack—as well as the welcome email that is sent to new subscribers—so that it better explains my motivations and the main aims of this newsletter. I highly encourage you to check it out in full, but I am going to share this fragment with you here:

"As my reader, I want you to understand why I’m doing this and why I know that what I write about has value, so I will tell you why I write in the first place. Why I have always been writing. I write because I want to reach people. I want to share as much as I can about the all the wonderful things on this Earth. I want to inform them about the problems facing our society. Problems that need fixing. Above all, I want to inspire everyone to do their best every day to make our planet even better, for ourselves, for each other, and for the generations to come. Together, let us try and reach as many people as we can, to make our society more informed, equitable, and filled with love for one another."

The reason why I have been doing this, and why I am going to keep doing this, is to provide you with information, reported with transparency and honesty. Not to convince you of any narrative, or of certain opinions, but as part of an honest search for the truth, or as close as we can get to it (Read more on this newsletter's editorial/ethical policies on the newly updated About page).

Paid versus free subscriptions
So what does this mean for your subscription going forward? Since I believe that access to information should be universal, no matter how much money you have, I want to keep as much of my content as accessible as possible. As a paid subscriber, that means that your contribution is going to fund my work and ensure that this newsletter can reach and inform more people. In the longer term, as the subscriber base grows, this hopefully also means that I can offer you much more content, as well as different formats.

Besides that warm fuzzy feeling you will get from knowing your contribution will help other people enjoy this newsletter, you will also be getting some perks.
The biggest one is gaining access to bonus content on my posts. What this means will differ on a post-to-post basis, but it could be extra sources, analyses, or information that did not make it into the final article. Or it could be a personal note, in which I share some extra insights or experiences. I usually have way more to share than fits inside a single post, so this is an excellent way to offer you more without offering free subscribers less.
Additionally, I'm planning to write you a monthly update on what is going on in my life. This could be thoughts, insights, struggles, or whatever else I want to share with you. I want these posts to be part of a broader discussion in which we can exchange our thoughts in a more personal way, so that is why I am offering this as a service to paid subscribers. However, open topic-based discussions, using the Substack chat, are something that I am seriously considering.

This entire project has been an interesting journey that has consistently managed to exceed my own expectations. I have a lot of ideas for things to write about, and I am not afraid to experiment a little here and there, or to change course if something is not working. If this newsletter keeps growing, I will be able to offer you more content, varied formats, and whatever else my crazy brain might come up with. I promise to keep you informed of changes to the newsletter or the subscriptions and to explain the underlying rationale as transparently as possible.

To give you an idea of what you can expect from supporting this newsletter through a paid subscription, you will be seeing everything a paid subscriber will see from now until the end of April. During this time, you will have access to the bonus content that is offered to paying subscribers, and will be able to comment on the monthly update I’m going to offer to paid subscribers. You will get a 10% discount on a 5$ monthly subscription if you subscribe before 8 May. Since all content is freely accessible during the month April, your subscription will be extended by the number of days you would have got for free. If you’re buying an annual subscription (discounted from 50$ to 45$) and you’re also buying another one for someone else, you will both get a 40% discount instead. To do this, select Group instead of Individual during the purchasing process.

Let me know if you are as excited about these changes as I am, and what you would like to see going forward. If you're still on the fence about a paid subscription, let me know why. Random thoughts are also welcome (probably). Send me an e-mail at criticalconsent.substack@pm.me.

I also invite you to give your opinion on some of the changes that I am still considering, but that I won't be implementing as of yet, like:
-Limits on older posts (3 months or older), so that most of these are only accessible to paid subscribers. 
-Limiting comments to paid subscribers. This is mainly a spam consideration, although it hasn't been a serious issue so far.
-Cross-posting other authors' posts if I think they could be of interest to you.

Who knows what the future might bring. That is why I believe that we can all have a meaningful impact in shaping it. For my part, I hope to see you there with me.

So let’s open up a bottle of champagne, and celebrate this Going Paid Party!

~Robert