Tulio: You can do as you please to monetize your site. I hope it works out for you. Just consider that some people just don’t expect to pay to read blogs and that may depress your readership. There are other ways to monetize a blog besides subscriptions. You can place ads on the site as well. If you get high traffic there’s also sponsored posts. There’s Patreon. You can self-publish a “best of” compendium and sell it as a book on amazon that people can read offline. This is the model these PUA types like Roosh with no real job do for income. They blog about what they like, people read it for free and they live off selling e-books.
Not telling you what to do, just saying that requiring subscriptions in an environment that people expect to be free(and 99.9% of blogs are) could cost you readership. It’s up to you to determine if the reward of subscribers outweighs any risk of losing readers.
I am not requiring subscriptions to use the site. I am requiring them to use the private password protected fora, and there is a huge response to that. I have had ~150-200 people sign up for that. The rest of the site, all 4,000 posts, is 100% free! However, you do need to subscribe if you wish to be a frequent commenter. Frequent commenters must subscribe, but it is only $10, which is nothing, and then you have a lifetime sub.The site has not gone fully subscription. Like m any pay sites, you can use a lot of this site for free, but if you want the full experience or if you want to do certain things, you will have to pay. Many pay sites operate on this exact model.
On the contrary. It has been only six days since going to the subscription model, and traffic has not slowed down at all. In fact, it has gone through the roof. It has exploded from 7,500 hits/day to 12,000 hits/day, but that may be coincidental. I do not expect a major drop in readership just because people have to pay to comment all the time. Comments may drop off, but a lot of people will probably just read and not become regular commenters. How many people are going to refuse to read here just because they cannot comment all the time? Not many.
