On The Verge's paywall

Yesterday, The Verge launched its paywall-esque thing.

It's not truly a paywall in the traditional sense. Rather, it's a membership that comes with a bunch of perks. Nilay Patel explains it like so (I had to use the dev tools to copy this quote, as text selection is turned off? What the actual fuck?):

At the same time, we didn’t want to simply paywall the entire site [...] So we’re rethinking The Verge in a freemium model: our homepage, core news posts, Decoder interview transcripts, Quick Posts, Storystreams, and live blogs will remain free. [...] Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall, but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay. Subscribers will also get full access to both Command Line and Notepad, our two premium newsletters from Alex Heath and Tom Warren, which are packed full of scoops every week.

Some thoughts:

• The Verge is one of my favorite websites right now.
• I'd argue The Vergecast is one of the best tech podcasts out there.
• Their pricing is smart, and I'm annoyed I didn't think of it when we launched overkill Premium. $7 and $50 looks so much better than the $7 and $70 we picked. It feels like you're actually saving money.
• It is wild that a membership won't get rid of all ads. Our membership gets rid of ads, but I guess this is where the industry moving right now, see Netflix, Disney+, etc.
• Full RSS feed alone is worth the cost to me.
• Why can't I get their magazine when I live in Europe?

I'm still on the fence about getting a yearly sub (though I'm leaning towards yes), mostly because I'm too close to subscription burnout. But I'd really love that magazine.