i've gotten a couple of emails over the last month or so along the lines of 'why do you charge for wiredparish.com? shouldn't this just be free?'
actually, i expected more than this; so maybe our reasons are generally intuitive to people. but it's probably worth laying out the reasons since i take them to be compelling.
1. your subscription supports our hosts' ministries. at the end of the day, we want our hosts' ministries to thrive. we believe in them and want to support their work for the kingdom of god. a large, large percentage of our revenue is dedicated to supporting our hosts. and we like that!
2. we don't want to be captive to an ad revenue model. if you make money on advertising, you're somewhat at the mercy of advertisers in terms of the messages you're sending. if company x want to advertise with us, but we're not really fired up about what company x does or stands for, we have a tough choice to make.
it's much simpler for us ethically to generate revenue from subscriptions than have to constantly evaluate if the messages of our advertisers is consistent with our views. that's not to say that we won't advertise something we really believe in, but we want that to be a choice, not something we're constrained to do because of our revenue model.
3. our profits support non-profit ministries. i haven't said this before because we weren't ready to say who we were supporting. we have 3 or 4 ministries that we're deciding between now, and i'll let you know when we've decided who to support. but the bottom line is that we are serious about supporting non-profit ministries. it's the right thing to do.
4. this is REALLY good stuff. can i say that? we're very grateful that the production and content quality of our 'casts are as good as they are. our 'casts are NOT recycled versions of last sunday's sermon (with the sounds of a baby crying the sanctuary) or last week's radio broadcast.
there's absolutely nothing wrong with many of the free 'casts out there, but we're doing something different. we're delivering (at the moment) nearly 20 extremely well-produced 'casts a week for $1.25/week from some of the most insightful and profound voices around. AND we're supporting our hosts' ministries. AND we're delivering profits to other ministries. AND i'm about to talk myself into raising the price! :)
keep it lively,
jay
Comments