http://daringfireball.net/2006/05/goal

Atoms vs. Bits

Just like in past membership drives, most of the revenue is coming from t-shirt sales. At SXSW this year, I spoke on a panel about making money from weblogs, and one of the main points I emphasized is that people are more willing to spend money for atoms than for bits. I.e. people will happily pay for things they can actually hold in their hands, but you can’t touch ones and zeroes.

Despite the fact that the reason you fine readers are buying these shirts is that you want to support my work, I don’t think I’d be nearly as successful if I were only asking for donations or selling memberships.

This isn’t criticism; it’s just an observation about human nature. It’s why so many honest people aren’t at all reluctant to download bootleg media files from file-sharing services. I see it in myself, too. When The New York Times put their op-ed columnists behind a for-pay subscription service on their web site earlier this year, I was very reluctant to pay the $50 annual subscription fee even though I read their op-ed columnists, on the web, almost every single day of the year.

There’s a big difference between The Times’s TimesSelect system and my membership system at Daring Fireball, which is that I’m keeping all of my article content freely available to the public, whereas the only way to read The Times op-ed columnists is to pay for a TimesSelect account. I’m just pointing out that $50 a year isn’t a lot of money for something I read at least 300 times per year — it works out to like 15 cents a day — but yet I was reluctant to sign-up because it just didn’t seem right to have to pay for something to read on the web.