Presented by Stripe

I cancelled my subscription. I tolerate advertising on free products, but find it pretty distasteful when I'm already paying $15/month. This reeks of trying to extract every last piece of value from the customer.

> Can I skip the ads if I’m a subscriber?

> No. Like I said above, Stratechery is a business, and it’s the quality of my audience that makes this deal possible. Moreover, Stratechery has never promised to be ad-free: what I am selling is access to my paid content, and it’s on me to make that content worthwhile.

This is disappointing. As a long-time Stratechery subscriber, and someone who cares a little too much about where my time and attention is spent, I go out of my way to pay for the ad-free tier for almost all the content I regularly consume.

After years of reading Ben’s arguments in favor of advertising, I was finally starting to come around to his point of view. This announcement, though, leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

I think Ben’s own distinction between lean-in and lean-back engagement is particularly relevant here. When I’m mindlessly scrolling Instagram, an ad for an interesting product is just as welcome a diversion as the wedding photos of some long-forgotten acquaintance. But when I’m reading Stratechery, I’m deliberately giving a subject my attention, hoping to come away with some new insight. An ad for Stripe in the middle of that experience serves as a distraction and decreases value rather than increasing it.

And, in the spirit of Ben’s own disclosures, I should mention that I recently joined a company that competes with Stripe. Make of that what you will.

Cancelling my auto-renew. We will see how it goes, but paying 150USD a year for a blog that USED to be independent when I decided to pay for it feels pretty bad.

Weird announcement, and it's pretty explicitly stated to be financially motivated.This feels like a slippery slope. Presented by stripe for now, presented by whomever pays more than stripe soon.

As a subscriber, this makes the offering significantly worse. Hopefully Ben priced in the cancellations correctly.

> Do I get anything out of this deal? > > This is the part I’m most excited about: I am going to invest the revenue from this deal into making more and better products.

I mean you do you but this whole line of argument just seems kinda insulting to readers? "Yeah I am planning on making even more money but it's really for your benefit"

Rather just say that you're doing it to make more money? When mcdonalds puts up their prices they say it's for shareholder profit not "we'll be using our increased profits to develop new mcNewThings"

So much for independent journalism.

This was a whole lot of "here's why Stripe giving me a boatload of cash is awesome for me," and not very much "here's why it's awesome for you, my paying customer."

I figured he was angling for a buyout with jacking prices up and all but eliminating free stuff. Can't really blame him for wanting to retire from tech if that's his goal once the required "pretend I'm still in it" phase ends. Things are getting weird.