On Thursday, Andrew Sullivan pronounced himself “somewhat gob-smacked” by readers’ response to his immensely popular blog the Dish leaving the Daily Beast, going independent and charging $ 19.99 a year. The new Dish has raised $ 333,000 in the 24 hours following Sullivan’s announcement, from “nearly 12,000″ readers.
Contributors paid an average of “nearly $ 8″ more than the $ 19.99 minimum. 2,050 people shelled out $ 25; 1,870 rounded up to an even $ 20; and one avid Dishhead paid $ 1,000. Sullivan provides a chart of “the 10 prices that have brought in the most revenue”:
Another chart in the post chart shows that the bulk of the subscriptions — 9,588 of them — were purchased yesterday, the day of the announcement, with a steep dropoff to 1,523 people contributing today. That could be a worrying sign, but also likely reflects the fact that the news of the Dish’s independence spread rapidly around the internet yesterday, with a lot of influential people tweeting their allegiance and signing up. It’s probably not surprising that the number of subscribers dropped off today, but what The Dish will want to see over the coming weeks is at least a trickle of new subscribers every day, with a jump once the Dish moves to its new home at andrewsullivan.com and turns on the meter.
Sullivan notes that “if our goal was an annual income of somewhere around $ 900K (we erred on the safe side), we have gotten a third of the way there in 24 hours.” He writes:
Total number of paid subscribers? Almost 12,000 right now. That’s still only 1 percent of our total monthly readership — so we have plenty of room to talk more of you into subscribing before the meter hits. And the current number is misleading because of that. We really won’t know how effective this is going to be until we actually have the meter in place. That’s the only true measurement of how many readers will eventually pay to read the Dish.
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