Ask Paul: May 2 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This has been a momentous week, for our industry, but also for me. So let's get the weekend started early: We fly home from Mexico City in the morning and there's still so much to do.
? Yet another subscription service
helix2301 asks:

Paul there has been a lot talk about different subscriptions on site this week due to pocketcast drama. I know myself I’m still grandfather in pocketcast. I’m alpha member on thurrott still grandfathered in at $42 dollars year. My question is have you ever thought of changing your pricing models. I know you offer a few different pricing models. Any thoughts changing site and moving to something like memberful just asking not saying the site should change. Memberful would made it easier if it was around when thurrott launched remember all the crazyness with the premium FRD in the beginning and feed not working. Good times :)

I haven't looked at Memberful specifically, but yes, I've been thinking a lot about the future and what this might look like. I can't claim to have specific plans here, but I feel like continued change is inevitable.

To start at a high level, I'm sure I've written at some point about retirement and how this isn't really a concept that applies to me. I'm a writer, not a coal miner, so I should be able to write for as long as I want, and I feel like being engaged in this fashion is healthy long-term. I'm not going to sit on a chair on the beach with a drink in my hand. But I may sometimes sit on a chair on the beach with a laptop and get some work done. That's the nice thing about this job. I can do it from anywhere.

Lower-level, when we transitioned Thurrott.com from George to me (or, for legal reasons, to a new company called Thurrott LLC that is basically me), I made a number of changes tied to streamlining the backend we have, which lowered the cost of doing business and made it more viable as a standalone operation. Since then, I've done nothing in regard to marketing or sales or whatever and have pretty much coasted in a business sense. Not out of laziness, but because I'm fundamentally just a writer and not a business person, and this isn't where my head is at.

This year, we've endured two episodes that speak to a common dynamic in business in which one typically reacts to problems as they occur rather than somehow magically predicting them and working to prevent them ahead of time: YouTube without warning or good reason took away our access to the service back in January, and then we had the fun little site outage yesterday and were down for the better part of a day for the first time in, I think, years. Years ago, I suffered some data loss on a PC and observed that people typically get backup religion when they lose data. These two events were reminders of that.

In the case of the site outage, we lost about a day and a half's worth of uploaded content (articles and perhaps forum posts), and then there was a related issue in which comments--which are...