How to ask for paid subscribers when it's a bad time to ask for paid subscribers

Is it a bad time to ask for paid subscribers?

This is the wrong question.

When your audience supports your livelihood, the question is not “is it a bad time?” but instead “how should we ask for paid subscribers right now?”

The founding team behind Aftermath gets that.

They just wrapped Inside Baseball week, a subscriber drive they started last year, where they take their readers inside games journalism and behind the scenes of their own business.

I’ve been seeing all the live updates on Bluesky as they’ve been racking up new subscribers so I reached out to Aftermath co-founder Riley MacLeod to ask how the week went from the team’s point of view.

In today’s issue, I share what’s so smart about how Aftermath runs this drive—especially when it’s never a good time to ask for paid subscribers—and what we can learn from them.

This is INSIDE Inside Baseball.

In partnership with Josh Spector ✒️ 

Writing sales copy is different than writing editorial content.

Josh Spector knows this well as a journalist who transitioned into digital marketing over a decade ago. Now, Josh coaches creatives (and journalists) on how to use content marketing to drive sales.

If your promos aren’t working so great, you might want to work with Josh. Check out his super affordable program Clients from Content or ask him about private coaching. And tell him I sent you!

What happens during Inside Baseball week

Aftermath launched in November 2023, led by five co-founders who had previously worked together at publications like Kotaku, Motherboard, Launcher and The Verge.

Gita Jackson, Riley MacLeod, Nathan Grayson, Chris Person and Luke Plunkett started Aftermath to breathe new life into games journalism through a worker-owned model.

I first learned about them a few months later when they ran the first Inside Baseball week in March 2024.

I immediately loved the premise of Inside Baseball for two reasons:

1) I don’t think journalists are running enough dedicated promotions on how to pay them

2) Tying a subscriber drive to a fresh editorial angle is smart publishing

It’s a great example of journalists leveraging their unique skillset to pull off a promotion that marketers would never have come up with.

Inside Baseball made its return this past week and it was another big success for Aftermath.

Let’s look at what went into this campaign:

• Stories: The most important part of Inside Baseball is what gets produced. Aftermath released 17 “Inside Baseball” stories in 10 days and they made sure to remind subscribers that their dollars fuel faster, better, more frequent publishing.

• Milestones: A list of rewards that all subscribers unlock as the subscriber base gets bigger. They started this last year and have kept up this practice of updating the numbers, both on the website and frequently on social media.

• Newsletters: One dedicated promotion email announcing the start of Inside Baseball and 4 big plugs inside regular newsletter editions.

• Website call outs: Inside Baseball got a whole big section on the homepage and its own tag so you could filter the stories.

• Livestreams: Aftermath already streams regularly on Twitch but they did a special stream with fellow worker-owned publishers for Inside Baseball, which they later released on their podcast “Aftermath Hours.”

• Bluesky (and Twitter): The whole team (and Aftermath’s freelancers) were super active daily updating milestones, promoting stories and engaging with fans.

Yeah, it’s a lot. But it does take your readers a minute to get caught up to what you’re doing so repetition across channels always helps when you can swing it.

The goal of this year’s Inside Baseball was to encourage regular readers to become paying subscribers so the Aftermath team also made them a limited offer: 20% off their first year (on a monthly subscription.)

I asked co-founder Riley why they did the sale on the monthly price instead of the annual and he said:

Last year’s Inside Baseball didn’t include a sale because Aftermath was still freshly cruising off launch momentum.

They did run a birthday sale ($1 for first month) in November that brought in hundreds of new subs. Luke Plunkett, also a co-founder of Aftermath, said the team was hesitant about “devaluing” subscriptions by running sales, but their sales have been successful for getting and keeping subscribers so sounds like we can expect more of them.

In partnership with Outpost 🪐

Want to run your own sale? Outpost can help.

Outpost makes it easy to add a special offer into both automations and one off campaigns.

So if you decide to offer your longtime readers a $1 first month promo like Aftermath did, you can create it and embed it in a campaign within seconds. You can also segment your audience with more fine tuned controls than Ghost gives you out of the box.

And if your sale works? You can automate it with Outpost too!

Just another excellent way Outpost is making you money while you focus on publishing great work.

If you’re thinking about using Outpost OR if you’re just getting started over there, I’m running free office hours through May to offer you personalized recommendations.

How Inside Baseball went this year compared to last year

Aftermath now has more than 4500 paying subscribers.

A pretty incredible feat for a publication less than 2 years old run by just 5 people.

This year’s Inside Baseball drove more than 150 new subscribers. Last year’s brought in around 300.

One thing no one tells you about running your own publication is that, as time goes on, it gets harder (not easier) to bring in a bunch of new subscribers at once. Launch excitement (and related press) will typically drive your biggest bump in paying readers because your most dedicated fans all join at once.

So, while it’s always nice to surpass that number, it’s not easy to top your own launch.

I would consider 150+ new subscribers in a few days pretty damn good and, as Riley pointed out, it being tax week and hell year probably had some effect too. I KNOW I SAID TIMING DOESN’T MATTER. IT DOES A LITTLE BIT OK.

One of the coolest things that came out of Inside Baseball this year though was less quantifiable: the fan testimonials.

Aftermath is really hitting their stride in terms of cultivating a loyal, supportive base and it shows in how many people stepped up this week to cheer on Inside Baseball, the publication as a whole and the team as individuals too.

Home runs of Inside Baseball week

I know you’re looking at this list of what Aftermath pulled off thinking…that sounds like a lot of work Lex…and it is.

Here’s three winning plays that I think made Inside Baseball week such a hit.

Public milestones

Hands down one of the most brilliant things Aftermath has shipped: their public milestones of rewards that the whole subscriber base unlocks as it gets bigger.

Why is this so smart? Because it enlists your current subscribers in the cause to get MORE subscribers. You’re not the only beneficiary of your growth, your fans are too.

Co-founder of Aftermath Nathan Grayson does frequent updates of the milestones on social media and they get tons of quote posts from Aftermath’s readers telling others to subscribe.

Really good stories

This one’s tough to copy. Aftermath published an exceptional batch of stories alongside their subscriber drive.

Riley said that Luke’s story about AI being forced on game developers and what’s happening at major games outlets right now were big hits. Aftermath is not afraid to stare the industry in the face and call out all its flaws plainly, and with receipts, like Gita Jackson’s killer piece on the bad incentives driving so much of 2010s journalism.

All the Inside Baseball stories made multiple rounds in my feed, not just from the Aftermath team, but from gaming industry pros, journalists and readers in general.

Riley pointed out that this high level of editorial quality is only possible due to their reader-backed, worker-owned model:

The fans clearly agreed because they were sharing the Inside Baseball articles like crazy and adding their own commentary about why these stories mattered.

Engaging the fans

Speaking of the fans, Aftermath prioritizes talking with them daily. This can’t be easy because not only do they have comments on their site and comments on social media, they also run a private Discord for their paying subscribers.

Riley mentioned that they recently found a tool called Postpone that makes the social media side faster, in particular scheduling threads and replying to readers.

During Inside Baseball week, the whole team is teasing stories, replying to questions, reposting each other, reposting fan posts. It drives a ton of buzz for both their subscription and their stories.

If you steal one thing from Aftermath, let it be this.

Talk to your fans daily.

You thought I was gonna say public milestones? Well, yeah I’d steal that too, but if you only take one thing away from Aftermath’s Inside Baseball week, it should be that treating your readers like the wealth of knowledge, support and amplification they are is a long lasting strategy that will serve you well from opening day until you hang up your cleats.