We're excited to announce the launch of recurring subscriptions!
Creators on Paragraph can now monetize their newsletter with recurring subscriptions that are optionally backed by NFTs. The NFT stays 'active' for as long as the user is paying, granting access to whatever the creator wants - gated content, private Discord communities, and more.
Combining subscriptions & NFTs
Recurring subscriptions have made it easier for creators to build sustainable businesses around their passions. Creators can produce some type of content on a recurring basis - newsletters, art, music - and fans can pay a monthly or yearly fee to get perks including exclusive access.
Web3 primitives, like the NFTs we use for collectible content, introduce an additional revenue stream for creators and a new form of engagement & digital ownership that rewards fans.
With NFT-backed subscriptions, we're combining the best of both worlds: creators can rely on a stream of predictable revenue, while still ensuring they reap all the benefits of NFTs including interoperability, provenance, ownership, composability & more.
Subscriptions Memberships on Paragraph
We're calling this feature memberships instead of subscriptions, since NFTs have excelled at fostering community and increasing engagement beyond just regular web2 subscriptions.
On Paragraph, creators can connect their Stripe account and create any number of membership tiers.
With each membership tier, creators can set:
A monthly and/or yearly price
A description of the membership and list of benefits
An image, used for the NFT
A chain for the NFT to be minted on. We support Optimism and Polygon right now, with more coming soon.
When users subscribe to your newsletter, we'll prompt them to choose a membership tier. After they successfully pay, they can connect their wallet and claim your NFT. (The wallet is added to their Paragraph account, meaning you can also deliver newsletters directly to their wallet!). We airdrop NFTs to the user, meaning they don't need to cover gas to claim.
At any point, readers can visit /@your-publication-name/memberships to subscribe to your newsletter, purchase a paid membership and claim your NFT.
The NFT metadata changes depending on if the holder's paid subscription is currently active or not: attributes are set on the NFT indicating the status (eg 'active' and 'expiresAt') and the NFT name changes if it's expired. Memberships can be used natively on Paragraph for gating; or, you can set up attribute-based gating using guild.xyz for gating elsewhere.
Case Study: Web3Academy
Web3Academy is building a community centered around their newsletter, podcast, and Discord. They offered free and paid subscriptions on Substack. After users purchased a paid subscription, Web3Academy sent them an email containing a link to a Google Form asking readers to input their wallet address so they can manually airdrop them an NFT. This UX and onboarding flow was clunky and error-prone, causing less than 50% of paid subscribers to actually mint the NFT.
When they migrated to Paragraph and began offering paid, NFT-backed memberships, the process was streamlined for them & their users:
NFT minting is part of the checkout flow, meaning conversion rates from purchase to mint are substantially higher
Reader's wallets & emails are connected to their Paragraph accounts, meaning Web3Academy can send wallet-based newsletters and offer other wallet-based incentives (like airdrops)
They can now turn posts into collectibles, giving ownership to their biggest supporters even beyond their paid memberships
Future Improvements
Over the next few weeks we'll be launching crypto-paid recurring memberships. We'll also be adding support for NFT-backed free memberships, letting anyone build a community around their content no matter if it's paid/gated or freely accessible.
Ready to get started?
NFT-backed memberships are usable today by anyone. Read the docs for more info on getting started.
Any questions or feedback? Swing by our Discord, say hello to us on X or Farcaster, or reach out at hello@paragraph.xyz.