Chapter 17: The Stupidest Path (Part I) — An Unsolvable Equation
The "Pay-for-Free" Dilemma in the Free Economy
The previous three chapters completed the dissection of the cost of choice and the structure of the stolen ladder. Chapter 14 addressed why one should still do it; Chapter 15, how heavy the bill is after doing it; Chapter 16, why the bill is so heavy — credential inflation, the collapse of "more work, more reward," and the systemic compression of survival space — three layers stacking into a closed loop.
Having seen all of this clearly, I decided to do one thing: provide deep observations and knowledge for free, and then see how many people would be willing to pay based on the value they themselves recognised.
This sounds like a naïve experiment, or more precisely, like something suicidal. But before getting started, it is worth thinking through one thing first: what has the history of free content told us?
The film industry around the year 2000 provides a case study. At the time, the industry widely believed poor box-office performance was due to rampant piracy: just crack down on piracy and raise quality, and audiences would naturally return to buy tickets. Eventually, streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+ appeared and the piracy problem did ease. But did audiences return? Some did, but in a completely different form — they no longer went to cinemas; they sat on sofas watching all-you-can-eat monthly subscriptions. What the public needed was not "better films" but "more convenient entertainment." These are two entirely different problems.
The gaming industry offers an even more direct example. In 1999, Hong Kong independent developers Marti Wong and Starsky Wong created Little Fighter 2, which accumulated over ten million downloads (download-free-games.com), with excellent word-of-mouth and a CNET rating as one of the best action games. But when the developers tried to charge — merely tens of Hong Kong dollars — large numbers of players preferred to seek pirated copies rather than pay. Ten-million-class users, rock-bottom pricing, near-zero conversion rate. This is not a quality problem; it is a psychological-structure problem: once something has appeared in a free guise, "charging" itself becomes an offence.
So the question is not "whether my content is worth the money" but "in an environment where the expectation of free is deeply rooted, what conversion rate can voluntary payment achieve?" Global data from various creator-patronage platforms has already provided a rough answer: according to the Patreon analytics platform Okoa's 2024 tracking report, the average conversion rate from free members to paid members is approximately 2%, and even though Patreon officially claims that up to 55% of free members are "interested" in paying, the actual conversion rate remains at that figure (Okoa, 2024). A handful of top creators can reach around 10%, but that is the exception, not the norm. This percentage will not significantly improve because your content is better — because what determines payment behaviour is not quality judgement but consumption habits and psychological thresholds.
A Reality More Cruel Than 2%
But that 2% is built on a premise: paid members can access things free members cannot see. Early access, exclusive content, private communities, behind-the-scenes material — Patreon's standard model is a clear value exchange: you pay money; you get extra things. Two percent of people are willing to pay for "extra things."
My model does not even have that.
I do not intend to set up tiered add-ons, put up a paywall, or create "paid-members-only" content. All analyses, all articles — completely free and public. The book is a structured integration of this free content — readers have, in theory, already seen the individual pieces; the book merely rearranges them, adds a logical skeleton, and includes previously unpublished chapters. What you pay for is not "something you cannot see" but for the very existence of "something you have already seen."
This means the conversion rate I face is not 2%; it is far below 2%. Payment is not buying content; it is pure support — approaching donation. And "donating money for something that is free" is psychologically far more difficult than "paying for extra content." The former is a transaction; the latter is a belief.
And there is a third model with a higher conversion rate than either: KOL livestream tipping. When Albert Leung lectures on the I Ching on a livestreaming platform, audiences tip — not because his I Ching interpretation is better than a professor of classical studies, but because he is Albert Leung. The underlying logic of the fan economy is persona monetisation — what audiences pay for is not the price of knowledge but the experience of instant connection with this person. A sales livestreamer selling tens of millions in a single night is not selling the product itself but "I trust this person's recommendation." This model's conversion rate is far higher than Patreon's 2%, because it simultaneously triggers impulse spending and the need for social belonging.
So "converting free to paid" actually has three entirely different models: the first is the paywall model — paying for extra content, conversion rate approximately 2%. The second is the persona model — paying for connection with the creator, conversion rate dependent on persona intensity, potentially very high. The third is the pure-donation model — all content free, payment purely from conviction, conversion rate far below the other two.
I am taking the third path. Not because I reject the first two — livestreaming, developing other revenue channels, these are all possibilities worth exploring beyond writing. But the core is writing. And writing itself, as a business model, is the hardest to monetise: it provides no extra tiered content; it does not rely on persona-based real-time interaction. What it provides is a book, an analysis, an observation — you finish reading and that is it. No members-only area, no private group, no livestream replay.
The mathematics are even more cruel: if the conversion rate is not 2% but 0.5% or even 0.1%, the audience base you need is not tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands or even millions.
0.5 USDT
This equation is not abstract. It runs in my daily life.
Forty-five years old. No title, no fixed income, no company name to present. In Hong Kong, "What do you do?" is the most dangerous question in any social setting. Your identity is your job title — which company, what title, how many people you manage. When your answer is "I write things," the other person's eyes undergo an extremely subtle shift. Not contempt — confusion. In Hong Kong's frame of reference, "writing things" and "doing nothing" are near-synonyms.
In reality, I have written over a hundred thousand words of industry analysis, nearly two hundred thousand words of fiction, built a complete publishing platform, and continuously produced in-depth articles. But none of this can be printed on a business card. And in my tip jar sits 0.5 USDT — roughly enough to buy half a cup of convenience-store coffee. Measured by worldly standards, the past year's output has a negative ROI.
Investment losses. Market downturn. Funds that were expected to buy time instead intensified the pressure to turn a profit quickly. My wife's question — "When will it start to be profitable?" — sounds like it is about money, but what it really asks is: are we safe? Do you know what you are doing? Children need food and things; the husband is betting all his time on something she cannot see yielding results. What she is asking for is not success; she just wants to hear one sentence: even in the worst-case scenario, we will not run out of food.
And those invisible wars fought over hundreds of hours — platform policy changes, algorithm shifts, system rebuilds — no one outside can see them. You build something; the underlying rules change; tear it down and start over. From the outside, your website looks unchanged, but behind the scenes it has been rebuilt who knows how many times. You cannot even explain, because to non-technical ears, these words sound like excuses.
An Equation with No Perfect Solution
The 99%-plus who do not pay are not without value. They are a distribution network. On algorithm-dominated platforms, reach is the scarcest resource. Every share, every recommendation, every "this is worth reading" borrows the algorithm's mechanics to widen the top of the funnel. Free users are not freeloaders; they are your distribution infrastructure. And the scale of infrastructure you need, because you have abandoned the paywall, is an order of magnitude larger than what other creators require.
But there is a loop here.
I have many more books and novels I want to write. If there is no way to derive even a modest income from them, the pace of the entire endeavour slows down. This is not a threat — it is physical reality. I need to spend time earning money to sustain this act of free creation. It is like enjoying building models for others to see; the original intent is not to earn money, purely because you find it fun. But when I write down fiction and industry analysis, it is more like a form of legacy. I feel this must be recorded.
If the traffic is not large enough and the paying supporters are not numerous enough, I must spend more time earning a living first, and only then continue writing. For readers who want to see my work, the result will be like the manga Hunter × Hunter — the author can only draw slowly due to health issues, and to this day Kurapika still has not gotten off the boat. I must emphasise: this is not a threat, nor a situation I welcome; it is the frustration of reality: creation requires time, time requires money, money requires traffic, traffic requires time. Loop.
So expanding traffic is not a question of "want to or not"; it is a question of "do it or stop." And expanding traffic itself takes time — running a YouTube channel, building multilingual distribution channels, getting more people to see this content — each of these is carved out of creation time. When you are doing distribution, you are not writing; when you are writing, you are not doing distribution. This equation has no perfect solution, only different trade-offs.
But mathematics is not the only coordinate system.
If you look only at the numbers, this path should have been abandoned long ago. 0.5 USDT in tips, negative ROI, a nonexistent conversion rate — every indicator tells you: cut your losses. But there is a question beyond numbers that has never been answered: those things you have seen, those structures you have understood, those collapses you have lived through — if you do not write them down, who will?
The mathematics say this path is blocked. But what the mathematics do not know is — what the person walking this path has seen.