subscription

A subscription is a standing charge, not a purchase. The fan pays once a month and, for as long as the payment clears, he can see whatever the creator posts on her account. Stop paying and the feed closes again. That is the difference from a PPV, and it is worth stating plainly because the two get mixed up constantly: a PPV is one file, sold once, to one person, inside a private thread, and it stays unlocked forever. A subscription is access to a place for a period, sold on the same terms to everybody who walks in.

What does a subscription actually open?

The feed, plus a door to the inbox. Nothing that carries its own price.

• Everything posted on the account while the subscription is live, including posts published before the fan joined and still on the profile.
• A direct message thread with the creator, open for as long as the subscription is.
• No locked content. PPVs, bundles and custom orders are all charged again, on top.

So a subscriber is a reader with an open channel, not a customer. He has paid for entry, and on most accounts entry is the cheapest thing on sale.

What are the levels of access on an account?

Three, and the subscription sits in the middle.

Level	What the fan pays	What it opens
Free page or follow	nothing	public posts and teasers
Subscription	a recurring monthly fee	everything posted on the account
Paid item (PPV, bundle, custom)	one price per item	that item, permanently

The ladder matters more than any single rung. A fan who never climbs past the middle row is a fan the account earns the same fixed amount from every month, whatever else happens in the conversation.

Why does a subscription renew without being renewed?

Because the fan authorised a repeating charge when he joined, not a single one. The setting that does it is auto-renew. Cancelling stops future charges; it does not usually cut access before the paid period runs out, so a cancelled subscriber still shows up in the subscriber count for weeks. This is why two figures never match: subscribers today, and subscribers who will still be paying next month.

The rate at which they leave is churn; the share who stay is retention. Both are measured on the same base, and both move for reasons that have nothing to do with the price of the subscription.

What is subscription income actually worth?

It is the floor of the account, not the total. It is the one line that arrives without anyone writing a message that month, which makes it the easiest revenue to forecast and the easiest to over-read: a full subscriber list is a list of people who have paid to be reachable, not a list of buyers.

That is also why the moment a fan subscribes is a beginning, not a close: a subscriber list is a list of people who have paid to be reachable, and nothing has been sold yet. What to charge for the entry itself is a separate decision, covered in pricing your content.