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Notes -
Why do so many Substack writers paywall their articles. This makes no business sense. Nothing should be paywalled except for inside baseball stuff, or things that have no general appeal or viral potential. Almost 100% of of people who subscribe, if I had to estimate, do so out of support for the author and the values he or she represents, not for gated or exclusive content. Paywalling content limits viral potential and new readers. Removing the paywall will maybe only cause 1% of people to unsubscribe. It will not slow down the acquisition of subs either. It would be the opposite. There are times when I wanted to share a substack article but cannot because it has a paywall half way through just as it is building up, which will obviously annoy the reader.
I think your estimate is wrong, and many subscribers do so because they want to read the private pieces. Just intuitively, you'll want to see pieces from an author you like that you can't see, and that'll push you to subscribe. My general impression from web content creators is that support from the goodness of consumers' hearts pays much less well than tangible benefits for paying. I guess if you're thinking about ACX, there are't that many ACX private pieces and they're not particularly important, and scott still makes money. But he's kind of an outlier there - most (eg freddie) have significant parts of their output private, and some (e.g. matthew yglesias) have most posts private. Some business/finance substacks are entirely private. Sure, failures of whole marketplaces to do obvious things aren't unprecedented, but I think the simple explanation is better.
It's likely that your best content shouldn't be paywalled, so people can share it and bring you new readers (and the company agrees). But I'm pretty confident having some posts paywalled is good for subscription numbers - intuitively, based on substack's promotion of the paywall, and based on how many creators use the paywall.
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