Gumroad Subscriptions Offer Content Creators More Revenue Streams

Gumroad, the web based payment service that makes it super simple to sell digital content and goods, recently announced the launch of its brand new subscriptions feature.  Content creators can use Subscriptions to power a course with daily lessons, a weekly article, a monthly film series, yearly access to a content database, or anything really.

Setting up a subscription on Gumroad is very similar to selling a traditional digital good on the service, except with subscriptions you are not required to upload a file at the start. Instead you just need to specify an incremental monthly (or yearly) price to begin selling the subscription to your audience.

Once you have setup your subscription and service and have people subscribed, you can send updates at whatever frequency you choose. Each of your updates is sent as an email with the ability to add a file attachment (completely optional) that go out to your subscribers.

Obviously there are many possibilities with what you can do — the only real constraint is your imagination. In terms of the stuff you can potentially attach to your updates to subscribers, think: book chapters, film episodes, songs, or other digital content, all downloadable directly from the update email.

Technically you could even use Gumroad to power your own physical good subscription service. Of course that’s provided you have the infrastructure to handle the mailings, etc, Gumroad will take care of the payment portion for you no problem. In that case you can skip the file attachment step and use updates to remind your subscribers that something will be arriving at their doorstep soon.

One site already using Gumroad Subscriptions is Dispatch which sells a monthly subscription for $9/month and gives people access to a bunch of exclusive, royalty-free content for music making platforms. For example, Audio Loops subscribers get a new 24 bit loops pack (drums, percussion, instruments, sound design elements, and more) every Friday.

This new feature by Gumroad is yet another example of the full suite of products Gumroad is building to serve content creators and help them create new revenue streams.  First it was strictly digital goods, then the ability to sell streaming video content, and now subscriptions.  This subscription feature is certainly something I’ll be looking into for BestTechie as we move forward.