Thought about this a bit last night and came to the conclusion that it's actually a brilliant idea. $2.99 is a small enough amount that most of his loyal fans will pay it without hesitation. If you look at it from an annual perspective, each person who signs up is going to lay out $35.88 in the first year.
If he can get just 1,000 to sign up, that's just shy of $36k per year.
Check out these numbers - left column is number of subscribers and right column is annual income for that number of subscribers:
1,000 = $36,880
1,500 = $53,820
2,000 = $71,760
2,500 = $89,700
5,000 = $179,400
7,500 = $269,100
I don't know if he'd ever reach 7500 paid subscribers, but when you consider that he's got 1.2 million fans on FaceBook....it would appear that this tweet secret thing is going to prove quite lucrative for Mr. Portnoy.
Kind of humorous to see him squirming a bit on FaceBook trying to rationalize charging money today for something he's been providing at no charge for the last decade or so....as quite a few of his fans are not exactly thrilled with this new paywall he's thrown up.
That said, I don't blame him at all for doing this. He's got to earn and I'm pretty sure that being in Transatlantic isn't much of a living.