Ken-
Wasn't sure if you meant "10 free articles is too many; why isn't the limit lower, so we can just pay and get it over with?" or if you meant "Why is there a limit at all, why can't I just read everything I want for free?"
The original announcement post for the article limit (with loads of discussion about it in the comments too) is here, if you'd like some perspective:
Changes for Girls Chase in 2013
The TL;DR of it is a paywall allows us to make article writing a sustainable business. If we didn't have a paywall, we'd likely have switched over to just marketing products entirely to cold traffic by now, and let the article side of things die. It's a ton of work to write articles, and not hugely profitable in its own right. Most of the other men's dating advice / PUA blogs have either died (like The Art of Charm, which focuses on its podcast instead) or gone mainstream (like Mark Manson). Gotham Club still maintains an active blog, though every article there turns into a heavy sales pitch. You also have mainstream places like AskMen that can post some good stuff occasionally, but post a lot of fluff, and also usually break their articles up across multiple pages to generate way more ad views as users click through the pages (good for ad views, horrible for user experience, IMO).
The article limit of 10 free articles a month we chose as the industry standard at the time in the news media business. This has fallen to somewhere between 3-5 articles for most metered paywall publications. In truth we should probably lower ours too, and I've had people telling me we should do that since 2013. I kind of hemmed myself in though with "And I guarantee, those 10 articles a month and the new Girls Chase forum will always be completely free." On the one hand, it's very normal for businesses to say "We promise blah blah" and then a few years later the promise is violated. On the other hand, that's not at all normal for me, so I'm loathe to do it. I always see promise violations as the #1 sign a business has shifted from "people-run business that genuinely cares about its connection with its customers" to "system-run corporation that merely exists to maximize shareholder value." Every time I think "we should lower the paywall" I then think "yeah, but I gave my personal guarantee to guys we would not do that." I'm not even sure how many readers are still here who were here in 2013, but I know there's at least a couple thousand.
Anyway, that's where we're at. Backstory, reasoning, logic.
Hope that answers the question.
Chase
