An update about Out-Of-Pocket

Hello there! I appreciate everyone that’s been reading, sharing, and sending feedback about Out-Of-Pocket. It’s crazy to think there are now nearly 6,000 of you on this newsletter - I really didn’t think this was going to resonate with so many people.

One of the main reasons I started Out-Of-Pocket was to make it more accessible for people to understand how healthcare worked in a more fun way, even if they aren’t in healthcare currently. To that end, my goal is to have a free tier of the newsletter forever. Hopefully by the time I die, GPT-69 can just train itself on my old posts and keep spitting them out.

I’m thinking through some different monetization strategies - and one of them will be advertising.

Before you skewer me and call me a sellout, I’m going to try advertising slightly differently though. I think the main problem with ads is that the ads themselves are terrible, intrusive, and generally not relevant to the audience they’re actually sent to.

I plan to actually make interesting ads that are fun to read as sponsored posts. They’ll look a bit more like analyses - clear cut and understandable about what the product is and even include pros/cons of the product and company.

My rules for ads are going to be:

• I’m not going to do any ads for products I don’t personally believe in
• I’m not going to do any ads that wouldn’t be relevant for this audience
• You will understand exactly what the company does by the end of the ad
• I’m going to paint as objective of a picture as I can about the company (e.g. how it compares to alternatives, tradeoffs picking this specific solution, bring any reviews of the product/service that would be relevant, etc.)

I’m in the camp that good products are worth giving attention to, and unfortunately these good products now have to compete for attention with a bunch of bad products (who usually have more $ to deploy for attention).

I also think publishers should actually care about the ads that get displayed with their brand instead of outsourcing that to third-party ad network.

So hopefully you won’t freak out when you see sponsored posts going forward! It’ll help me keep the free tier available to everyone and I think you might actually like some of these ads. I’ll give a disclaimer for all of the sponsored posts.

If you’re interested in advertising on Out-Of-Pocket and you’re willing to play by the rules above, let me know! You can email me at nikhil@outofpocket.health.

Thinkboi out,

Nikhil aka. “my landlord does not accept ‘social capital' as rent payment'“

Twitter: @nikillinit

IG: @outofpockethealth