Dremmen said:
My suggestion is to do something akin to Audible, the online book service I'm a member of - a monthly membership fee of say $5 or $10, and that in turns gets you credits - 1 or 2 - which can be used to purchase some of ENWorld's varied and useful publications. Some of that larger publications could be split up into parts, each a credit, etc.
Dremmen's suggestion is a sales model that can work for a business. However, I believe it works best if you have a rather large number of products available for people to choose from and products that people will want to keep buying more of. I used to have a "subscription" like this to DAZ, which sells 3D models for rendering. There was always something I wanted to spend my monthly credit on. I could have kept it up for years. I finally ended that subscription, however, because I realized I was purchasing more products than I had time to use. (In fact, I still have models I've never even unzipped because I haven't had the time.)
I own quite a few of the items on the EN Publishing list. From a quick count, something just over 20% of them, actually. (Maybe a little more, once you eliminate duplicate entries and bundles.) However, there are only a couple of items remaining on their list that interest me. So, the monthly subscription with "credits" would be of little use to me because I'd run out of products within a few months. (Depending on pending release schedule.)
This is not to say that such a monthly "credits" model would not work for other people. I believe it would be best suited for people who are new to EN Publishing products and so would have more choices for things that would suit their personal gaming styles.
However, if you went to such a model, I believe it should be in addition to a Community Supporter Account. I'm willing to shell out the $20 per year to support a site a use daily, where as I wouldn't want to shell out $5 per month to both support the site and get a free PDF that might not be useful to me.
There are an additional suggestion that I think might help generate some extra revenue.
Would it be possible to send out coupons for EN Publishing products specifically to Community Supporter Account holders? Or if you don't want to e-mail them ads, you could post a notice on the boards for CSA holders to check their account page because there would be a special link to a discount. The coupons could change monthly or whatever and would both reward those who support the site and perhaps generate some extra sales of the PDFs.