I previously probably mentioned that I have had some experience managing an indie blog network. Of course, our revenue depended on advertising, an integral and historical component and pillar of the publishing industry. Advertising allowed us to pay each author for every contributed article. We weren’t the best paymasters in the industry but we offered above average per post rates.

Yet, having all eggs in one basket, that of the Big G mostly, didn’t seem smart to me. Neither did it offer much growth and expansion possibilities in my eyes. The industry has historically been cut-throat and with one tweak in its SERPs Google cut massively affect the traffic to sites and thus their earnings. One of the first things I did when becoming CEO of the network was to expand our offerings beyond blogs, publications.

Within few weeks, months the network had integrated several services which we sold, using the reach and trust the platform had built up. Services offered included — but not limited to — infographic creation, content creation, (whitelabeled) analytics software, WordPress themes, and plugins. We even dabbled with an own advertising platform for bloggers, but our reach was not sufficient to grow that in an actual earner. The fickle thin line between community trust and just not big enough to be able to knock down doors you would like to walk through.

Content is Social Capital

Whether a content creator, writer likes to hear that or not… content is merely social capital. It is art And its value is absolutely in the eye of the beholder. Through history many great publications often have dependent on the ownership — and financial support — of a wealthy family. A situation which continues until this day and also still defines the creation of many a new outlet which manages to reach scale, often in no small part due to volume.

Of course, the ability to be able to reward authors is of utmost importance. Especially if you want to attract the best, which in turn can cause an avalanche effect and attract more authors.

Online, it is rare to find truly stellar content creators who consistently publish and don’t search to make their content transactional. Because, the only real function of your blog — whether self-hosted or on a hosted platform — is building up your own profile.

If you publish on a hosted platform, the platform operator will most likely claim a right to publish your content and aggregate it, as they also need to make their operational costs. More often than not, that license is not to steal your copyright but is about being able to freely promote your content, and even feature the best content created on the platform in order to attract more eyeballs to the platform.

But, your content is most likely only social capital. Your profile, your brand.

Social Capital Content Needs to be Made Transactional

For authors and platforms like Trybe, Medium, Steem, WordPress, Svbtle, and others there are few ways in which content is made transactional.

1. Traffic: A mix of volume and so-called cornerstone content will eventually result in the Big G sending traffic to you
2. Advertising: Given enough traffic to your site, ads can become a main earner but let’s not beat around the bush here. Advertising is the most difficult part of a platform because advertising conversion is poor, ads pay little and are in an almost constant race to the bottom, and the hardest of all: if you have only 10 users/day, it is highly unlikely that your site will hit Adsense’s required payout threshold.
3. [User] Signup Funnel: discovering awesome quality content — or maybe the interesting aspect that one can earn — is a great way for sites to attract users. This applies both to single creators and hosted platforms. A designer writing about their craft may not have members but possibly maintains a mailer (newsletter). Of course, the root of signup conversion starts with… traffic.
4. Services: Once sufficient people discover your content, you are able to sell services. This could be consulting sessions, your freelance services, or as we offered at the blog network SaaS/PaaS (software as a service/platform as a service). Services do require an existing relationship of trust, maybe you don’t think about it that way but your contact form is a trust builder. Services require mostly traffic, not necessarily signed up users because you will undoubtedly discover methods to improve your conversion rate. Depending on your services, and their respective cost, you may need only 10 visitors/month but if that’s your particular situation you are most likely in a very expensive traffic acquisition cost niche.
5. Commerce: Sites/platforms which grow big enough can expand with (e-)commerce opportunities. Of course this does require scale and I highly suggest that you offer more than merch because merch is usually bought only by the hardest fans. Pareto applied several times within Pareto already to reach that 20% which may actually purchase your swag. Of course, this requires users first and thus before that even traffic first.

These are the main methods how social capital — words, AKA content — are made transactional. Without any of those, the words you published online wouldn’t be more valuable — or less — if written on a tree somewhere in the middle of the Amazon or British Colombia. It doesn’t matter whether you wrote the smartest haiku or a 4,000 words history about the marijuana prohibition conspiracy history.

The harsh truth is that unless there is a revenue strategy, rewards for content are philanthropy. Words tied together, in any form, are art.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Creating Token Value out of Crafted Words

I am not the best author. There are hundreds, thousands of authors crawling Craigslist every day and promoting their services on oDesk, Fiverr, and now CanWork. It is a never ending race to the bottom and many master grammar better than I do. They may also be able to work better within guidelines than an old fox like me can. They most likely will charge, or expect, less for vastly better linguistic skills than I would.

Yet, I am rather confident that if I wanted I could land another blogging gig again. A paid gig, not a gig in inflationary down pressure crypto scenes. Think I have the skills required for it?

But I don’t. Maybe, in this altcoin bloodbath, I should but I don’t because it would distract me from focusing on this industry, this newly developing niche within the publishing sector, where everyone rewards everyone. Or everyone has the most democratized opportunity to earn from content yet [let’s forget about Flattr widgets, shall we].

The publishing industry is brutal. For many that means content farm sweatshop alike style of work. It wasn’t very different for authors at Gawker Media. Publish or perish. Up to 16 times/day, because usually only one article out of sixteen would attract sufficient traction on social and contribute to that traffic bonus.

Crypto is brutal and when we look at most chains with “Social Tokens”, we are performing really badly as tokens. Of course, much of that is due to the horrendous culture of users preferring MOAR SHITCOINS over complexity, effort which could potentially increase the value of a token 30-40x. Crossposting is MOAR SHITCOINS thus a good thing, right? Irrespective of it being a big factor contributing to the SHIT in SHITCOINS.

MOAR SHITCOINS is MOAR DUMPING is MOAR PROFITS, said no economist ever.

Despite earning probably only peanuts of what I could in any other online publishing gig, I love being a part of this new niche and look forward to discover whether the tokens, and their respective teams and communities, will come up with true innovation. Because, while I like new approaches like currently on Publish0x, they are merely an adaptation to the ads model. A smart adaptation but not fully innovative. Yet novel.

TL;DR

Next time you look at the value of your TRYBE, your STEEM, your whichever token earned for content submitted and think you’re wasting your time… remember that those platforms have to do what no publishing era has yet managed: create value which does not rely on philanthropy and ads.

Note: I don’t think ads are necessarily bad. But, of course, more often than not they can contribute to the operational cost of the leading team but only rarely will their revenue scale to genuine, genuinely interesting token value. And, if they did, then maybe you are actually an ads dapp, not a publishing platform. 😉