Monetization seems to be quite neglected in this wave of self-published content. I am with you that writers who want to monetize their work absolutely should be in power to do so.
I think a big part of why monetization is neglected is because it’s tricky do right. No one likes being subjected to tons of tracking scripts or hitting a paywall for the content they’re browsing. On the other hand, how do you make money from people if your content is completely free to browse.
Of course anyone can slap Google-ads on their website to generate some money from their traffic. However, for the indieweb to grow I believe there needs to be a healthy discussion on how to ethically monetize your content.
I read something lamenting that Substack is taking off for this–unhappy that it’s email instead of the web. Myself, I’m just happy Substack publishes RSS feeds for its newsletters, so it works for me. The more web-native version would be Patreon. Patreon’s a silo, for sure–so I’m curious what the self-hostable versions would look like (integrate with Stripe/Square kind of stuff?). I think Ghost is trying to do stuff in this space, but I’ve heard complaints that it’s really finicky to self-host.
Monetization seems to be quite neglected in this wave of self-published content. I am with you that writers who want to monetize their work absolutely should be in power to do so.
I think a big part of why monetization is neglected is because it’s tricky do right. No one likes being subjected to tons of tracking scripts or hitting a paywall for the content they’re browsing. On the other hand, how do you make money from people if your content is completely free to browse.
Of course anyone can slap Google-ads on their website to generate some money from their traffic. However, for the indieweb to grow I believe there needs to be a healthy discussion on how to ethically monetize your content.
I read something lamenting that Substack is taking off for this–unhappy that it’s email instead of the web. Myself, I’m just happy Substack publishes RSS feeds for its newsletters, so it works for me. The more web-native version would be Patreon. Patreon’s a silo, for sure–so I’m curious what the self-hostable versions would look like (integrate with Stripe/Square kind of stuff?). I think Ghost is trying to do stuff in this space, but I’ve heard complaints that it’s really finicky to self-host.