Collaboration, community pay system

Ideas
1

This is a feature idea. Please comment, give ideas and suggestions. I’m tagging @Kevin here because I get the feeling that he is intimately involved with the ‘membership’ feature being developed.

Medium’s business model is interesting, can be frustrating, and there is room for us to learn from what they have achieved. The same can be said for Wordpress.

Wordpress did a good initial job of incorporating a way for readers to find and consume others content (pingbacks for example). Medium, at least rhetorically, does a good job at curating content you want to read and allocating membership payments to the authors that subscriber enjoys via their ‘clap’ system.

There is no reason why Ghost bloggers couldn’t opt-in to a similar setup. Not a clone of these features, but an improvement. How?

  1. Ghost is a 5013c. Medium is a for profit company. This means that, at least on paper, more of a users … contributions, payments, tips … would go towards the contents creators.

  2. Ghost could, if they wanted to, take a smaller portion of those ‘tips’ than medium, presumably.

  3. This system is the default model on Medium - it could be optional on Ghost.

One method to pay for your websites purposes may be the new ‘membership’ setup. A portion of this system could be an alternative payment model similar to what medium has/is doing. So, as an author on your site you could choose between the following

  1. Free. no membership payments required
  2. Membership payments required
  3. Some mixture of a payment that is then dispersed on a like system to other content creators.

I think an interesting approach here would be how granular you could get with the micropayment system. Medium presumably allows those micropayments to go to the content creators, but what about the commenters?

This type of setup could also give some new options for multi-author websites. For example: Statistics could show us whos content has more traffic. Always good to know. But, a micro-payment, content-liking system would turn that into an entirely new … something

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I don’t think it at all is their intention to bill content creators any more than they have to. Remember that Ghost is open-source (5013c), and as far as I understand, all services available to pay for (Ghost Pro) goes towards keeping the whole Ghost atmosphere running.

The cherry on top for such a system would be if Ghost made a page on their website showcasing membership content (with an extra opt-in for all creators). Almost like the App Store or YouTube, where you sort of browse a catalog of amazing content from categories.

Just a thought. I’ll be following the process closely! :ok_hand:

1 Like
3

‘to bill content creators any more than they have to’

can you clarify if your speaking about ghost here or medium?

My point with that statement was that because Medium is a for profit company, and ghost is a non profit, ghost could technically take less of a transaction fee for each payment … if you will. Hope that makes sense.

If I visit your ghost blog and like your content - how do I express that? How do I compensate you for your efforts? With Medium that pathway is defined.

4

I’m talking about Ghost. They literally run off the Ghost(Pro) subscriptions.

Well it’s not for sure they can’t, if they need to sustain their development of it all.

Yes I agree, it would be nice if there was a way to do it. And there is, but you would have to set it up yourself.

1 Like
5

One interesting aspect to keep in mind is that this type of micro-payment setup doesn’t necessarily require a centralized account system where all users are somehow tied back to ghost or some central platform. How?

Both likes and micro-payments could very easily be managed by a cryptocurrency type setup, possibly built off of an already established base to which there are plenty to choose from. There’s a blogging system already setup that takes this approach and I would anticipate that more will follow.