Introduction
After writing about an idea to use Hive as a platform for Fandom-style Wikis, I kept thinking about what other uses cases exist that could be easier to apply to Hive and also help with adoption. In this post I will explain another idea, the context, and some practical aspects I think would help with adoption.
From what I can see, Hive content heavily focuses on personal blogging and cryptocurrencies. Common topics include stories about daily life, travel, gaming and hobbies in general. I haven't found much that could be considered consistent 'professional content' in the sense of high-quality posts produced by professionals or talented hobbyists in their areas of expertise.
A few weeks ago I posted a short Javascript code and included some analysis with graphs and statistics. To my surprise, I found my post upvoted by the group STEMsocial community, which aims to promote STEM content on Hive. They have a surprisingly large number of people following their curation trail, but the aggregate amount of rewards they distribute is disappointingly small. There are many general-purpose or regional groups on Hive with fewer followers that consistently distribute much higher rewards.
I think the fact that blogging on Hive is associated with cryptocurrency actually plays against the desired behavior of every member growing their HP over time to compound the rewards for everyone - with the uncertainty and failures we see happen too often with crypto projects, many people opt to extract any small gains as often as possible instead of going for a longer-term strategy that could potentially yield more rewards. But this carries the risk of turning potential assets into nothing if the blockchain suddenly stops working or HBD de-pegs, bringing the token value into a downward spiral, which famously has happened before to other algorithmically stable coins (in Luna and Waves ecosystems for example).
The case for premium content and paid subscriptions
To counteract this extraction mentality, I think it would be very beneficial for Hive both in terms of increasing user adoption and reputation (wider public confidence) to bring in audiences that are interested in creating and reading professional-level quality content, rather than everyday-people type of content.
Considering the premium nature of this idea, I expect those audiences would consist of people with high enough disposal income that they would actually decide to park some of their money in HP to reward their favorite authors, all the while collecting interest and creating more value. The success of this idea would in fact be a net positive in terms of locked value in the network, as opposed to what I see as the prevalent behavior of keeping accounts with very low value and extracting as much as possible, and often.
Instead of onboarding many authors who produce content with the purpose of extracting most or all of their earnings out of the blockchain, this feature would attract
professionals interested in earning a living by creating content that others would actually be interested in reading and sometimes even pay for;
readers with enough disposable income to be willing to pay for subscriptions and would be incentivized to keep and grow a sizeable Hive account.
Adapting Substack business model to PeakD
The idea for this proposal came from my YouTube diet. I often listen / watch podcasts while I'm doing something else. Some of that content is political, and quite often I hear people mention 'Substack newsletters'.
Substack is a website designed to help writers deliver independent subscription-based newsletters.
Here are some numbers Substack publishes on their website https://substack.com/about
Authors on Substack collect about 86% of the subscription fees. 4% goes to the payment processor and 10% goes to Substack. On Hive, the blockchain and the blogging infrastructure is already working and somehow paid for :) . I think PeakD can offer authors a better deal, as I explain below.
Substack is currently collecting more than 3 million paid subscriptions.
A significant part of the growth comes from existing subscribers - people onboarded into the platform actively searching for other authors to follow and support.
"A few hundred paid subscribers will support a writer’s livelihood. A few thousand makes it lucrative. (The top 10 publishers collectively earn more than $25 million annually.)"
"The ad model demands that writers attract 40,000 page views every day to earn just $1,000 a month. With the Substack model, a steady base of 1,000 subscribers paying $5 each month earns you $60,000 per year."
So the idea here is to attract renowned authors (journalists and experts with a desire to write about their expertise to a wider public) to publish their regular content on Hive instead. Here are the main points around this idea:
PeakD would update the website to support Substack-like services:
gated paid subscriptions
content delivery via email
fiat payment processing
a mixed system of free posts and paid posts
etc.
One of the authors' advantages is that they wouldn't have to pay any fees to the platform - it would be a free service, since Hive and PeakD already provide a free service as it is. Authors could still optionally divert a small percentage of the upvotes to Hive and PeakD. The upside would be the increased adoption of both PeakD and Hive.
Another author advantage is that they would be able to collect additional upvote rewards on top of the subscription fees.
The free tier subscription tier is essentially already in place.
There could be an option to make the subscription-only posts public after a predefined number of days have passed.
Readers wouldn't have to set up a Hive wallet to pay for the subscription, but they would be encouraged to do so and also invited to explore other free and paid content on Hive. Hopefully, a percentage of those readers would understand how the system works, install a wallet and move some funds in.
Readers with a Hive account would be able to pay for the subscription with upvotes alone, if the amount of rewards they distribute to the author at the end of each month covers the subscription fee. They'd need to set up an automatic voting authorization for the particular authors they wish to support. Readers opting for this alternative would be locking substantial amounts of Hive, contributing to the health of the ecosystem and collecting interest on their locked Hive at the same time.
Considering the distrust and poor reputation crypto still has over the wider population, perhaps the first steps would be to reach out to well-known Substack authors who are already writing about crypto and invite them to move over to Hive.
I think this feature would need to have some momentum to be successful, so it would be really important to secure a number of high-profile authors early on (even with extra financial incentives for a limited period of time) and also have in place a permanent effort of recruiting new authors with large followings.
What others are saying and doing around this idea
This is far from an original idea. LeoFinance apparently has been working on similar concepts for a while (also this), but as far as I can see their current product seems more focused on replicating Twitter than Substack.
And here is author @makerhacks making some points that overlap with some of mine, just a few weeks ago.
