I have been watching the increase in popularity of newsletters for building an audience and generating a recurring income with interest.
This is not just an arena for journalists but also for knowledge workers, coaches, bloggers and other creative entrepreneurs.
You will probably have seen the growing popularity of Substack newsletters (in fact Leo finance have their very own Substack newsletter), plus Twitter recently acquired a newsletter company called Revue. There are also squeaks that Facebook is working on its own newsletter portal for users and also similar suggestions for LinkedIn.
And this brings us nicely onto blockchain platforms like Hive.
As Hive also provides an opportunity for writers to be paid for their content (but in a more novel way).
It would be interesting to compare the incomes of newsletter writers and creators on platforms like Substack, Ghost and Revue with the income of writers and creators on blockchain platforms like Hive.
Sliding calculators on sites such as Substack allow prospective writers to work out potential earnings from charging say $5-$10 per month and then estimating the potential audience size.
Despite the growing popularity of sites like Substack, the reality is that it's difficult to get folk to put their hands in their pockets and pull out their credit card to pay a monthly subscription for an email newsletter (this is unless, you are one of the few that has grafted over many months and years to build up an audience in advance).
Getting folk to pay for your newsletter doesn't take into account all the work necessary to build up the level of traffic you would need in the first place to convert x% of visitors into paid subscribers.
I would imagine it is very much an 80-20 split in terms of earnings amongst the thousands of writers - with less than 20% earning over 80% of the total cash payouts.
It is exactly this difficulty in encouraging folk to part with their hard-earned cash to access content and newsletters that platforms like Hive has the potential to solve.
This is because the payouts to writers on Hive comes not from the pockets of the voters themselves, but from the inflation pool generated by the platform itself - like a 'prize pool'. This pool is then shared proportionately amongst the published posts according to the votes received.
I think this subtlety is often missed by newcomers to Hive as I suspect that many incorrectly think that their votes are somehow coming out of their own wallet.
Some might argue that it is difficult to compare a blockchain based platform with a more traditional web-based email platform as the latter is paid in dollars (or Fiat) whereas the blockchain platform pays in crypto, such as Hive.
However, with recent advances in blockchain and exchanges it is not much of a problem to convert crypto into fiat (if that's what you want to do!).
In fairness, I can see the argument that the number of eyeballs reaching platforms like Hive right now are relatively low, and I am not convinced that the SEO capabilities are up to speed to allow for organic growth from outside the platform (as yet). Compare this with Twitter and the consequent potential reach of its Revue newsletter...
That being said, it would be interesting for an influencer with a reasonably large audience to compare incomes by posting on a site like Substack and here on Hive.
We are entering a perfect storm that should lead to growth for platforms like Hive as we see increasing censorship and algorithms 'playing' with the delivery of content on the more popular established (centralised) social media platforms.
Throw in the income capabilities on a blockchain-based social media platform and things could get very interesting.
My own view is that content creators with a more limited following or for those just starting out might do better on a platform like Hive compared to those with larger, more established audiences.
So all things considered, platforms like Hive look like a potentially better solution for the majority compared to these new emerging web-based newsletter platforms.
As a side-note, it would be interesting to explore whether it is possible to embed some sort of email functionality into Hive to allow readers to become email subscribers and receive new posts directly into their inbox (if required).
Either way, it looks like an investment of time building an audience on a platform like Hive might be a better use of time and resources than one of these new web-based newsletter platforms.
I would be interested in your thoughts and experiences.