Obviously you're focusing on journalists now, but there are other groups of content creators who might be into your product; I see cartoonists and photographers are mentioned in the article. I wonder whether this model would be useful to young academics, too - especially those who are moving to careers outside of academia but might still like to conduct and share research. Publishing in academic journals is (supposed to be) a way to get your research out there, and peer review does matter. But academic journals don't pay their authors, and often have very limited audiences. It seems like Beacon could help solve those problems. Maybe another interested population for you in the future!
Yes! So first off with regards to photographers we're starting to experiment with that. Dmitri and I built an app called Backspaces before so we brought on a power user from there. his project on Beacon was super successful: http://www.beaconreader.com/projects/extraordinary-everyday-...
Yeah, I'd second your thoughts about academic contributors.
I know a few HCI grad students who are interested in sharing their work in more informal kinds of venues (I'm one of them). Sure, conference papers are nice, but almost no one reads them. A lot of research in our field would appeal to a more general audience.
I've given a lot of though about current state of journalism and my conclusion was that the current model is wrong for two reasons
1. conflict of interests
2. lack of transparency
@1 There are two main sources of capital for journalists - government or companies that buy ads. The problem is when they can put pressure to not write of unjust acts that may conflict with their interests. The solution is to provide founding from large enough group of people when there is no dominant subgroup. Models has to be highly distributed to avoid bribing users[1]. There needs to be upper limit of funding e.g. 99$ or 10%[2] to dilute influence of a single user. Even better for a 5$ a month I can get credit which I can allocate.
@2 Log everything. Brutal transparency. That's the only way I can think of.
So you're going to make something people want, right? :) I want to be able to vote what is important for me. I want to post an issue and let other judge if it's worth investigating.
[1] I'm amazed how often pattern of distributed models occurs and works very well (Bitcoin, Git etc.).
[2] That may have a similar effect as Twitter's 140 chars limit
Yep, you've kinda nailed it. We're moving towards that on Beacon. But right now our primary focus is on helping writers convert their existing readership into paying subscribers.
As the content offering as a whole becomes more robust, you'll start seeing more of the effects you're looking for.
It's really simple and old fashioned:
You think certain information or perspectives are valuable, you pay for them.
We're just updating the underlying tech and user experience to modern times ;)
Do you plan on helping journalists distribute their content outside of the main Beacon site? I imagine some have their own following but others want to use the site to help gain readership on/off your platform.
Maybe in the future but the reality is that the last 10 years have been focused on distribution of content as the primary goal. We're focused on monetization, and helping creators make more money and delivering more value for readers who support them.
It's something we're still playing around with but one of the early issues we had was that some writers would come onto Beacon with a smaller subscriber base, but would add a really valuable article into the system that everyone read, and not feel fairly compensated.
If you generate value on Beacon, we want to make sure that's reflected in money.
So we came up with the idea of the bonus pool as a way to reward writers when their articles were widely recommended.
Currently we have a "Worth It" button which is basically like an upvote or a like - except it equates into real dollars.
Again, it's pretty new, but we're very excited about it. Last month, we had a relatively new journalist who's top article paid her out $1200!
