It’s an interesting time to be a writer, and indeed to be a publisher in general. Whilst online publishing has flourished off the back of largely free content, there is coming a realisation that great content is not, and many will say should not, be free.
How this can be achieved is still a bone of contention for the media industry. Whilst some big brand publishers have put content behind a paywall, there is still much debate over whether this is a viable strategy or not. Google have tried an alternative approach this year, adding a new feature to their Wallet payment processing system that allows publishers to collect micro-payments from readers in order to free up the remainder of the content.
Building a sharewall rather than a paywall
Whilst it’s an interesting approach, I’m far from convinced that it’s one that will provide writers with much of an income, at least not yet. Another approach being tried by Inside Social is to place part of an article behind a ‘sharewall’. It’s very similar to the paywall approach used by Google, but instead of making a micropayment, you have to follow or share the content on Facebook or Twitter in order to read the rest.
You can see an example of this in action on this article. Do the relevant sharing and I’ll give you my thoughts on whether this is a good thing or not.
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Ok, so you followed me on Twitter, so thanks for that. What do I think of this system? I’m not convinced it’s the answer to the problem of how to make blogs pay, and I think this for a number of reasons.
- I don’t think shares are that valuable – There was some research done recently by HubSpot suggesting that many people retweet something without even reading the content. In other words they’re assuming something is worth sharing either by a great headline or by the reputation of the person writing the content. What this means is that a high number of shares doesn’t always reflect a high number of visits. Now a share is nice, but if you’re relying on ad revenue to earn a living from your blog, it’s not ideal.
- The impact on SEO -For many blogs, I suspect that search engines still represent the main source of traffic. That’s certainly still the case on this one. As such, there are clear risks involved when you make a chunk of your content out of sight of the Google spiders. With Inside Social you can get around this by specifying when the sharewall is erected, so for instance you could say it only comes up after people have read your article twice.
- It might annoy readers – In an ideal world, people would follow you or share things because they love what you’re producing. If you’re forcing them to do so in order to read content it kinda feels a bit like blackmail. I’m sure many readers will appreciate the commercial realities behind the decision, but when you’re fighting hard to attract and retain every customer, is it really wise to make it harder for them?
Of course, I may be wrong here, and do please let me know your thoughts in the comments section. Did you find it a nuisance? Would you consider adding this to your own site?
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I was pretty intrigued. I think the follow approach is better than the tweet approach, as it is less obtrusive and I am more likely to follow someone randomly than to tweet their content. I also find a follow to be more valuable than a tweet. I'm rather curious to see the numbers that come out of this.
Thanks for the comment Paul. As you say it will be interesting to see how many followers this generates. My instinct is to really put as few barriers between the reader and the content as possible, so I'll be taking some convincing that this is a good idea.
I have to say that I am not keen on it. It annoys me as does the same scenario with a share button. I like your content so I clicked to follow you. You've already built a certain amount of trust with me, I know I'm going to get quality content from you. If I was visiting a site for the first or second time, then I may not click as readily.
I think I agree with you Kittie. I've been playing around with it and I'm not keen thus far. If it let you read a bit and then greyed out the rest it may be slightly nicer, but to block the full article unless you follow is too intrusive for my liking.
Kittie, thank you for this comment. As you mentioned, because you know Adi publishes great content, you were happy to connect with him. This is the scenario the product was built for. We want to help facilitate authentic connections and your experience is a perfect example. Adi, as I mention below we do provide an "in-content" option so you can give your readers a much of the content as you like.
Hi Adi. I am one of the founders of Inside Social. We were surprised you found us as we're still in a private beta, but very pleased that you found the concept intriguing! We know that keeping readers happy is paramount and as such, have aimed to build a flexible product that gives publishers the options to define the experience best fit for their respective audiences. Our goal is to help you and other publishers maximize the value of your content and we believe establishing persistent social connections is one great way to do so. If anyone is interested in learning more, or participating in the beta, feel free to reach out to me [email protected].
Hi Joey, thanks for stopping by. I was given an access code to check the service out, so have had a look around. The service is certainly an interesting one and bloggers deserve to get rewarded for writing good content. I'll need to play around with the service more to decide whether it's right for this blog though.
Is it possible for instance to display a few paragraphs of text and then put the 'sharewall' up? At the moment it blocks the entire post, which is not very user friendly.
Adi, we do provide the option of using an "in-content" gateway as part of our wordpress plugin. I will follow up with you personally to assist.
Thanks Joey. How is that implemented? I don't see any way of editing settings from within the plugin itself via WordPress, and the website only has options for showing the sharewall after x number of visits, not for showing it at a particular point in the content (that I can see).
Thanks for the quick comments btw, great to see you're so on the ball with this 🙂
Adi, I just sent you an email with the instructions for implementation. I am sorry the plugin instructions are not clear and we will have that updated soon.
Thanks Joey, think I have it looking nicer now.