The Interledger Community 🌱: Sam

Widget — Grant Report #2 (Final)

Sam — Mon, 05 Jul 2021 02:05:46 +0000

Project Update

(For our interim report, click here.)

Now that our grant period has officially concluded at ‘widget HQ’ (basically the UN for funny comedy posts), we can say it was an unequivocal success. Well, okay: some equivving.

There were hiccups, surprises, challenges – and not all of them were we prepared to recover from without missing a beat. But, as we’ll lay out, we hope you’ll agree we did an admirable job at rolling with the punches, delivering some really dynamite content, and completed our grant in a way you might call ~95% literally as-pitched and 100% in the spirit of it.

Here’s some high level bullets, and we’ll link to documentation that gets more granular (for those interested):

Wins

We greenlit 130 posts from a diverse cohort of contributors. (Some earlier, anonymous demographic stats about whom are here; we’ll tabulate final stats ASAP.)
Our traffic increased from 1.5k (July-December, 2020) to 13.7k (January-June, 2021), an increase of about 800%; our MailChimp list grew from 0 to over 470.
We went through 5 drafts and 2 outside readers in the development of an open-source equity guideline for web publishers (GitHub – if you are that rare thing, a comedy editor who forks). We welcome feedback and, being the nature of the project, hope other sites can use this as a basis for their own work promoting equitable publishing. This also led to us releasing two free classes, itself an equity/accessibility effort.
We commissioned 26 podcast readings from our contributors to punctuate our sketch comedy show, Work It.
We have released the first 2 full-colour, 100+-page (in total) comedy magazines of our pieces, in lieu of the print zines that we had planned in those days before we knew the full extent of the pandemic. (Found on the first two theme pages, linked here.)
We arranged partnerships for 5 of our 6 months, 3 with comedy publishers – Hard Times, Flexx, Functionally Dead – 1 with a labour organizing group – People’s Labour Project – and 1 with a magazine by incarcerated individuals – Cell Count by PASAN – during which we featured the contributors or members of these organizations.
Unrelated to the grant itself, though perhaps GftW boosted our bona fides, our podcast Work It joined the Harbinger Media Network a Canadian network of left-leaning podcasts with some of our nation’s finest left-wing commentators and content-creators.
Finally – here’s the granular part – we completed a 19-part series of posts called ‘Website DIY’ going topic-by-topic on some of the things we have learned in the course of this grant and/or in the course of doing the site more generally. We won’t repeat the topic list, but that doesn’t mean we won’t screengrab it:

Draws &/Or Losses

We have a post that goes into this in some greater detail, but in general:

Boy, did we underestimate the workload. We doubled our in-kind donated time in our final budget. One of our editors was doing this just about as an (unpaid) full-time job on top of freelance work. While the other was doing her best, which gets us to the other point:
We didn’t realize our plan sort of assumed everything would go without surprises or setbacks. We didn’t plan for one of our editors to have a sudden death in the family and trip back home. Or a work promotion (and increasing work load) not too far removed from that. Or for one of our publishing partners to also suffer a death in their family and need an indefinite extension on turning around their pieces.
And then there's a raft of less significant things, nevertheless challenging in the aggregate: contributors ghosting, or not replying to emails, etc.
These challenges mean some of our content will be published following the official end of our grant period: a couple dozen podcast episodes and about 20 posts have been commissioned and should have been released in the previous 6 months, but will release steadily over the next couple or so instead as we cross our t’s on all outstanding materials.

Progress on objectives

Widget (formerly Spooky), set out to a) bootstrap a silly and left-leaning humour site; b) be a leading web publisher with regard to equity and inclusivity; c) be a leading web publisher with regard to ethical, anti-exploitative business models.

Objective A

Like we said above, this has been a huge success in terms of the content and the traffic. We’ve published (or will have published by the time the few outstanding drafts are in) 130 humour pieces by a diverse cohort of writers, some experienced, some early in their careers. Our traffic skyrocketed. We had two pieces featured in the influential “Newsletter of Humorous Writing.”

Where it wasn’t successful is if you define bootstrap as ‘become financially viable’ – Coil subscriptions are the only form of monetization we pushed and we ended up with subscribers in the single-digits (and revenue around ~$100 or so – total, that is; not monthly).

Shortly, we’re going to send out a questionnaire to our readers and contributors to find out what a broke version of Widget might look like until such a time as we’re able to bring in some cash again. Clearly we missed the mark somewhere here: poor messaging, poor incentives, poor value proposition. So hopefully we can find a way to maintain the site with a skeletal overhead, grow our list, and look for the next opportunity.

Objective B

We completed and published a comprehensive and open-source equity guideline for (web) publishers, reviewed by 2 external readers and following 5 internal drafts. We had wanted and planned for 2 additional readers on top of this but couldn’t ultimately get them confirmed.

Our consultant who led the development of this project identified that one way of promoting equity is to provide free training, and surrendered a portion of her budget to license two free humour writing classes. Again, a third was planned and budgeted, but were unable to pin the instructor down in time.

Finally, a small thing, but we shared some additional posts about tools we use to manage accessibility on our site among our ‘website DIY’ posts.

Objective C

This was unsuccessful in many ways that run bigger than ourselves. On a recent podcast, the creator of the open-source social network Planetary talked about just how difficult it is to fund social networks with a social good mission, and how difficult it is to achieve anything in the way of network effects against the Valley’s juggernauts. We have a Mastodon account – it has 0 followers. You can see from our analytics nearly all our traffic comes from, of course, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

I suppose we could do like, off the top of my head, Basecamp or maybe even Tesla (IIRC) and boycott those channels once we had reached a critical mass of support and could afford to, but right now? Hardly anyone knows we exist. It would be a beautiful luxury.

So, I don’t know what a viable version of this project looks like: we could ensure our hosting is climate neutral, and not on AWS. If we could move the community we do have elsewhere, like a web forum or Discord (or Element) channel, maybe we could get off those nefarious social media platforms and trust word of mouth to help us grow.

But on the other hand, we also want our writers’s material to reach the biggest audience possible. Do we do the deal with devil and exist on Facebook since there are a lack of credible alternatives for up-and-coming sites? Do we congratulate ourselves for feeling reluctant about this? I don’t know. Hopefully smarter people than us work on this issue.

Key activities

Activity A: Producing Coil-monetized humour content

Our primary activity was to produce Coil-monetized humour content. This has mostly come together as planned. We proposed: “We are budgeting to produce 156 humour pieces (132 funded; 24 in-kind by the Editor) and 24 podcasts (hosted in-kind by the Editor, and featuring funded appearances from our contributors as guests) during the six-month project phase.”

Right now, we have published 108 of these pieces. Another 20 are waiting as drafts to be reviewed, having coming in later than planned (just due to scheduling conflicts, other arrangements not working out or, like we said, the ‘life happens’ obstacles that weren’t part of the plan). All outstanding posts will be published in the coming weeks.

We left the in-kind posts after only 8. They weren’t moving the needle at all, and we saw no utility in investing more time in them, given our overruns in labour elsewhere.

The 24 podcast readings have been commissioned, many of them have been submitted, but the majority of these will also be released in the coming weeks due to these same time-management challenges.

Activity B

We promised we would publish blog posts about running the site and about web monetization: “We will create 24 blog posts addressing the ‘meta’ of running a web- monetised, WordPress comedy site – these will be resources for the web monetisation and Coil communities, regarding emergent best practices as we identify them in our use case.”

In this case, we exceeded targets: We had published 8 posts about web monetization at the time of our interim report. In the second half of our grant, we published another 19 posts looking at 19 different aspects of things we’ve learned during this grant and in running the site. We hope, by sorting them by topics, it makes it easy for editors to pick and choose and hopefully learn something to make their lives easier.

We had wanted to do Twitch streams with other editors and, though we pursued this idea in Slack channels with other editors of sites much like ours, we just haven’t been able to secure the time commitments of other editors. There is a lot of goodwill in the community, but people are also busy and focused on their projects and it’s been a challenge trying to get buy-in for collaborative, community projects. (Which y’all, I’m guessing, are getting a taste of with community calls and so on. It can be hard to herd us cats.)

Activity C

Our third activity is the creation of open-source equity guidelines: “As described, we will deliver an open-sourced set of equity guidelines to promote diversity in (humour) publishing on the Web.”

We’re repeating ourselves now, but this went quite well: You can read “Objective B” above for the rundown (though why did I say ‘Objective B’ but ‘Activity C’ – what the hell was I thinking?!?!)

Communications and marketing

We won’t repeat promotional efforts described in our interim report, though some of them were quite good sources of traffic.

If you really want a breakdown of how our promotional efforts led to traffic and things we could have done better, we have posts about our “analytics & traffic” and our “(thoughts on/wishlist for) audience growth”.

The biggest lesson was, we saw some traffic spikes from posts ending up in influencer or niche groups on FB and Reddit, e.g., but also speculated this was unlikely to lead to ‘sticky’ readership, so we might have budgeted more time/money for community building with audiences we think would be more likely to convert to subscribers next time.

Lastly, in our interim report we linked to our first full-colour magazine, a freebie we want given away to the widest audience possible. Our second (68-page, holy moly!!) magazine is available at https://widgetmag.com/themes/food-travel/, with the remaining 4 to follow in the coming couple months once the last posts are done.

What’s next?

As discussed, the immediate priority is publishing all the outstanding (couple dozen) pieces of content that we weren’t able to get out the door on schedule, but are all in various parts of the production cycle.

We will be sending out a questionnaire to ask our readers and contributors for feedback on the project and what they’d like to see from us next and will take that seriously under advisement. We’ll need to determine how we can deliver sustainable entertainment and value, with basically no revenue and a fraction of time that we put into these 6-months. Fingers crossed there’s an intersecting point between all these priorities.

Depending on those responses, we may look at new monetization streams, as well as slashing our costs. (We calculated the site would cost us about $5k a year at this rate if we don’t bring in any money. That can’t continue! So we may move our tech-stack to something more optimized and cost efficient.)

What community support would benefit your project?

Just read, enjoy, and most definitely share if you like any of the material! Check out the equity guidelines if you run a web magazine and see if you can use any bits and pieces! And hop on the newsletter and/or our (corporate) social channels where we will remain active as we try to figure out what’s next.

Additional comments

Thank you so much to the GftW team and the web monetization community for this opportunity. We hope we have created something of value, for humour fans and writers first and foremost, sure, but also for people who just like seeing ambitious projects and find some small part of it they can find a lesson in.

Relevant links/resources (optional)

Dig into the our archives at https://widgetmag.com and/or https://widgetmag.com/themes (which we will update with the remaining 3 theme cards within the week).
For the umpteenth time, enjoy our equity guidelines at https://widgetmag.com/resources/equity/ and our free classes at https://widgetmag.com/resources/classes/
Dig into our ‘business admin’ posts at https://widgetmag.com/resources/website-diy/ and/or https://widgetmag.com/category/news/
Join our newsletter in the footer of (nearly?) everyone of our pages to stay in touch for what happens next.

Widget: a funny website — Fart jokes & anti-capitalism™

Sam — Sun, 07 Mar 2021 20:45:00 +0000

Project overview

Widget is a comedy writing site that if fond of silliness, stupidity and socialism. Our motto is fart jokes and anti-capitalism.

In our 2 months since launching, we’ve published 40 authors (with a focus on giving access to contributors from historically underrepresented backgrounds; see this post for our stats), seen an almost 1,000% increase in our visitors, seen our mailing list and social follows grow by hundreds, provided free and on-demand humour writing training (as a tool for boosting access), and drafted an equity guideline that will be open-sourced on schedule, among other accomplishments.

Hell yeah, binch. As the kids are saying.

Project team

Widget is edited/run by Sam Allemang and Janet Mowat, two Canadian comedy writers and podcasters so minor it’s a wonder they exist. They also make the sketch comedy podcast Work It, about jobs and working. To make ends meet, Sam is a web developer and Janet works in literacy promotion.

For our Grant for the Web project, we’ve contracted Caitlin Kunkel (@kunkeltron; founding editor of The Belladonna; creator of Second City’s online teaching program) to draft equity publishing guidelines.

Every month, we partner with another publisher or organization or program to feature their writers/members/participants. Our first three partners have been The Hard Times, Functionally Dead ’zine, and Flexx.

What we are doing

Our main thing is publishing a diverse group of humour writers, so just check out widgetmag.com and/or follow @widgetmaglol to see our latest stuff! Or grab our magazine of posts from month 1:

You can also preview our very fine, soon-to-be Pulitzer winning podcast on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbuZIptc5gB-u20dwWJkZRA. (We know, we know: We’ll be all in on Cinnamon when it’s just a bit more feature-rich.)

If you’ve ever wanted to learn or review the basics of humour writing, we’re planning on offering 3 free classes by summer – check out https://widgetmag.com/classes and sign up for our newsletter to learn when they launch.

What community support would benefit your project?

Just read, enjoy, share and give props to the authors. We’re just here to showcase an eclectic mix of talent and spread the good vibes, daddy-o. Though if you wanted to sub to Coil with our referral code, we wont’t stop you – https://coil.com/?ref=widget3221.

If you check out and like our sketch comedy podcast – workitpod.com – a ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ review would be real nice too.

Link Round Up!

Home page: https://widgetmag.com
Our podcast, Work It: https://widgetmag.com/workit/
Exclusive perks for Coil subscribers – https://widgetmag.com/subscribe/ (plus, every post has author recommendations just for subscribers)
Free, downloadable magazine of pieces from our Myths & Legends month: https://widgetmag.com/themes/myths-legends/
Grant report #1: https://community.webmonetization.org/widget/widget-formerly-spooky-grant-report-1-interim-59el

Highlight other projects

We’re happy to shout out our comedy world budz who are also GftW recipients:

https://www.ladyspikemedia.com/: feminist-focused humour site
https://thechicagogenius.com/: Chicago-based humour site

Wearing my web dev hat, https://p5js.org/ is very cool. Processing is a great library for genuinely turning code into art (or the opposite of art: the dreaded ‘Infographic’). If you like experimental art and creative coding, you probably already know of this, but otherwise check out some of the demos!

Widget (formerly Spooky) — Grant Report #1 (Interim)

Sam — Sun, 07 Mar 2021 03:34:25 +0000

Project Update

Our GftW project is going well and, barring challenges summarized below, according to plan.

In the 2 months of our funded, public facing work, our comedy site Widget has published 40 authors (with a focus on giving access to contributors from historically underrepresented backgrounds; see this post for our stats), seen an almost 1,000% increase in our visitors, seen our mailing list and social follows grow by hundreds, provided free and on-demand humour writing training (as a tool for boosting access), and drafted an equity guideline that will be open-sourced on schedule, among other accomplishments.

The biggest challenges have been the following:

Time management – the amount of ‘in kind’ time we estimated we would be spending on the project is a fraction of what we’re actually spending. This is, in theory, a ‘nice problem to have’ because most of it is going to responding to people who’ve taken an interest in the site, but we’ve been unable to stay on top of this work while holding down full-time jobs, etc.
Sustainability – we have only converted the smallest fraction of visitors into subscribers, and this necessarily points us towards being unable to sustain the site at the pace our GftW funding allowed. In our final months, we will have to consider our options for a) growing revenue more successfully; or b) planning what we can continue to do if we aren’t financially viable.

Progress on objectives

Objective A

In the 2 months of our GftW-funded, public-facing work, our traffic increased by almost 1,000% (5.6k visitors vs. 543 the previous 2 months). Our newsletter mailing list has grown from 0 to 350+ and growing steadily, as we gate some free content updates to subscribers. And, as outlined in our latest monthly ‘wrap-up’ post, we’ve transparently published a diverse mix of writers. Some of our writers have previously published in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Onion; while others have gotten their first bylines with us:

My first published piece!!! 😭😭😭
Thank you @widgetmagLOL 🙏 https://t.co/W9t7gvg8pg
— Vic (@VicPinto_) March 3, 2021

In our first 3 months, we’ve teamed up with The Hard Times, Functionally Dead, and Flexx – three publishers of humour on the web – to feature their writers – and in our final three months, we are working to confirm partnerships with less conventional organizations – non-profits and activist organizations – to feature their members and people from their networks.

Objective B

One of our deliverables is an open-source publishing guideline to foster diversity and inclusion. As it stands, we’ve done 5 internal drafts, and had 2 external reviewers. We plan to have 2 more reviewers (representing unique background and perspectives) weigh in before open-sourcing it for community feedback – this is on schedule. In addition, with one of the barriers we identified being the cost of training, we’ve begun releasing free humour-writing classes – the first is live, the second will be shortly.

Objective C

The last goal is the least successful – we still promote on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and haven’t cracked an alternative; I think our hosting servers are ultimately AWS; the only ‘win’ so far has been moving to pro-privacy analytics provider Plausible. We will continue pursuing this and blogging our findings, however discouraging they seem to be.

Key activities

Activity A: Producing Coil-monetized humour content

Our primary activity was to produce Coil-monetized humour content. We said: “We are budgeting to produce 156 humour pieces (132 funded; 24 in-kind by the Editor) and 24 podcasts (hosted in-kind by the Editor, and featuring funded appearances from our contributors as guests) during the six-month project phase.”

At the end of month 2, we are largely on track, though needing to improve in some areas:

As part of this project, we have published 46 humour piece (89% of target) and 9 podcasts (6 Coil-subscriber only; exceeding target, though with only 2 guests – the time it takes to book a guest and get a recording from them was underestimated, and we will modify our approach to fill these slots within the grant period).

Activity B:

We have published 8 such posts, which are available here: https://widgetmag.com/tag/web-monetization/. In the remainder of our grant period, we’re interested in trying to move some of this activity to Twitch streams with other creators.

Activity C:

This is a work-in-progress, but we will discreetly share our current working draft, which we estimate to be two revisions from being complete as a ‘v1.’

Additionally, as this took shape, we identified one barrier to access is the cost of writing classes, so we have begun offering free, on-demand workshops, led by professional writers: https://widgetmag.com/classes/. The first class is up, and the second is edited and just waiting some admin before being posted.

Communications and marketing

It goes without saying we’ve discussed this on our social feeds, so beyond that:

We’ve been sending out a newsletter most weeks (to our 300+ subscribers), the archive of which is here: https://us16.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=ba6229e12a71869fb9fdc2a29&id=d673909b6d.

Our collaborator Caitlin Kunkel featured the site in her list of sites that accept writing: https://kunkeltron.medium.com/a-list-of-humor-and-satire-websites-to-submit-your-writing-to-2b5af860858b

Caitlin also shared a great, lengthy thread about how to pitch us:

I have a piece on @widgetmagLOL today in their "Myths and Legends" collection! I've been working with them to create some of their publishing guidelines, and I want to talk a bit about how to pitch them (they pay $200 a piece!): https://t.co/g4OAZNYZMt
— Caitlin Kunkel (@KunkelTron) January 19, 2021

We’ve appeared on the subscriber-only show of the Harbinger Media Network – a Canadian podcast network for left-wing podcasts:

UNLOCKED: on S2, E1 of🏆Harbinger Society Presents🏆 ⚒@WorkItPod⚒ broadcasts live from the 2021 Harbinger Socialympics + @socialistraptor & @RabbiDieHardman intro the excellent🏀@offcourtpod🏀!

Support Left podcasts at https://t.co/yRi7iY3QlU
🇨🇦📻🎉 https://t.co/ssWsTo1uSn pic.twitter.com/cQSm5CG1gK
— Harbinger Media Network (@Harbingertweets) January 17, 2021

For marketing materials, it was in our budget to produce a physical ’zine to leave in coffee shops, record stores, etc. ... Needless to say, that was proposed at a time we didn’t grasp how wretched the last year would be. So, we’ve made the best of the situation and are producing a free, full-colour, professional PDF magazine every month instead. The first issue can be found here – https://widgetmag.com/themes/myths-legends/ – with the second in development.

What’s next?

The remainder is business as usual, with some modifications:

We expect to refine and publish our equity guidelines within the month.
We will continue to publish comedy and administrative posts, podcasts and monthly magazines, on schedule.
We will be more aggressive and budget longer windows in booking podcast guests to make up the gap between what was planned and where we are.

What community support would benefit your project?

We’re happy to discuss the challenges we think remain in trying to convince people to become Coil subscribers and supporters of our site here: https://widgetmag.com/tag/web-monetization/. Or maybe it’s a much simpler challenge: our site just doesn’t have the clout and the ‘brand loyalty’ to be able to convince people to subscribe.

Additional comments

Relevant links/resources (optional)

Subscriber perks: https://widgetmag.com/subscribe/

Subscriber-only podcast: https://widgetmag.com/fridays

Overview of our monthly themes: https://widgetmag.com/themes/

Free Widget magazine #1: https://widgetmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/myths-legends.pdf

Public analytics: https://plausible.io/widgetmag.com

Web Monetization: Some Random Thoughts From A Blog Publisher

Sam — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 23:22:00 +0000

Repost of several posts from our website, originally published January 6, 28, February 15, and March 1, 2021.

In the interest of trying to look at web monetization objectively – even if it’s our main/only means of supporting Widget at the moment – we’re going to occasionally post about the challenges we see to it becoming a standard, ubiquitous technology. We do see it as a promising tech, but at the same time we need it to be financially viable for us to commit to it indefinitely.

User Personas

Who are our potential readers and, more to the point, potential supporters?

We’ve been thinking about the sort of person who might want to kick a few bucks to Widget and sites like ours every month, and the best we can come up with anecdotally (i.e., by just guessing) is that everyone who might support our site can be lumped into one of two groups.

User Personas

For our use case at Widget (widgetmag.com), we anticipate two potential user personas – not that we’ve converted a single damn person, though our full court press on pushing subscriptions hasn’t happened yet.

People who want to patronise comedy content ‘charitably,’ i.e. they don’t need convincing, they just want this stuff to exist;
People who can be convinced to subscribe by the quality/quantity of perks offered, i.e. those who need to be ‘sold’.

Persona 1

These are people who you might say just want to donate to support sites they think are doing good work. They might read and enjoy the stuff; on the other hand, they might just be voting with their dollar – basically, telling us to ‘keep up the good work.’

What might it take to convert this category of user?

Well, for our site and those just like ours, they may already be covered: e.g. the Coil comedy site lists out all the logos of the sites they’d be supporting with a subscription (and provided they actually visit those sites). If they like those sites and think that it is a net-positive that they exist, well, they know what to do: sign up with one of our referral codes and visit our sites.

What else could we be doing?

Maybe we could do more to thank them or preemptively thank them – a video on the Coil page from all of us telling them what they’d be supporting? better calls-to-action on our individual sites?

I think the main thing is a) to be a good community member and web citizen. Be the sort of person and publisher that earns trust and goodwill and that somebody can feel good about supporting. But beyond that, obviously you also need a way to get the message out about how they can support you. It’s probably good to think like a charity/nonprofit: grow your mailing list and your social follows; continually communicate about the good work you’re doing; and periodically ask for money – whether that’s through dedicated ‘fundraising’ periods or just peppering in the calls-to-action.

TL;dr: do good work and be a good community member; showcase this; and occasionally ask for support.

That’s the best we’ve got, but curious to know other publishers’ thoughts.

Persona 2

These are fans who can be converted, not out of the goodness of their heart, but because they’re getting something. We’ll write about these users in our next post on perks.

The post Web Monetization, Challenges #1: User Personas appeared first on Widget.

Perks

In our previous post on this topic, we spitballed about what we envisioned as the two user personas of our potential (Coil) subscribers.

The first group was basically those who would support sites like ours just because they think they should exist – a donor, basically.

The second group is those who want something in exchange, or as we described them before:

People who can be convinced to subscribe by the quality/quantity of perks offered, i.e. those who need to be ‘sold’.

So, how do we convince these people their getting bang for their Coil buck?

Perks

Many subscribers will likely be converted by the perks unlocked with their subscription. How do we sell these users better on what they’re getting? How can our sites deliver better perks? And how can these perks be better communicated to the potential subscriber?

Here are some thoughts on how we can communicate our (network’s) perks better and what form those perks might take:

Improved Communication

As it is, perks are spread out on our individual sites. There’s no reliable way for a user to know what sites are on the network and what perks those sites offer.

Would-be users may need to know what they’re getting before they consider converting. How do we do this? Here are some possibilities – purely spitballing, and many of these outside of our (Widget’s) authority. But maybe it gets some ideas churning:

For us ‘Coil comedy bundle’ sites, perhaps a microsite, landing page, or block of content at, e.g., coil.com/comedy? For example, is there a minimum-viable-product version whereby everything tagged with a consistent tag on our individual sites could be cross-posted via Zapier/IFTTT to a subscribers-only microsite, so that users can instantly have access to a bunch of stuff in once, centralized place?
Or a more manual version – we editors each manually provide to the Coil team [x] number of pieces of content for a central site or page? Very crufty and manual, but at least it would be curated… Maybe curation beats volume, I sure don’t know.
Or, can our sites be better at consistency? E.g., all of us editors agree to some sort of standard set of practices where we can showcase our perks on our site, even if it’s just a menu link – “Subscribers” – or a home page CTA. This is as-fragile-as-it-gets and subject to all sorts of human error and inconsistent UX.

The TL;dr is only identifying a problem, unfortunately, not offering a very good solution: The problem is, a potential Coil subscriber cannot be given a clear view of what they’re getting.

AFAIK, the best we have is the ‘discover’ page at https://coil.com/explore, which does list a bunch of cool sites but isn’t great at saying what perks you get from each site or from the network as a whole – “10 exclusive podcasts, which you can find here! Subscriber-only posts from over 20 leading humour sites, which are all collected here!”

As a subscriber, there maybe perks out there I have no way of knowing are available to me. I guess I’m just counting on the Coil blog to notify me of anything cool and subscriber-only(?).

Can the communication and/or collation of perks available to Coil subscribers be improved?

Better Quality Perks

How can we actually create something valuable that boosts subscriptions? If all we’re doing is paywalling 1 exclusive post for every 10 we give away free, of no appreciable difference, would a potential user really give a shit about the 1 they’re missing, or would they just make do with the 10 they get for free?

We may, as a network of content creators, need to come up with more ambitious, collaborative perks. I’ve got no idea what we could actually coordinate to deliver, but here are some ideas if the will exists among our community members. All of these a) are just a partial, brainstormed list, of course; b) assume collaboration among a critical mass of Coil comedy participants:

Subscriber-only podcast
Subscriber-only Twitch/YouTube livestream
Subscriber-only newsletter
Subscriber-only web forum or Discord channel

Drawbacks: These are not perfect fits for Coil’s micropayment solution – yes, we may get the referral bonuses, but:

A newsletter doesn’t pay while someone reads it in their email app;
A Twitch stream could, if we have the subscriber counts to pay out and a solution to divvy up payments among participants;
A forum could be web-monetised pretty easily, obviously; I don’t know about a Discord or Slack channel (or equivalent) – don’t think so, which is unfortunate as one of those is probably otherwise the ‘default’ option.
A podcast can’t be web monetized if consumed in a standard podcast app (though could if made available only in-browser or monetized YouTube channel).
More on that…

Podcasts

Coil could be a Patreon competitor: the problem it solves – supporting content creators – is similar, and the value proposition – one payment to unlock all bonus content – is compelling.

But to try and peel off some of Patreon’s users (both subscribers and content creators), an elegant solution to deal with podcasts is needed. A way for podcast creators to be paid while users listen to their shows.

Stopgap solutions are possible, such as embedding playlists in our sites, but what is the longer-term vision to handle web-monetised podcasts?

These are just some thoughts we’ve grappled with in trying to figure out how we could actually entice people to sign up for this ‘strange, new payment technology’ and convince them that this is worth their money and – god help me – mindshare.

The post Web Monetization, Challenges #2: Perks appeared first on Widget.

Learning From Other Platforms

Lord knows I spend too much time on the web – in general as a ravenous hog of a content consumer and in my day job as a web dev. In the course of that, I’ve catalogued some integrations and features that I think could add value to Coil, and have also kept tabs on other ‘products’ that are trying to solve the reader-engagement/support question in other ways.

Feature Idea

Widget (sorry) / Embeddable Sign-up

As it is, Coil is a thing you sign up for on their site, install a browser extension, and then browse the sites you like.

Would there be value in creating an embeddable Coil sign-up form, like the donate forms from Canada Helps, e.g. – https://freeingthehumanspirit.com/donate/ – or the sign-up widgets and modals from Pico, as seen here – https://discourseblog.com/subscribe/?

This could our sites to create a more integrated UX and do our own messaging or have perks and sign-ups on a single page, e.g.

Competitors and Comparisons

Here are some other sites/products that bring interesting ideas to the ‘website subscription’ space:

Pico
- I like a lot of what Discourse is able to do with Pico. Maybe none of this is technically doable, but here’s some of the cool things they offer:
- Comments are subscriber-only, including a weekly discussion thread;
- Merch coupons are available;
- Exclusive newsletters are available to subscribers.
- The more integrations or features we’re able to offer with a subscription – MailChimp integration? Discord? WordPress commenting features (or other 3rd-party commenting solution)? – the cooler this could be. Though I get that may be asking for the world and pulling dev time away from more pressing matters. And again, some of these may limit payment to the referral bonus if the 3rd-party apps don’t pay micropayments.
Memberful.com
- Check out https://memberful.com/features/ to see its features and maybe get some ideas. Not dissimilar to Pico: integrates with 3rd-party newsletters; has elegant handling of subscriber-only podcasts.
Patreon
- Maybe the main thing Patreon does well is get podcasts to subscribers. Unless Coil is ceding that use-case to Patreon, web-monetised sites need an elegant solution to do the same, ideally that pays out as users listen to the show and ideally that meets them where they’re at – on their phones – and doesn’t force a hacky solution like listening from a page on the podcaster’s website.

When thinking about how to try and make money with your website and offer something of value to your supporters, there are enough options on ‘the market’ that site-owners would be well advised to not rush into a decision.

That said, there’s not really a reason not to run web monetization via Coil. It’s just a script tag and Coil-subscribers who visit your site will pay out micropayments while they read. (https://coil.com/creator, for more info.) The question is whether or not to make it the core of your business strategy and the main way you amass subscribers. That’s not such a one-size-fits-all question.

The post Web Monetization, Challenges #3: Learning From Other Platforms appeared first on Widget.

Collaboration & Communications

Earlier, we wrote some posts trying to grapple with perks: what sort of perks might entice a potential Coil supporter to actually subscribe? How can we deliver effective messaging to these people to actually communicate what they’d be getting with a subscription?

I’ve got no idea for sure, but I can’t help but think we’re going to be unlikely to win over a critical mass of supporters without ‘going big.’ I don’t think a bonus blog post on some beloved sites, hidden amidst the regular posts, is going to be sufficient to convert on-the-fence subscribers.

I don’t know what is, but one idea I come back to is ambitious, collaborative (and (subscriber-only?) projects between sympathetic, web-monetized sites – like those of us in the Coil comedy bundle. Here’s some stray thoughts about what that could be, though making it happen is a whole other can of worms…

It probably starts with just talking with one another, so a quick note on that:

‘Fraternal’ Communication

Those of us running Coil-monetised sites should be talking more, sharing ideas and success stories more, collaborating more, cross-promoting more…

Our Coil comedy sites are all on a channel together in Outvoice’s Slack, but maybe more could be done to foster experimentation and collaboration between us all.

I don’t know what this looks like, but maybe a weekly newsletter from Coil to content creators sharing ideas, updates and success stories? Regular (monthly?) Zoom or Discord calls for Content creators? Ways to bootstrap collaborative projects that are less formal than Grant for the Web – e.g. a Twitch comedy night sponsored by Coil?

This need to share ideas and strategies between web monetized sites is probably the problem that the https://community.webmonetization.org/ forum is trying to solve. Hopefully it succeeds in that.

Collaboration

But what would be really cool is if communication could lead to (subscriber-only, high-value-proposition) collaboration. Just speaking as a member of the Coil comedy bundle, it would be amazing if a few of us teamed up on an exclusive podcast – whether it’s funny or it’s just ‘talking shop’ about editing humour, e.g.

Or same idea, but a newsletter, or livestream, or forum, or… just for subscribers. I don’t think any of us – barring maybe Hard Times, Beaverton, Reductress (and pardon me if I’m forgetting one or two others) – has the cachet to convert many subscribers at all. Our best shot at trying to make a go of this is by working together, IMHO. Either that, or making Coil just one part of a business strategy. Which may be the right move, but pulls focus from trying to deliver great perks for supporters.

The post Web Monetization, Challenges #4: Collaboration appeared first on Widget.

Widget (GftW Mid-Level Grantee) New Year Update!

Sam — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 19:31:37 +0000

Hey everyone, our comedy site, Widget (or, Spooky at the time) received a mid-level GftW grant in October, and we just wanted to share what we're up to to start the year.

New Name, Same Old Jokes

We used to be called Spooky. Now we’re called Widget. You can read why we rebranded in this post.

January 2021: Myths & Legends

This month we begin a 6-month run of monthly themes with a new post every weekday. This month’s theme is Myths & Legends, and we’ve got some amazing posts lined up about: creepy chain emails about the Spice Girls, the headless horseman pestering e-girls, a landlord fighting with his ghost tenant, and so much more!

We’ve got an amazing mix of humour writers who’ve previously written for sites like Hard Times, Daily Shouts and The Belladonna. In fact, this month’s publishing partner is The Hard Times.

That means we’ll be featuring (at least) 4 Hard Times writers throughout the month.

Butt wait, there's more!!

In addition to experienced humour writers, we’re also featuring a number of first-time and emerging humour writers from other backgrounds: activism, organising, academia and, well, Twitter shit-posting.

You can learn a lil’ bit more about our goals – beyond just posting super-funny stuff – here. And we’ll have more to say on this in time.

Thanks, GftW!

This is made possible by our 6-month funding from Grant for the Web. Thanks to this funding, we’re able to pay a relatively respectable rate for every piece ($200 USD), and are prioritising work that supports an anti-oppressive, socialist-leaning editorial agenda.

Join us!!??

Thank you so much for being part of our mailing list. We hope you’ll consider following us on all duh usual social media channels below and – please, oh, please! – if you see a post you like, share the bejeesus out of it!

We’ve got six months of funding here to try and build something sustainable. We'd love to keep paying emerging comedy writers from diverse backgrounds after this grant runs out, and keep fighting the good fight in the anti-capitalist content wars, and that starts by building an audience. We’re in this together, pals.

2 x free, Coil-exclusive comedy ’zines from Widget team

Sam — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 23:02:45 +0000

Our GftW-backed humour site, Widget, has released two PDF magazines exclusive to Coil subscribers. They’re based on material from our extremely silly and stupid podcast Work It, a sketch comedy show about jobs and working. If you’re on Coil, feel free to check ’em out!

Click the cover and scroll down the page for yer links.