Chances are that you have noticed that most of the renowned media outlets have some sort of VIP access to their full or dedicated articles, and there is also the trend of paid groups among crypto traders and enthusiasts, making clear the demand for scarce information, and willingness of consumers to pay for valuable information and the comfort to have it served.
Even Steemit has made a habit out of sending e-mails once in a while, to keep in touch with its users, and Publish0x does that even more often, sending trending articles via e-mail, and somehow ensuring that they stay in touch with their users. They do that for free and it's clear why. Nobody would pay for such subscriptions.
Hive is expanding and it really has big chances to one day become mainstream and represent an alternative to classic, often manipulative and misinforming, media outlets, and can go even beyond that as it isn't just an alternative media outlet. That might represent a catalyst for a future paid subscription service imo. Have you ever thought of that?
I did, and I somehow have a vague idea on how that would work. First of all it should have a monthly fee of some 10 HIVE or so, paid by the subscriber automatically from his wallet, or via monthly payments in the form of transfers to some account dedicated to that service, for non Hivers, having a memo with the e-mail address of the subscriber. Or any other way of cashing Hive in from avid readers and Hive quality content fanatics.
What subscriptions are we talking about?
Personalized, of course. Something using an algorithm that would take into account a set of criteria chosen by the subscriber, choosing from the sea of daily posts that the blockchain offers on a daily basis, the ones matching the criteria and being automatically sent, via e-mail, once or twice a day to the paying consumer.
The algorithm should/could include tags or communities as the main criteria for the chosen posts to be sent, certain authors that he usually sips content from, an average or minimum length of the articles that suit his reading preferences, keywords that should match his criteria, level of engagement that certain posts sould have, curation, and posts topics. I guess it could get much more complex than that and that's where I'm waiting for your creativity to kick in.
Who would benefit from the payments of such subscriptions? Most of them should go to a dedicated fund for maintenance of the service, for further developing of the blockchain and of course to the service creators, and I would also share a small part of that amount with the content creators that are usually served to the service customers by the algorithms.
I believe such a service would come at hand especially for people that don't have time to explore Hive daily, searching for their preferred content and authors, as well as for folks that forget about our beloved platform and need to be reminded, and for non Hive users that would pay for what this platform produces, being too stubborn to create themselves an account. Oh, and now that I think a bit, a small part of those revenues could go into a marketing fund as well, to spread the word about Hive even more, and sell our product on a broader range of consumers.
What do you think, would such a paid subscription service make any sense? Would there be enough consumers to make it worthy, and last but not least, will this have any impact in getting Hive mainstream?
Thanks for attention,
Adrian