The Challenges of Independent Web Publishing

You can feel it. The creator journey starts with the call, a felt invitation to follow a creative path, to explore a passion and the fates it might lead to. It has the power to fill you with newfound excitement; the call is true, genuine, sincere. When you heed it, you suddenly face two big pains:

• Picking a platform to share your output with the world.

• Building an audience, finding people to appreciate and experience your output.

You’re taking off. You found a platform and start seeing some engagement. Sometimes it’s days, weeks or months; the time comes when you realize you’re starting to put some serious time and effort into this. Soon enough you start feeling another big, you tell yourself “I need to start making money with this.”

Two big fates rise on the horizon: Either you make it or you don’t. “An internet phenomenon? Me?”, you start doubting and you’re not wrong. You naturally consider a future where you stop and return to regular course of life, where you find a traditional job and your passion becomes side hobby.

When it comes to being a creator on the web, as with any activity, there are levels to success. Roughly, a first level is making enough to make the activity self-sustainable. A second level is achieving mainstream recognition of your brand and your work. On the web, however, these two outcomes come woven: Monetary success is predicated upon becoming a viral hit or sensation. The problem is clear: this can’t work for everybody. Finding livelihood as a creator shouldn’t necessitate a global audience of millions, but that’s the state of affairs the existing publishing models have brought about. The question becomes, is there a way to fix this situation? Creators making a living with an audience in the hundreds or thousands... how do we make it possible?

There’s people working on that. Two early players in this space are Patreon and Gumroad, services offering the creator some basic subscription and publishing. What these two platforms realize is that there’s power in helping the creator own the relationship with the audience. Why does it make sense to own it?

It’s a game of numbers. If you as a creator manage to establish a modest following of 1,000 people through a newsletter or Patreon/Gumroad and start monetizing the relationship at $3, $4, or $5 dollars per month, that starts becoming serious money very soon, starts giving viability to your work.

You cannot say the same of mass social media. Indirect monetization strategies where the creator makes money through sponsored posts (think Instagram) or some ad revenue share program (Youtube, TikTok) start producing real income after you amass audiences in the hundreds of thousands and no earlier. A reach of 1,000 followers has very limited appeal to sponsors and produces modest if any income through revenue share.

Creators have woken up to the fact that owning the relationship with the audience is critical to make passion-driven endeavors sustainable. Call it the newsletter craze, when scores of creators and web-native professionals started building e-mail subscriber lists. Writers, visual artists, podcasters, everyone started putting time into setting up what is now a familiar dynamic: Siphoning-off traffic from mass social media to your landing page and making an appeal to your audience to join your newsletter or mailing list. It’s the MVP of going independent... having a list of e-mails of the people who care about your work. The act of sharing an email address establishes a very elemental direct connection, a simple way of truly owning your audience.

Owning the relationship is a big step for creators: When you engage your crowd by email you can point them wherever your content lives, it offers platform versatility and choice. But this is where it starts getting tricky... your content has to live somewhere and choosing mass social media as your publishing vehicle takes you back to the monetization challenge. The temptation to rely on big platforms is real because they offer the smoothest publishing experiences for most digital media types bundled to an equally smooth content delivery experience for audiences.

The answer to “What kind of platform should I pick for my content?” is that it really depends on the nature of your output. It starts making sense to talk of content-platform fit: How suited is a platform to publish the type of content you create? Consider for example that Youtube is a natural fit for video, Substack and Medium natural fits for longer-form writing, Instagram for photo and shortform video, etcetera. The trade-off with all these format-optimized platforms is that they are walled gardens (exc. Substack). So where does the creator go for independent publishing?

• * We can also talk of platform-audience fit: What type of crowd does the platform appeal to? Platforms catering to specific demographics and segments (consider Instagram Kids).

When it comes to independent publishing platforms, sadly, you don‘t see this level of format-level fit, there isn’t even much variety. That's why looking for tools to build an independent platform today inevitably takes creators to the one or more “website builders” (consider Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Shopify). Somehow we all settled with blogs or things that look like blogs, the visual artist, the journalist, the podcaster. We can think of the ecommerce-enabled blog as an early "one-size fits all" alternative for creators going independent. Blog-like publishing, however, isn't a fit for all creators. The issue of content-platform fit, for example, keeps video creators using walled video-first services like Youtube or Vimeo to share their work with audience.

• * Hypothesis: There is little development interest to build format-optimal platforms for independent publishing because the incentives are always there to turn them into highly-profitable walled gardens.

A last thing holding independent publishing back is the low interactivity they afford with published content. When you publish with mass social media platforms, your audience can interact with content in ways they can’t on a static website (consider liking, commenting, upvoting, retweeting). Social media is technically a medium where content can be interacted with in social ways, where people can engage each other and experience content together... making conversation about it, adding to it, referencing it, repackaging it. Static sites created with website builders grow stale over time because conversation can‘t happen on-site, all social engagement pours back into mass social platforms, the places equipped for conversation.

Owning the conversation that happens around your content is a challenge different than owning the audience relationship. There is value in owning the conversation because engagement follows engagement... people go where the conversation is. This is why creators with strong independent platforms flock to Slack and Discord, services that let you set up a place you can invite your audience to interact more intimately with you and amongst themselves... Community emerges: Creator-focused / Interest-based / Shared-interest. New value is unlocked.

There's a disconnect. Conversation usually happens where the content is enjoyed, unless there's no one to talk to or the venue won't allow conversation. Consider a theater, when the play is over and the crowd pours into the vestibule, that's the type of conversation that happens in places like Slack and Discord, conversations taken to an adjacent room out of necessity. How do you bring the conversation back to the place where you experience the content? Platforms optimized for messaging aren't optimized for publishing. The emergence of community-oriented platforms like Circle and Tribe is a response to this challenge, but with semi-rigid architectures that favor community-building over content publishing.

As a web-focused creator, your platform at urbrand.com is the official point of presence for your brand. Allowing social engagement directly on your independent platform augments your content and offers your audience a natural way to engage your work. Achieving something like this, however, asks for new publishing tools that weave the social features of modern social media directly into spaces independently built and maintained by creators. Imagine a space where you can engage the artist and other visitors by chatting directly on the gallery, writing on a guestbook, or painting on the walls. Imagine audience-generated content and conversation, coexisting and sharing place with the work that inspired it.

What’s missing in the web today is giving our experiences a sense of place, a sense of meaningful togetherness. We’re talking about integrating features like relationship management, monetization, and community-building back into the independent publishing experience. We are talking about creating web properties that look and feel different than a blog. That’s the hope, creating place on the web, because place is where things that belong together happen together.

Topic / Criticism of the Internet

Topic / Criticism of the Internet

Topic / On Publishing, Broadcasting, and Editorial Practice