The Sound of One Hand Clapping

francine hardaway
Aug 24, 2017 · 2 min read

Well, Ev, I’ve followed your career with my attention, time, and writing ability since the beginning of Blogger, so I am inclined to trust you.

But in reality I agree with Greg Fehrenstein, who said he gets more recommends on posts that take him less time to write and contain more outrage. This is also true of me, although on a much smaller scale. Are you rewarding the right thing when you reward with claps? Perhaps not.

I know how hard you are looking for a business model that isn’t advertising, so maybe I should shut up. However, if you want to encourage good journalism, maybe you shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath water and perhaps try to consider how to “fix” advertising. Some things don’t disrupt so easily.

I teach a course at ASU Cronkite School of Journalism called Digital Media Entrepreneurship. The students are seniors and grad students, and mid-career fellows. All my students run ad blockers, but none of them subscribe to anything they have to pay for. They all say they can get their content free elsewhere.

But that isn’t true about Medium. Most of its content is not available from a different outlet with a higher permitted number of articles before hitting the paywall.

And yet none of them had heard of Medium. I’m going to ask them for suggestions on a workable business model, since I’ve now made them understand that their positions are untenable if they want to be journalists. Or writers.

Doc Searls has done a great deal of work on fixes for advertising on his blog, and I’ve talked to him a about it, because I’ve been consulting for ZEDO, which started as a publisher ad server and over the past fifteen years has morphed into a development shop that experiments with new ad formats that help brands keep abreast of consumer changes in the advertising space. Being in ad tech has become somewhat of a roller coaster ride.

While I created a publication for ZEDO on Medium, it will never get claps, because it is corporate. And it isn’t meant to. It is just meant to expose the blog to more and perhaps different readers.

My own blog is also on Medium (Stealthmode Blog.) It won’t get claps either. I have a small and faithful constituency that I don’t really try to monetize, although it wouldn’t hurt.

I’d be much happier if you created a way for someone like me (and yes, I’m a member) to monetize. Have you explored the BAT? It’s a cryptocurrency based on attention and made to work for publishing and advertising.

I’d be interested to see if you have explored this other alternative to claps.

)

francine hardaway

Co-founder, Stealthmode Partners, helping entrepreneurs succeed

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