Skip to main content

WordPress introduces a new way for bloggers to get paid


WordPress, one of the internet’s leading purveyors of blog infrastructure and hosting, has taken a step toward making blogging more sustainable by allowing sites to easily accept recurring payments. Think: subscriptions. The tool will be available to anyone with a paid WordPress site and to sites that use the company’s Jetpack toolkit.
Blogging has been declining in popularity from its heyday in the aughts, when you could make enough money to live on just from maintaining your site.Blogging isn’t dead — because “that is not dead which can eternal lie,” to quote the famously racist H.P. Lovecraft — but it is absolutely on life support, and difficulty making money is among the reasons why. (See: the death of personal bloggers, and the untimely, unfair demise of Gawker and Deadspin.)
“Especially from a small publisher, small business, sustainability perspective, subscriptions and memberships are such a key foundational element to monetizing your site in 2019,” says Mark Armstrong, the founder of Longreads and an editor at Automattic (WordPress’ parent company). The idea was to build something simple that could be integrated relatively easily, so that sites could immediately begin collecting revenue from their audiences. Armstrong said that an early version of the product was first tested at Longreads.
“We provided a lot of feedback in terms of the things that we had seen,” says Armstrong. “We’ve had a membership and subscription for Longreads, going back to 2011. So about eight years of experience working with memberships and subscriptions.”
The new Recurring Payments feature also includes pay-what-you-want options, which was something we learned from @Longreads: Some people who really love your site will contribute more than you expect.
- Mark Armstrong (@markarms) November 12, 2019
The thing about this product, though, is that it does duplicate some functionality — like, say, with PayPal’s WordPress plug-in. This fits into a broader trend of enabling creators to accept payments and build communities in easy ways. If it’s not a Patreon competitor, it’s definitely influenced by the site.
But Armstrong doesn’t see it as a conflict. “I think we’re all supportive of all of the other products that exist within the WordPress ecosystem,” he says. “Patreon, Memberful, WooCommerce — which is part of our own company, so they have a memberships and subscriptions extension as well.” Those other products serve a slightly different need, and are available to all WordPress blogs — not just the ones that are paid.
Armstrong says which service people choose really just comes down to what individual users need. He says WordPress’ new recurring payments feature would work for local organizations trying to start a fundraising membership program; or maybe a podcaster that’s just getting off the ground. “Recurring payments are critical for pretty much any small business. And that’s really at the core of our user base.”
Armstrong says that the company is always working on its e-commerce offerings. “So I would expect to see a lot more of that in the future.”
Originally published at https://www.theverge.com on November 13, 2019.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Google can now help you figure out that song stuck in your head - all you have to do is hum (or whistle) into your phone

  Google just launched its “hum to search” feature, which allows users to hum, whistle, or sing for 10–15 seconds in order to identify a song. The feature currently works in 20 languages, and Google hopes to add more. Google has finally launched the perfect feature for when a song is stuck in your head but you don’t know any of the words. “Hum to search” launched today on both the Google app for iOS and Android, according to Google’s blog, The Keyword. Users can also whistle or sing directly into the mic to identify a song. The technology works like this: the user can hum (whistle, or sing) for 10–15 seconds, and then Google’s technology takes the song’s melody and turns it into a numbers-based sequence. From there, the sequence can be used to “identify songs based on a variety of sources, including humans singing, whistling or humming, as well as studio recordings,” according to Google’s announcement. The sequence also strips away any other outside noise, like accompanying instru...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ransomware's Dangerous New Trick Is Double-Encrypting Your Data

  Ransomware groups have always taken a more-is-more approach . If a victim pays a ransom and then goes back to business as usual-hit them again. Or don’t just encrypt a target’s systems; steal their data first, so you can threaten to leak it if they don’t pay up. The latest escalation? Ransomware hackers who encrypt a victim’s data twice at the same time. Double-encryption attacks have happened before, usually stemming from two separate ransomware gangs compromising the same victim at the same time. But antivirus company Emsisoft says it is aware of dozens of incidents in which the same actor or group intentionally layers two types of ransomware on top of each other. “The groups are constantly trying to work out which strategies are best , which net them the most money for the least amount of effort,” says Emsisoft threat analyst Brett Callow. “So in this approach you have a single actor deploying two types of ransomware. The victim decrypts their data and discovers it’s not act...
Post a Comment
Read more

WhatsApp Users Exchanged Over 100 Billion Messages on New Year’s Eve, A New Record

WhatsApp is one of the most widely used communication apps on the planet and as such, clocks an insane number of messages and media exchanges on a daily basis. But the New Year's Eve broke a record that has been standing since WhatsApp's debut a decade ago. WhatsApp has revealed that users exchanged over 100 billion messages on New Year's eve. And out of that number, more than 20 billion messages were shared by Indian users alone. Moreover, around 12 billion out of the 100 billion+ messages shared on the platform were images. WhatsApp wrote in a press release that over 100 billion messages were shared globally on December 31 in the 24-hour duration leading up to the midnight of New Year's Eve. This is a record-breaking volume and is the highest number of messages exchanged in a single day ever since WhatsApp kicked off its services ten years ago. Out of those 100 billion+ messages shared on New Year's eve, WhatsApp says over 12 billion were images. Meanwhile...
Post a Comment
Read more