My fellow admins, I come to you today to propose an inspired idea.
Smogon is free - we all know and love this. But what if there was a way for creators - our beloved Posting heroes - to make money off their work, enabling them to keep pumping out the content we adore? That's where my new idea - which I am tentatively calling "Premium Posts" - comes in. Under this model, a user would have the option to paywall any Post they made - I suggest leaving the cost open to the Poster's discretion.
Presented below is a "quick" mock-up of what a paywalled Premium Post could look like:
You will notice that the preceding Post is still visible - in order to maximise profit, I think it would be wise to make it such that whole threads cannot be made Premium, but rather each individual Post.
Something of this sort has recently been announced on Tumblr, to great public excitement - the Smogon userbase will almost certainly welcome this in a similarly enthusiastic fashion (perhaps even without any death threats! Wow!).
To pre-empt a couple of questions:
Will this replace Smogon Gold?
No. There is enough difference between the two models that we can run both concurrently. In fact, it seems like an excellent money-making wheeze to have both; imagine a user finally coughing up for Smogon Gold to see a funny Post, only to have to pay further money because said Post has been Premiumised. Magnificent.
You keep mentioning "profit" and "making money" from this. How do we do that from a Poster-controlled paywall?
I grant you, my presentation has been somewhat vague on this front so far. We will be taking a cut of the profits - I suggest no less than 95%. This is, of course, a serious step down from our intake on all other projects (100+%), but as we are framing Poster profit as the main benefit here, I think it prudent to allow them a small piece of the pie. With any luck this'll shut BKC and the rest of the namby-pamby "pay your contributors" brigade up, too.
I trust you all agree with me that this is a brilliant plan with no possible negative outcome, and eagerly await your feedback below.
Oh, and do make sure this doesn't leak, will you? I want to keep it as a nice surprise for the plebeians.
//clef
Smogon is free - we all know and love this. But what if there was a way for creators - our beloved Posting heroes - to make money off their work, enabling them to keep pumping out the content we adore? That's where my new idea - which I am tentatively calling "Premium Posts" - comes in. Under this model, a user would have the option to paywall any Post they made - I suggest leaving the cost open to the Poster's discretion.
Presented below is a "quick" mock-up of what a paywalled Premium Post could look like:
You will notice that the preceding Post is still visible - in order to maximise profit, I think it would be wise to make it such that whole threads cannot be made Premium, but rather each individual Post.
Something of this sort has recently been announced on Tumblr, to great public excitement - the Smogon userbase will almost certainly welcome this in a similarly enthusiastic fashion (perhaps even without any death threats! Wow!).
To pre-empt a couple of questions:
Will this replace Smogon Gold?
No. There is enough difference between the two models that we can run both concurrently. In fact, it seems like an excellent money-making wheeze to have both; imagine a user finally coughing up for Smogon Gold to see a funny Post, only to have to pay further money because said Post has been Premiumised. Magnificent.
You keep mentioning "profit" and "making money" from this. How do we do that from a Poster-controlled paywall?
I grant you, my presentation has been somewhat vague on this front so far. We will be taking a cut of the profits - I suggest no less than 95%. This is, of course, a serious step down from our intake on all other projects (100+%), but as we are framing Poster profit as the main benefit here, I think it prudent to allow them a small piece of the pie. With any luck this'll shut BKC and the rest of the namby-pamby "pay your contributors" brigade up, too.
I trust you all agree with me that this is a brilliant plan with no possible negative outcome, and eagerly await your feedback below.
Oh, and do make sure this doesn't leak, will you? I want to keep it as a nice surprise for the plebeians.
//clef
