Content is still king, over 20 years after its coronation by Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Then, as now, however, the challenge is to make it pay.
The solutions are as varied as the types of content for which people have an appetite. Paywalls, for example, metered or not, are popular among traditional publishers, like the New York Times, for example, which now sees about 11 percent of its bottom line contributed by digital revenue.
But, an approach that tends to democratize content creation is the content platform where subscribers pay to access your blog or your video. You don’t have to be a star or a big name to grow your audience. It can supplement your outreach on “traditional” social media channels like Facebook, YouTube or LinkedIn. Or it can be a stand-alone tool for building an audience and monetizing it from the start.
That’s the premise of ConnectPal, the content subscription platform that start in 2014. ConnectPal was initially started as a platform to help radio stations and hosts earn more money. But the idea caught on so well that it expanded well beyond that media market.
The driving premise behind ConnectPal is that any user can set up a profile, or a ConnectPal page, and set a price so anyone can see what’s on this page – without having to build the standard infrastructure for a subscription business.
ConnectPal has attracted a long list of celebrities and ordinary people who are building their brands through the platform and getting paid to do it. The more aggressively they push out their ConnectPal content on their networks – for viral traction – the more money they will earn.
The platform is simply designed and easy to navigate, and has become particularly popular with radio personalities and podcasters. Content creators that have built large followings range from news commentator Jane Velez-Mitchell to Torregano Tribes (business tutorials) to KandynChrome Designs (custom painting tutorials).
Conveniently, ConnectPal also handles other business aspects for its members, such as credit card processing and content hosting.
While other such services are beginning to pop up, ConnectPal has an edge as one of the early comers, being one of the first to provide recognition of the value that legitimate content creators provide to paying subscribers.
