Why Does Kickstarter Suck (Redux)?

Michael Fienen on November 24, 2014

Two years ago, I wrote a post about the numerous problems/opportunities I saw with the Kickstarter platform. I’m a big fan of Kickstarter, as a concept, and to date have backed well over 30 projects (for the record, I have an almost perfect record on picking good projects, as well). As a result, I’m on the site a lot, and looking for things that would interest me. After all this time,  I thought it would be interesting to revisit the last post and look at what’s changed, see where they’ve improved, and where they haven’t. Read More

Thoughts on Google Contributor

Michael Fienen on November 23, 2014

Google recently began testing a new platform called Contributor. The long and short of it is that as a visitor, you can “subscribe” to a site for $1 to $3, and in return they’ll take ads off the site and give a part of the money back to the site owner. It’s sort of like a blend of Patreon and Readability (back when you could donate to the site you were saving from – as it looks like maybe they don’t do that anymore now).

It’s an interesting move by Google, in my opinion, and one that speaks volumes of some of their underlying goals. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of ways this is good for them, and can generate a lot of self-serving data about valuable content on websites and the like, so I’m stopping short of calling it an altruistic system. But, that also doesn’t detract from the value that it creates if site developers can use it as a means to maintain and encourage good maintenance and content. It also has the possibility to create marginally more stable revenue streams for sites, since subscriptions are much more consistent that pay-per-clicks.

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