I don't understand - what possible business model could you have with such niche blogging? Can anybody explain how this is expected to work? Some kind of sponsored advertising on what the blog topic is about?
I was gonna type this but then I saw your post. I don't see where Svbtle is going. What benefit can membership get from joing Svbtle network? well there's only 1 thing i can think of right now is link exposure. and how Svbtle is going to make profit is still a huge question. Ads is obviously not an option because I felt like it's against the philosophy how Svbtle was created.
> What benefit can membership get from joing Svbtle network?
I applied (and got in) to Svbtle because of two things: exclusivity and the interface. Svbtle at least attempts to have only high quality writers there, and it was made clear that sometimes, if posts were of low quality, they'd be asked to be revised. There was also talk of helping Svbtle members with their writing through things like copyediting. I haven't heard of any of those things happening yet, but I can tell you that (generally) I try to keep Svbtle much higher quality as a result. I still maintain a personal blog where I put shorter/news kinds of things, but bigger, more in-depth essays go to Svbtle.
The interface is also really nice. It's good enough that I actually write in-browser, rather than writing in Vim and copying it over.
Oh, and also: I suck real hard at design, and I'm sick of maintaining Yet Another Blog Platform/design. I really like the look and feel of Svbtle. My personal blog is basically just Skeleton default with a few small modifications: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/archive
So, are you gonna pay $50/m for this, to make them profitable?
Assuming they've taken, say, $500k, to get that back from 200 writers they'd need to make $2.5k from each of the current writers. Even doubling the number of writers, that's still $1.25k - 25 months at $50/m.
So actually, to recoup the investment from writers in any reasonable time they'd need to charge more like $100-200/m. I doubt many of their 200 writers would stay in those circumstances. Would you?
Other than charging the writers, I don't see what business model svbtle can support, other than advertising, which would also jar with the way the site is designed, and also with the ambitions of many star bloggers, who typically want to eventually have the option to put their own discreet ads à la DaringFireball on their blog...
Agreed, I tried to address this with 'at least attempts.' I feel that my last post is not up to the standards of the rest of them, but that's also because I judged it across different lines than normal.
I actually liked that post: what are you unsure about? It felt very straightforward to me.
I'd recommend creating some way of chaining posts, either linked-list style (to simulate a blog) or tree-style (to simulate conversations, ala Branch).
For what it's worth, I like the look of your blog with the Skeleton default --- and it really isn't much different from a design perspective than what Subtle gives you.
Your decision to segment your blog onto two URLs is interesting. Won't this degrade your personal blog since you only put short, and by your admission, lower quality posts on it?
In the past, I've gotten paid by IBM to write articles for their developerWorks blog. Long form. High quality stuff. I always felt like they paid me for the privilege of hosting my writings on a website they control, that they make money from...as opposed to me writing something that lives on my personal blog forever, hopefully giving my blog/"personal brand" (yuck, but not sure what else to call it) the traffic.
> it really isn't much different from a design perspective than what Subtle gives you.
Thanks! Here's the thing, though: Dustin is always working on improving Svbtle, and I don't have to think about it. For example, the code formatting on my blog is terrible. I haven't felt the need to fix it. So it keeps looking terrible. The highlighting on Svbtle is great. One day, the 'related posts' feature just appeared: I didn't need to code that up.
> Won't this degrade your personal blog since you only put short, and by your admission, lower quality posts on it?
It may. It depends: if you care about more news-feed personal stuff about me, then you can read that. My blog used to get on HN all the time, and I'd have a hard time building an audience, because a complex, theory-driven post would get a bunch of subscribers, and then the next one would be a "I released a new version of $PROJECT" and people would unsubscribe. Now I can have two audiences in two places.
Also, Svbtle is on my domain, so it's still 'my brand' as much as Svbtle's.
The problem is that companies like this are as not-scalable as possible. It is a bunch of individual contributors. The only way you add value is to hire someone great, who will presumably be quite expensive. Once they start trying to figure out how to hire more cost effective bloggers, quality will suffer and people will stop reading.
Or hope you can keep convincing quality people to join a boy's club, with some editorial power, and perhaps a marketing channel that it could be promoted on/with. Most of the character that I enjoy in personally written blogs feels like it gets lost in whatever process they follow for editing. Just MHO.
