Let's say I'm a Personal Trainer and because of an entirely hypothetical disproportionate governmental lockdown response to a recent pandemic destroying my usual in-person training sessions I've had to move my personal training sessions online.
I decide to make YouTube my main platform and produce a series of videos featuring me doing a different work-out each week and a blog where I put out articles about how to perform different exercises correctly, healthy lifestyle options, recipes, product reviews as well as motivation and goal setting advice.
I'm pretty hot too (YOU KNOW IT!) So I decide to up my Instagram game with daily (obviously post-workout pumped) shirt-off selfies and TikTok shorts of me doing HIT sets, and make sure I've got all of my content linked together in my profile pages.
I also set up a Patreon account, reasoning that I've got a few dozen regular clients and most of them will happily pay my top tier subscription of $50 a month to attend my Zoom personal training sessions, but if they don't want to pay that they can still support me by paying a lower tier subscription and getting access to some further video and blog articles I only make available on Patreon.
I may not know it yet but I'm going to be reasonably successful at this and after a couple of years I'll be earning a decent living via two 'earning models' online....
- I'll be earning from advertising and
- I'll be earning through subscriptions
Earning through Advertising
This is where my regular blog posts and/ or YouTube/ Insta/ TikTok videos will generate a loyal following of dedicated readers and/ or viewers and advertisers will then pay me to advertise to my following - the more adverts my viewers watch, and much more significantly the more click-throughs and purchases that are generated from my blog/ YouTube channel, then the more I earn.
And if I become REALLY popular I'll also get paid to promote products directly within my blog/ Channel - by actually wearing or endorsing certain brands, for example.
The downside of this model is that my content gets 'tainted' with advertising which reduces the quality of the content, With the advertising model, there's something of a 'black box' effect - I personally can't see how much revenue is being generated from the ads people click on, I don't know if I'm getting a 5% or 25% (it's highly unlikely to be more than that!) kickback for the click throughs and sales from my site.
Earning from Direct Subscriptions/ Patrons
This is a more direct model which cuts out the advertising middle men.
I produce content, put a certain amount of it online for free, essentially advertising myself and my services, and then I charge a subscription or fee to access to my premium content.
The benefit of this model over the advertising model is that I get to directly control my own fees and I can see exactly what I'm being paid - there is no black box effect.
It's also possible for me to offer different tiers of access or simply set different levels of subscription which give people the opportunity to pay me more if they want to and can afford it.
Earning on Hive
The Hive Blockchain offers me another way of earning - through another layer of rewards besides FIAT money, via the upvote mechanism, completely independent of advertising and subscriptions. AND it offers my followers the opportunity to pay me without actually paying me - if they so choose to invest in Hive and use their upvote power to reward my content. (Not that I'd advise any of them to do this as I would never offer financial advice!)
Hive also offers me the opportunity as an entrepreneur to Power Up Hive and encourage my followers/ subscribers to post their own content, and reward them for their comments on my work - rewarding interactivity and engagement and encouraging a certain sense of loyalty to my personal brand.
I can even set up my own community with its own token and 'tokenise' my business and offer a further layer of rewards to my followers with that token.
While this kind of inter-tribe loyalty may be niche, it does offer a kind of hedge against the necessity to keep plugging away with the SEO mission, by kind of leveraging as much money out of the followers you already have....
And earning in Hive also offers me that 'moon' potential - $10 earned on Patreon will be worth $1 in 2030 (you know it!), but $10 earned in Hive today could be worth $500 in 2030, I mean (you know it) a Hive moon is just around the corner, after all.
Different flavours of earning...
The means of earning in the above three models is different - one indirect in fiat from advertising, the second direct, in fiat, from those who consume my content, and the third direct in Magic Internet Money.
With the subscription model I'll be more able to offer a more personalised service as I'm more likely to get to know my clients, with the advertising model I probably won't even know who has been viewing my content.
With Hive - this potentially encourages much more social interactivity - it probably won't be as personal as the subscription model, but not as impersonal as the advertising model of earnings - with a fully tokenised set up on Hive I'm effectively rewarding social interactivity, and because my clients and I are 'paying without paying' it should also encourage a level of playfulness too.
One advantage of the subscription model is that I could leverage it to encourage higher earning, higher demanding customers to pay more, while if someone has less capacity to pay I might selectively offer them a discount, on the quiet of course!
An advantage of the advertising model is that it would mean less personal contact with clients, and thus less hassle and pressure. It's more just 'me and my content'.
Hive lies somewhere between the two - kind of socially personable!?
Final thoughts - Three earning models, insane to not leverage them all!
If you're going to spend time working on content to generate fiat income via Web 2.0 then you may as well also post that content to the Hive blockchain and leverage that extra layer (or layers, depending on how far you take it) of crypto earnings too.
What have you got to lose?
Also published on PublishOX