The premium membership feature is on labs. We are now in testing to see what breaks.
When it comes to subscriptions, this is an important milestone. With premium) membership, we now have the payment system in place. Subscriptions is going to use the same technology on the back end.
This means the building of the infrastructure for that premium service is now going to be dual role.
Which opens up a new host of possibilities.
Increased Earning Opportunities
One of the things about Hive is we see expansion in terms of the ways to make money. I wrote an article the other day that detailed some of the history. When I joined Hive, we have $HIVE and $HBD. That was it.
There were no Layer 2 tokens. LEO did not exist. Neither did most of what we see today. The only non-blogging feature was Splinterlands. Outside of that, we were dealing with very little.
Fast forward to now and it is a totally different realm. We have layer 2 tokens galore. There is also the micro-earning concept. Heck, we are even seeing opportunities arising within the realm of infrastructure.
All of this is expanding what people can do within the Hive Ecosystem to earn.
Leo is going to take this a step further with subscriptions. In fact, this could be a major market over time.
Millions of Dollars Monthly
If we are going to target a market, it might as well be one with millions of dollars in revenue.
When looking up the stats relating to Substack and Patreon, this is some of what we find. Granted, these are established sites. Nevertheless, we have to consider what things will look like just taking a sliver of this business away.
Let us start with Substack:
The information is a bit dated but we are looking at over 500K paying subscribers. That is a healthy total.
Then we have this:
The top 10 authors are pulling in over $20 million per year. Again, this is a bit old but the point is driven home.
We can see there is a lot of money in subscriptions. Having this will, in the future, provide a nice option for content creators, especially as more people join the platform.
Now we can look at Patreon.
Here we have a platform paying out almost $25 million per month. That is a nice chunk of change.
They have a content creator base of almost 300K. These are the people who are getting the $25 million per month.
Leo subscriptions is going to put Hive in this game. For the first time, we are going to see something like this.
Plethora of Offerings
Did you ever notice how content creators operate?
This is the typical Web 2.0 model as I see it.
You are watching a video of someone. That individual is talking about the particular topic the channel is known for. To emphasize a point, he or she points to a tweet placed on X. This usually has the image of the tweet in the video, we everyone can see.
Then at the end of the video, the person mentions his or her Patreon page, stating the link is down below.
While all the bases are covered, here is the most important point: *we can do all of that one HIve.
In fact, with the exception of the video, we can create it all within Leo. We have the microblogging, similar to X. Long-form content creation was part of the ecosystem from the start. And soon, we will have subscriptions.
How many different companies does one need to deal with under the Web 2.0 model? On Leo, we deal with the same log in information.
There is actually another benefit: one can earn regardless of what he or she is doing. Post a long form article, that can be rewarded. Send it out as a thread, can also result in votes. Do the same with a video, more money rolling in. Add in a subscription that has a handful of subscribers and one can see how this all can add up.
With the other, people are trying to get monetized on different platforms. With Hive, it is there from the start.
We often talked about the idea of one set of followers and how there is no need to jkeep rebuilding it each time one joined a new platform. Actually, there is no reason to start from scratch on your monetization.
With the system we have here, we are seeing more offerings being added. The content creator toolbox is growing.
This is why subscriptions is so important. It is another leg in the arsenal that content producers have.