Our first project is progressing. The Fiction Community will be an adult writing community, an online platform centered on the community itself. It will be the first website in our new ecosystem, I have plans for online adult story platforms, adult book marketplaces, and more. I hope we get off to a good start so that we can finance everything else. Today I finished the wireframes. You'll find the drafts attached. I want to build publicly and let you participate in the progress. If you have any feedback, please let me know. One question is how the Fiction Community should be monetized. The goal is to build an awesome community while securing basic funding. At first I thought of a paywall around the whole community, but I like the wireframes so much that a free and paid plan might also be interesting. Feel free to give your feedback. I want to build something awesome, but since we lost the income, the monetization has to be right.
I'm not sure where you want to put the "I am 18+ disclaimer" - possibly both on the signup and the login?
It might be stupid of me to suggest this, as I was not observing the discussion, but my suggestion is this - since it's supposed to be with adult content, make all adult content invisible unless you sign in. Sign-in the process could include any disclaimer you would want to put in, it would make it more difficult for trolls to take an interest and maybe put some transaction sites at ease... On the flip sight, it would make the site less accessible.
Good point! I think we're going to include the 18+ modal that we also have on the CHYOA website. Thanks for your post! I actually assumed that we would do a purely adult community. Since the payment issue, I think it's better to separate adult from mainstream.
I don't know much (OK, fine: absolutely fucking nothing ) about the economics of running a (set of) website(s) with millions of visitors, but given how much free pornography is out there (of all kinds, not just erotic stories!), from a "will people actually use the thing" point of view, I feel like this would scuttle the project before it even got started.
I’m curious what percentage of those who backed chyoa with regular payments were authors? As an author, if I was to support the new site with regular payments and that meant my stories on chyoa got more exposure I’d be happy to do that, as I did in the past here. The tricky bit is how to get readers to part with their cash? Maybe some sort of exclusive content or premium gold star membership? I think basic entry to the site has to be free though.
I would do a free option and a tier for other options could be one without ads if you plan on having ads. Could have premium storiess. Etc. could even do a membership tier where they hire an author and chyoa gets a cut like pateron option but without the middleman. Hope that makes sense. I’m very excited for it.
I'm in favor of free content. The paywall could be for joining a group or paying for a commission or subscribing to a writer to show support. You could look to Twitch, Discord or Deviant Art for monetization strategies. Subscribe to a creator for custom badges, titles or emoticons. Offer the ability to commission and tip which you take a cut off the top. Maybe custom avatars, titles or emoticons for different groups. Like if someone wanted to run an RPG story and reader/players could pick their own characters or the free one would be a default character. I guess that would be more specific to writers offering subscriptions. (I'm hoping this new system will make adding images way easier than it is now) Another subscriber benefit could be weighted voting power, like if there was a vote for adding new features, subscribers would have more of a voice compared to a free member. The highlighted story was always a nice benefit for being a Patreon supporter. I would like a feature to allow you to change the story on your own if you're keeping that. Also, having a system to connect chapter tier subscribers with writers might make that process easier and more desirable as well. They could have access to one chapter and fill out a description of what they want that chapter to be, then it would go out to a writer's list where writers can notify that they will write it. Once that link is established, the writer does the chapter, the reader approves and the payment is sent. Then, if the reader wants to stick with that writer, there could be an option to do that instead of filling out a new story request each month.
Thanks for your suggestions! I think that answers the paywall question. Then we'll make a free plan, we still need to work out details for the paid plan. My plan was to make Fiction primarily a community, i.e. it should be a forum/"Reddit" for authors and readers. From the point of view of the payment providers, we therefore do not sell any pornographic material. The online platforms we build afterwards will then host the stories. However, I don't see a problem with stories being written in groups or posts as long as the credit card rules are followed. For the Fiction Community I have planned a story directory where authors can link their stories externally. And on each profile, a user can link their best stories to external sites.
The wireframes look awesome Friedman! One major questions that I think is worth discussing as a community: Should the new community use virtual currency (like points or tokens you can buy, 'in game currency') vs. direct purchases? Some upsides/downsides of each option as I see it: Virtual currency 1. It can bring in more revenue, since users pre-purchase the virtual currency with regular money (the site receives the money earlier, users may not spend all their currency, etc.) 2. Could be better for building a community & retention, since once you've bought into the currency, you have a motivation to spend the rest of it 3. It could be given as a reward for active/loyal authors & followers who contribute to the community 4. Potentially expands the monetization options while avoiding the censorship issues from credit card companies. Given the credit card guidelines Friedman posted, I don't think users could directly pay an author to write an incest story on the new community site. But one potential workaround is if users can buy virtual currency on the community site, which can then be ported or exchanged for tokens on Chyoa (or other websites) and then they can use those tokens on Chyoa to commission the taboo story they want. If anybody with actual training in law can be consulted on this, that would be good. Direct payments 1. The finances are more transparent. A. If an author is paid in virtual currency to write a story, there's a question of whether you can redeem the currency for money (answer should probably be yes), but then the timing of redemption and cash flow becomes hard to predict. If everyone cashes out in a short time frame there could be liquidity issues. There's also thornier design questions of whether you have enough currency sinks, or whether you can deal with currency inflation, and minimum points required for cashing out etc. B. If an author is paid cash to write a story while the user spends points, there's again a question of timing of payments (like a user might have purchased the points 2 years ago and maybe there's no longer cash on hand to pay the author bc the money went to server costs in the meantime).2. The process of buying a product or service is more direct. This matters less for whales and more for the consumer on the fence of buying. Extra clicks and complexity is generally not desirable. A more secondary concern is that virtual currency makes the site feel more like a video game & potentially seen as less professional. I don't know how big this benefit is, but people could be scared of getting scammed (especially with crypto) or don't want to invest heavily into a whole adult writing community ecosystem (like they're just there to pay a couple bucks to support one author, they don't want to buy into the whole system), and then directly paying cash makes more sense.3. Likely a simpler system to implement. My take is that virtual currencies are preferred, especially if point 4 holds. Otherwise, we risk either hamstringing the monetization options we can pursue, or we cut out a big section of our authors from some monetization channels. I'm interested in hearing what you guys think and if there are alternate systems that would make sense! (For instance, you could integrate a premium tier that's paid for with virtual currency, or simply directly pay for premium.) I also have a couple of other monetization ideas that I'll post later when I have the chance to fully write up my scratch notes.
If it’s virtual currency then I won’t contribute, it’s too difficult to use and the currencies too unstable. I’d be amazed if the site made any money from virtual currency payments.
If we are compliant with the policies of payment providers, then there is no reason to not use standard fiat currency. Of the points you make, 1 and 2 are just users spending more than they mean to, which I would consider a bad thing, and 4 seems to be outside the scope of Fiction Community. As for point 3, rewards can just be directly given to users, if necessary, rather than giving them tokens to spend.
It sounds like you're referring to cryptocurrencies. Using virtual currency would just be a way to store payments in your user account, making it possible to use it over time.
Essentially what you mean is like using V-bucks in Fortnite. It’s a currency that you buy that’s just for the site. Just making it another way so others can understand. If we do that there could be a way that Friedman does a battlepass like option where it’s a monthly fee but it translates into certain rewards and coins for the membership.
For this to work, "Fiction Community" needs to be innocently clean. How much stain will a link towards chyoa be on the site? Will a link towards an adult book marketplaces be a problem? You have to moderate the speech there... A link from chyoa to fc is different to a link from fc to chyoa.
Im comfortable enough with the idea of buying tokens in the same kind of way we do on webcam sites. Im still not sure what you can then spend the tokens on in the site though. eg would it be something like: you can use them to pay authors to write stories? you can pay to use variables / game mode in a story? you can pay to have access to "premium" stories? (Ones which are in the top 100 say) maybe you can't see images in stories if you're not signed in as a member with tokens? maybe you pay an extra token for every story you read beyond 2 a day? maybe you only get to 10 chapters deep for free? beyond that its a token per 5 chapters.
