Rethinking How Writers Get Paid
We’ve been thinking a lot about how to help writers earn money in new and meaningful ways. Not just to support individual writers, but to grow the entire ecosystem — bringing more writers (and readers) onchain and building a thriving creative economy around ideas.
As part of that, we’ve been considering how we could use coins to help writers make more money. We’re not committed to launching anything yet, but we wanted to share a few early thoughts — partly to clarify our thinking, mostly to hear what you think.
The Challenges with Open Edition Mints
Today, the most common monetization on Paragraph is open edition collecting: writers publish a post, readers mint it as an NFT, and the writer receives a small payment per mint.
While it’s certainly unique, there haven’t been a lot of examples of writers, artists, musicians, or any type of creator that’s turned this into a consistent, durable income stream. On Paragraph, the only use case we’ve really seen work is leaning into speculation, allowing readers to collect with the hope of an airdrop, token allocation, or some future financial gain. Here are a couple recent examples: Apiology DAO (over 31,000 collects over the past few months) and Ink the future (one post with over 46,000 collects).
There’s nothing wrong with this use case. But we feel there’s more we can do to radically expand the amount of writing and creative work on the internet, well beyond company’s sharing updates and announcements.
Other platforms like Zora and Rodeo have experimented with adding secondary markets after open editions, aiming to spark more speculative activity. These have been worthy experiments and show promise, but don’t seem to have generated too much growth in sustainable commerce. Switching from an open edition to a secondary market for each post, and all that comes with it, is a tricky product experience to get right.
Why Coins Might Be a Better Model
Speculation, whether we like it or not, is one of crypto’s strongest features. Removing speculation or only making it accessible in convoluted ways makes it much harder for onchain apps to gain traction.
So how could coins (ERC-20 tokens) offer a better alternative to open edition NFTs (ERC-721)?
Compared to open edition NFTs, coins give readers the opportunity to sell or trade, introducing the potential for financial upside.
Compared to limited edition NFTs, coins offer much better liquidity and are far easier to buy, sell, and exchange over time.
Writers get paid from every transaction — not just an initial mint.
Writers can hold their own coins, benefitting as their work gains value.
Readers can participate in upside when they support a writer early.
Coins can reward other valuable behaviors, like sharing, editing, or remixing a post.
Further, coins are a little more flexible and interoperable. There’s a good shot the core benefits above open up new opportunities and lead to a lot of compelling second-order effects that are unimaginable right now.
Growing the Economy Around Creative Work
Compared to open edition mints, coins feel like they have a better shot at growing the economy around creative work.
But there are certainly still big risks to consider.
First, coins introduce more mental overhead and complexity around the purchase behavior. You have to decide how many coins to buy and when to buy them. After buying coins, there’s an ongoing decision burden of whether to hold or sell. Easy purchase decisions are part of the reason bundles outperform a-la-carte products, and why subscriptions outperform micro- and one-off payments. With coins, decisions are more abstract and unintuitive, all of which are amplified by this being a totally new type of purchase behavior.
Going viral should be incentivized and rewarded. BUT, if it’s the only way to make money with coins, we’re right back to the internet of today. Ideally, we have an ecosystem that helps you go viral to get discovered and find new audience. But then for some of that audience to be loyal and stick around, providing foundational support for any ongoing creative work.
Another risk is the requirement to sell to profit from a rising coin price. This is no problem for speculators, but hard for readers that care about the writer. There's quite a bit of psychological risk here for writers — having readers unsubscribe is one thing, canceling a paid subscription hurts a little more... but selling a coin associated with your work? That might sting even more. Even more problematic is requiring the writer to sell their own coins to profit, which may signal loss of faith in their work (or, worse, evoke scar tissue of past rug pulls).
Finally, speculation. Coins may be better at tapping into speculation, but if that’s the only reason people (or bots) are buying coins, we may end up in another short-term cash grab. Speculation needs to play a supporting role, not the primary motivator, for coins to be a durable monetization feature.
I’m hopeful some of the risks above can be chipped away through product design, marketing, fine-tuning incentives, and broadly trying to guide the overall experience toward valuable, durable behavior.
But sitting above all of this is the central question: will people actually buy coins for creative work?
We’ll explore that in Part 2.
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Been thinking about what drives people to support creative work — not just for access, but to support, express themselves, or feel part of something. If we want onchain products to truly grow the economy around creative work, we need to move beyond speculation and tap into deeper motivations. Some thoughts on the search for something better below. Would love to hear your feedback! https://paragraph.com/@reidtandy/why-will-readers-buy-coins
loved your article, really insightful, specially given your previous experiences at substack and crunchyroll "coins could offer a much stronger signal layer than paid subscriptions. When someone buys a coin because a post or writer resonated with them, that purchase becomes more than support — it becomes a visible marker of value in the marketplace of ideas and media, something paid subscriptions can’t do." this sentence really resonated, and i'm v curious to see how all of this will play out
Thank you, really appreciate the feedback & love that this resonated. I love the quote you pulled. We've been thinking about two big vectors: 1) How could we add a unique spin on paid subscriptions for full-time writers? 2) How could we provide a better home for folks that want to write ~4 posts per year, but have those ideas valued? The first is more like the Substack writer persona, the second more like the Medium writer persona. For the first, the signal value (and opportunity to earn yield) of a coin purchase feels like it could actually compete a bit with the utility of paid subscriptions. Thanks again! 🙏
Great read man, I think the creative door has been flung open again to investigate what v2 and beyond of what value both coins and nfts can provide
Absolutely, feels like we're heading into some fun, compelling territory of experimenting & iterating.
I'm wondering if there is a way to bundle 'indie' software products with relevant content from across writers so writers who's work amplifying subscriptions for builders can both be incentivized. most hackers dont' don't want to sit and write content, myself included. https://every.to does a great job of sharing insights you can subscribe to across writers with access to bundle software. can we bundle writing and provide subs to mini apps or recommend mini apps from the publications like substack?
I'm a big fan of Every and friendly with some of the folks over there, and think it's fascinating what they're doing with the AI apps as part of their Every subscription. I'm also seeing more writers partner with other companies to bundle relevant products into their paid subscription. Lenny is a great example: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/an-unbelievable-offer-now-get-one I could easily see this porting over to our world, where coin holders get access to a suite of mini apps, whether that be through partnerships or more of the Every-style of incubating / building in-house. Thanks for sharing your ideas & feedback!
i think coins at the publication level is interesting. theres a reason that most successful reader-writer relationships have a publisher in between. drawing attention and curating an information diet is a different skillset to content creation
Next time we chat, let's talk about this. It's a valuable insight across media
I'd love to tune in if you'll have me!
I think part of the struggle is that "content" is a lot of peoples least favorite word It means something different than art to me And how do you infer the amount of time / artistic skill that goes in to form a market? Is a tokenized IG reels value the same or different than a feature length film? It feels like a new option, but doesn't seem to solve the old probems in my mind right now
I definitely agree w/ your first comment! https://warpcast.com/reidtandy/0x49495eed Re: how the value of a tokenized IG reel differs from a feature length film, my gut says it's pretty subjective & may be better to let an open market figure it out (vs. being more prescriptive about what should be valuable vs. not). If you buy into that, then it becomes a question of what's the best ways to create an open market around creative work? What's our best shot at truly expanding the economy for creative work?
Def allergic to the word "content" too In regards to expanding the economy for creative work, do you feel we are missing a bare minimum entry? Things pop up now with little filter for slop and it becomes a raise of amount of content over the quality of it As an aside something like /bedrock that @jihadis building feels more centered and focused (subjective I know) But for us to expand the economy of creators we need to invest in creating with intention as an alternate to the creative world people find themselves in now Little bit of a ramble there, but liked the question
Gn Reid One of the first thing that I think when I start to read this is if you are thinking about to use solutions like Castcoin? I collect it, but I can't resist to Castcoin it also! I'm going to send you some of this tokens also. @castcoins !coin
Gn Reid I create a coin with this cast, and I sent you some of the tokens. This is the link of the token, where you can mint more if you want!: https://warpcast.com/castcoins/0xdfe2860e I hope you like it!
Very cool, thanks for sharing!!
You're welcome!🙂 Do you ever use the Castcoin bot?
What if it's some combination? I'm thinking: - utility coins at the creator level - spend/burn coins to mint nft's at the publication level - options for gating certain extra levels of access with tokens and/or mints - option for publication level patronage by collecting with a paid mint instead of token - optional extra utility for additional burn mechanisms for things like merch, event access, direct services, etc. - speculative component could be a token split on creator level mints. A creator's publications are ranked by total mints and holders get a split of new token mints based on which nft's they hold, somewhat hypersub style. Could potentially use a /revnet backend for managing this.
Some excellent ideas, thanks for sharing! One idea I've always like that we haven't really explored much are NFTs at the writer- or publication-level. Like the digital equivalent of a New Yorker tote bag — something that provides signaling value that you care about & support a particular writer. Thanks again!
https://warpcast.com/trigs/0xfba9c684
I enjoyed reading this, thanks. For the dummy (me) who hasn’t quite grasped the difference between coins and open edition NFTs, could you explain?
Not dumb *at all* - this is a great question!! Open edition NFTs are like tips for a single post. They have an unlimited quantity and are "free" (the collector pays a small fee, with some of it going to the writer / creator & some of it going the the platform). Collecting a post today is rooted in patronage as there's no direct way to make money by selling the NFT. Coins are much more liquid (they can be bought *and* sold), providing a few more ways writers (and readers) to earn: a share of transaction fees, benefit from the coin price going up, yield from staking, etc. Coins are broadly more flexible, so it opens up some compelling opportunities for revenue sharing back to coin holders. Curious to hear if this makes any sense at all! A little more detail here too: https://paragraph.com/@reidtandy/rethinking-how-writers-get-paid
Tipping via DegenSub 65 $DEGEN
This is the conversation. Most creators don’t just want buyers, they want believers. Speculation fades, but shared purpose sticks
Totally agree — it's really hard to build a reliable income without a loyal base of people that care deeply about what you're doing.
How can we help writers earn meaningful, reliable income? Open edition NFTs haven’t quite gotten us there, so we have to find a better solution. We wrote a couple posts on why we think coins may be a better model (part 1 below) — we'd love to hear what you think. https://paragraph.com/@reidtandy/rethinking-how-writers-get-paid
@six @androidsixteen.eth, relevant to the other threads on coins, we'd love to get your critical thoughts here as well!
Will read and follow up with thoughts here!
Just read -- not sure how it would differ from the Zora model as currently implemented? I guess my core question is around why virality matters. Viral content is closely coupled with an ads-based internet model. Rather than trying to optimize for millions of views / page opens, I feel like the goal should be to connect each author with their "1000 true fans" If each person can find 100 patrons that adore them, the mechanism underlying the monetization is less important. From the latter perspective, it could literally be as simple as a 1 USDC tip button That said, I don't want to be too prescriptive as I don't understand your business as well as you do. Perhaps it makes sense to offer a toolkit ranging from speculative tokens to vanilla subscriptions, and let your authors decide how they want to make money from their audience? Would be down to discuss further with y'all at Farcon or something, as @giu and I are thinking deeply about this as well
I’ve gone back to the basics https://warpcast.com/christin/0x3976783d
I still love reading books.
@yb wdyt
My initial thought is that a publication token feels more aligned with writers than issuing a token for each individual post. As a writer, I’d want to use the token to gate certain posts, while also rewarding my community and collaborators. Early supporters who hold the token could benefit if interest in the publication grows. Sure it might sting if some choose to sell for profit, but if the token is required for access, they may be more inclined to hold. I also see potential for interesting experiments where a publication is run as a collective - writers are the token holders, and holding a token is required to gain access to publish posts.
Excellent feedback & ideas - thanks for sharing! 🙏 Please let us know if anything else comes to mind.
Will do! Curious if you were thinking more in terms of coins per post or a coin for the publication? We have Zora as an example and most of my friends think that Zora cares more about speculation than anything else. I really don't want that bad PR for Paragraph
oooooh shit, this idea of a publication token that gates access to posts/community feels SO ALIVE to me compared to other monetization methods. as a writer it incentivizes cultivating a living, growing body of writing, and for readers it incentivizes deeper conversation and sharing around it. something about the energy/vibes of this model feels so different from a substack subscription or selling access to body of work for a one time fee. it's a shift from writing as transactional commodity to writing as campfire that people can gather round
Love to hear it & agree... Paid subscriptions are great & have opened up a large economy for creative work (Patreon, Substack, etc.), but obviously have drawbacks as well. Coins feel like they could provide some unique advantages to better connect readers & writers, and broadly expand the economy for creative work.
I've aways loved the idea of collecting articles But I have been deeply disappointed by the experience or lack therefore of Show me all the articles I have collected in any farcaster account make collecting useful and meaningful subscriptions so I get it for free Let me talk to a knowledge base that can be trained on my collected articles Stop calling it free and charging me money, just list the price in $ and let me pay with whatever currency I want/have (relay.link)
Thanks for leaving feedback! > make collecting useful and meaningful Could you say more about this?
the other points are what would be make it useful and meaningful :)
> farcaster account = any verified wallet attached to my farcaster account >so i get it for free = pay monthly forget about article cost I type to fast some times 😪
This made me think of a great old Android tablet app I had. Can’t recall the name but it allowed you to custom link articles and blogs and websites all kinds of content and map it into a nice swipeable bento grid. Click in the box to expand and read. Always thought it was my favorite UX for reading articles from across many different platforms.
Feedly or Flipboard? There were some pretty great reader apps back in the day. I used Pocket for a long time. Big fan of Readwise's reader app these days.
So hard topic to comment on - have some strong opinions about writing and creator economy in general - but for me paragraph's main proposition always was (and I believe should be for everyone) proof-of-origin. Basically future-proofing my writing for the future when everyone can write the same quality thing with AI help. (mint on publish 😉 ) That's what should be at the heart of it. Parghrp can't outperform web2 platforms in features, cross-promotions, network effects - not now, not for a long time. You have to lean into what matters to you as a team and to writers. Whether it's subscription, NFTs, or coins is pretty irrelevant. even though - publications coin is cool idea, but so is Donate $5 button. Again, I won't make more money with coins or NFTs compared similar efforts elsewhere.There are easy ways to get paid already, crypto and coins only make it more complicated. It's not that every writing is valuable, sometimes we just write for ourselves. Or we don't solve anyone's problem = 0 value
Awesome feedback, thank you! Out of curiosity, how much would you pay each month or year for Paragraph as a provider of proof-of-origin? Do we already solve your problem, or what additional features would you like to see to further solve the proof-of-origin / future-proof problem?
Good question 🤔 1/ you partly solve it with IPFS but I'd still like mint-on-publish option 2/ For me, if you'd automatically mint everything I publish onchain $20-$40/y would feel as well invested money (but from your perspective - individual mint fee might be safer option since some people publish a ton) And look, I'm not trying to say don't experiment, it's just that side-kick experiments will just exhaust your small team. You really need to focus things where - nobody will hate it, if you’ll do it right. (think Amazon - nobody ever complains about faster delivery, hence build many warehouses) Otherwise coins can have many fun use-cases, like “writer playlists/baskets” of essays which could be done with @basketdotfarm or similar tools, so I would have fun, but it would not move the needle for you
My suggestion: - 1 coin, representing all the writer's paragraph posts on that blog. - Keep the open editions for each post. - Build in mutual benefit both ways, between the two types of tokens. (If many open editions get minted, coin-holders also benefit. If coin price goes up, open-edition holders also benefit) This way people can buy what they like (open edition or coin), and each benefit from the success of both. And the artist can benefit from both open edition sales and LP positions on the coin.
Super interesting... I love the idea of a coin at the writer / publication level. Also love the idea of having some kind of tie-in w/ coins *and* NFTs (though I was thinking limited-edition NFTs for signaling & self-expression, which coins don't do as well off-the-shelf). Thank you for the idea & feedback!
Also could be cool for the launch of it, to get a bunch of writers to airdrop a % of their blog-coin to all the collectors of their writing so far.
Like this one! And would work with this theme · 👓 🔵 2. Author/creator gets immediate supply of their work, which they can use in many different ways: · Airdrops to original collectors and/or loyal follwers · Promotions to Introduce new readers to their writing · Trading with other authors/creators
Will ponder and return some thoughts soon · 👓 🔵
Thank you, any feedback is much appreciated. 🙏
Some thoughts on a potential move to coins · 👓 🔵 1. Move would be directionally consistent with overall trend 2. Author/creator gets immediate supply of their work, which they can use in many different ways: · Airdrops to original collectors and/or loyal follwers · Promotions to Introduce new readers to their writing · Trading with other authors/creators 3. Future possibility for author/creator to “boost” their coin with something similar to boost.xyz 4. Readers/collectors get lower price point and can collect a broader range of work (Seeing this happen on @zora) 5. Readers/collectors can adjust quantity based on their reaction to the work 6. Uptick in speculative interest, especially to be early 7. Viral price action, fueled by many potential catalysts, can attract more attention
I think #2 is a great idea if the writer were to launch a coin - a great way to give back to the folks that have supported them along the way (if they want to!). A lot of the other activity could be valuable too, but still think we'd love to see more durable, non-speculative motivators be the driving force behind any commerce: patronage, self-expression, community, and utility, among other less-zero-sum, sustainable motivations.
👍🏽👍🏽