Matthew Gates 4m 930
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
Is There Any Value With Confessions of the Professions?
For the month of July 2018, we ran an experiment involving our contributors and marketers. Having always published for free, as we highly believe in free speech and feel that others should not have to be charged for it, we wanted to understand what would happen if we started charging for publications. The results were shocking, but expected. We always promised we would be as transparent as we could be.
For more information on why we posted this, refer to: http://confessionsoftheprofessions.com/news/confessions-of-the-professions-secures-sponsors/ http://confessionsoftheprofessions.com/news/confessions-of-the-professions-secures-sponsors/
So here it is: we definitely moved to a higher server and the costs to pay for this website went up. Is the site faster? It definitely loads for us and has a pretty decent speed on Pingdom. While there was never any serious financial concerns, we wanted to understand what people and the many marketing agencies we have published for might do if they were to lose a website for which they had publications on.
The answer: probably nothing.
As Confessions of the Professions is a site based on organizational-psychology and social psychology, specifically focused on jobs, careers, and the workplace, experiments on our visitors, our co-workers, and even our bosses are done from time to time, but usually go unnoticed. It often gives us research and new articles to publish.
Data gathered from your visiting and email and data graphic habits are still returning the same results. Our visitors and contributors do keep coming back to the website. Knowing full well that we were charging them to publish, they still were visiting our website with purpose. Our policy is to always try and deliver #nofakenews articles that are quality, funny, filled with joy and purpose, and have meaning, for one day… maybe you’ll discover them — or you already have. But there’s a world out there that hasn’t! How might such a website be archived? For what happens to a website that might be instantly gone tomorrow?
Imagine if Google went down tomorrow. Lots of money to be lost. Imagine if Amazon was gone. Facebook? No more. Twitter? Medium? WordPress? Your email? Society tends to work because we keep it working. It makes sense. We are very happy to have concluded this terrible, good-for-nothing research. Yes, we’re sorry. We were just curious.
We appreciate your patience, your frustrations, the fact that you never factored us into your budget! *sarcasm* Despite only charging $5.00 per confession, most marketing agencies were unwilling to submit “paid” articles, and when we emailed them to find out why: the most common answer was: “We don’t have the budget for that.” However, we are so glad to be helping you! We really need you to help us! Keep coming back! Keep marketing our website! We need you as much as you need us!
We understand we may have lost some contributors in the process. But when it comes to a $5.00 per article budget, we realize the feelings are just as mutual for us as they are for you: we need you as much as you need us. Fortunately, we do not harbor any hard feelings towards any of our contributors, as this was done purely for research purposes to understand: what would our contributors — freelance writers and marketing agencies — be willing to donate or contribute beyond just articles and infographics? Once money was introduced into the equation: the emails did not stop, but the paywall stopped almost everyone from actually contributing an article or infographic.
We are certainly going to try and support this website for as long as we can. We have tons of articles to help you through your job, your life, and everything in between, maybe give you an idea about starting a business, or just maybe leading you to contribute an article yourself. Our supporters are our family. We work hard to make sure this website is indexable by all search engines and articles are being discovered.
We push to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Triberr, and others, as well as at least a dozen different RSS feeds, and about 300 subscribers on our push notification feeds. So each article has the potential for at least a hundred thousand views or more. We are certain that there is some value to Confessions of the Professions by this alone. The value itself comes from the unique and interesting perspective of the articles we publish.
Just know, we can only keep it going for as long as YOU too continue to support it, both financially and with confessions. We make no promises, for tomorrow is not guaranteed, and each day we can continue to deliver some decent knowledge to the world through the Internet, is a day we are still alive and well, for we might just be gone tomorrow, and this website with us, without a trace, only memories, except maybe that we might get lucky enough to get a spot on the Internet Archive, where our website work will supposedly be hosted for as long as we have our Internet access.
We appreciate everyone who has read this. We certainly meant no hard feelings by doing this experiment, but we really had to understand that we are really just a minimal space on the vast Internet. We will do our best to take care of your articles and archive them for as long as we can. For the time being, there is no threat to losing your articles at all. Thank you for your unknown participation. We still will give priority to paid confession over free.
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