Adoption Sponsorships

This is a strange topic for me to write about because on the one hand I am terrible at monetising anything—whether it's my content or my skills—but on the other I'm fascinated by the idea of people being able to get paid for what they create online. What I want to share with you today though, is an idea I had in the past couple of days. Maybe it's a great idea, maybe it's an idiotic one. That, I don't know but I'd love to know what you think about it. And before you ask, no, I don't plan to implement anything like this on my site. I just want to share the idea and see what other people think.

Let's imagine you have a blog and you like to write about, well anything that interests you really. Let's also imagine your content doesn't mix well with more traditional tools like affilate links and that you also don't want to have ads on your site. Your options, when it comes to earn money from your content, are pretty limited. Since it's 2021 you can of course start a premium newsletter or have some content paywalled but you believe in the open web and want content to be accessible to everyone. At this point you're left with only one option: relying on people's generosity. That's pretty much it.

But let's now imagine that, for some reason, you wrote a blog post that is referenced a lot on the web. A blog post that also ranks very high for some interesting—from a marketing stand point—search queries. It wasn't your goal, it just happened.

What if you could let someone "adopt" that article, and that article alone? What do I mean by adopt? Let's use this post I referenced just the other day as an example. It's a post about small blogging. What if someone like Micro.Blog could sponsor it? You can imagine something as simple as adding a small intro line to the article that says something like:

Micro.blog believes in the power of small blogging and it's happy to have adopted this blog post

To me something like this could be a win for everyone. You, as a creator, are not pressured into writing anything in particular because the content is written first and sold later. To me, that's a win. A company or even an individual could selectively decide to sponsor individual posts that are directly dealing with the market niche they're interested in. And that also a win.

I was talking with my friend Rob earlier about this and he even mentioned the idea of a marketplace for individual articles. That would also be intriguing. So rather than selling access to your whole site you can decide to only market one article out of hundreds. I'm sure someone smarter than me is already trying to work out how you can make this thing a reality using some blockchain-crypto-nft-thingy.

Does any of this make any sense to you? Has anyone already built such a thing? Is my idea completely idiotic? Am I a complete idiot for even thinking this idea makes sense? I'd love to know so hit me up if you have thoughts on the subject or if you want to le me know that yes, I am indeed an idiot.