Rather than making a meta post every time I have a thought about territories, I thought I would collect a few and make one post. Here goes:

I own three territories. Maybe (definitely) I bit off more than I can chew. It’s not easy to even approach the break even point financially. I went into this with an “if you build it, they will come” mentality, which might have been a bit short sighted (really dumb). After one month there are far fewer territories. Reality set in for many owners. That’s probably a good thing for Stacker News. I heard @Car and @K00b talking about the situation on SNL. Keyan thinks there will be a group of creative, hard working territory owners who will be successful. This of course depends on the fee structure and the overall growth of Stacker News. It also made me realize that I had to do a lot more hands on work to help my territories. That includes crafting posts, commenting, thinking up contests and promotions, marketing outside SN, and supporting stackers who use my territory. In short, it requires the energy and brain power to come up with ideas that will foster engagement and ultimately bring in enough sats. My hands off “let it happen” approach ain’t working yet. It is still early, and I’m committed to sticking around for a while, but I must start working harder.

It got me thinking about something else too.

To own a site you need a lot of sats. To be successful, you also need someone to do the hard work I mentioned above. There are probably plenty of stackers with great ideas, skills, prior work experience, and/or energy to put into a territory who simply can’t afford to do it themselves financially. What if there was a way to collaborate with a stacker who can afford to maintain the site by paying the rent? There could be some sort of reward split. If you look at a territory as a business, you can have sat equity and sweat equity investors. It also could be structured as an owner/manager situation, or independent contractor type arrangement, where the owner hires a manager to run the territory. I’m interested to know if anyone else thinks this is viable. It seems that it would be simple to implement. SN would just need to allow daily territory awards to be shared.

This is a good idea, but it seems to me that it will be a long time before this makes sense, if ever. Most territories have enough problems staying afloat right now. Why would anyone be interested in paying for a sub? I can see an exception,where, for instance, someone wanted to create a sub territory in music dedicated to a particular band or something, which could become more popular than the territory itself. In that case, though, the sub owners might be inclined to create their own territory and collect all the revenue. I can’t imagine that the market value of any sub territory would be very high right now. It may be a simple fee splitting arrangement. In short, I have trouble envisioning how sub territories will be profitable.

I see two types of territories on SN: bitcoin related, and non-bitcoin related. Most bitcoin related territories may never need to do much marketing. In fact, some basically peeled off existing content and claimed it as their own. Examples include ~lightning, ~bitdevs, ~devs, ~fedimint, ~litdevs, ~mempool, and my ~bitcoin beginners.

Non-bitcoin related territories have a much more difficult path to success, and marketing is critical. The most obvious target audiences can be found on other sites and forums like reddit or single interest forums. For my ~DogsandCats territory, this is an urgent need. I don’t have those skills, and should probably partner up with someone who does if I take financial viability seriously. My purpose in starting this territory, beyond my love of dogs and cats, was sort of an experiment to see whether I could make a Stacker News territory a means to orange pill non bitcoiners and foster adoption. Profit is obviously secondary.

I know this is planned, but I have to repeat myself and mention it again. I really think this will help with building a territory’s identity and create incentives for stackers to write quality content. This can’t happen soon enough. Owners can reward the best posts by pinning them, where they will have exposure to "prime real estate" and hopefully earn more sats.