So the Bugle has been live for over a year, with a focus on being entirely community funded instead of taking gay sponsorship money which influences our journalism, as well as sets up our readers for rug pulls. It's been a really interesting experiment so far, and I'm convinced that there is a path forward to have a full fledged media company operate this way.
There are a few ways we generate money:
- direct donations on our site
- direct donations via Geyser
- Selling merchandise in person (Haven't been very consistent at this)
- Allowing people to point hashrate at our mining pool account
- Nostr Zaps
- Allowing readers to tip each article's author via LNURL at the bottom of each article
- Selling black market cigarettes at Bitcoin conferences
There are a few ways we could expand ways to earn sats from readers:
- Premium subscriptions
- Gamefy what articles are written next
- Migrate from ghost to a custom site with lightning payments integrated, maybe built on nostr
- Actually sell merchandise seriously
- Physical book sales
- etc there's probably a lot of ways we expand here
- Fountain podcasting stuff
Stacker has been a pretty consistent way to generate sats. When I post articles on here, I forward sats to the authors who wrote the content. In the future, I could see splitting percentages making more sense but I don't pay anyone who contributes so until that changes, I'll just give 100% of tips to authors. The lightning network is so slick for stuff like this.
I think if you have a compelling mission, you can solicit donations. People have really gone out there way not only to send us sats, but also promote our content on their podcasts, at conferences, and word of mouth.
The Bugle's mission is to do a few things:
- Push back against and criticize the influencer circle jerk in Bitcoin related communities
- Promote freedom and human dignity
- Educate people on why smoking is good for you
- Earn Bitcoin in the process
- Open source new ways individuals can earn sats
- Be the best damn journalists in the business, free of corporate overlords
- Promote new communication channels and communities that further our goals.
Anyways, just thought I would do a post here and see what happens. I'm really curious to see what ideas the community has on this topic.