Your ideal content sharing platform
The world has an expanding amount of content sharing platforms, all of which do great things. Though great, they all differentiate in various ways. I’ll list the categories and platforms so you have a general idea (some will be listed more than once). For the sake of you not roasting me for leaving anything out, I’ll add “etc.” at the end.
Social Media - Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook, etc.
I consider these sites to be consumer generated content. Most of the content comes from casual users, which then gets recirculated by reposting or sharing. Some of these platforms fall into multiple categories.
User Generated Content - Youtube, Twitch, Medium, Tiktok, Clubhouse, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc.
With the exception of TikTok, these are sites that generate a lot of content from creatives, freelancers, and professionals. “Creatives” being a broad range of users that produce some form of content regularly.
Premium Content Platforms - Patreon, Onlyfans, Vimeo, Buymeacoffee, etc.
These are sites that are rightfully pay-to-play, or at least they give you the option to. Users still generate the same content, but instead of being subject to algorithmic payment terms, you’re able to make your own for the users that want to view your content.
Now that you have a spectrum of content in your mind, tell me… Have you ever thought about what your ideal platform consists of? I mean if you could piece together everything you need to create something personal and tailored to you. Would it be a simple portfolio, combined with a subscription form? Or maybe a simple community that was only accessible through memberships and included other features similar to twitter. The list and combinations go on and on.
I encourage and ask you to share your thoughts on this, as I am truly curious. As a consumer of great content, and a creative myself. What would you create?
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=> it all comes down to running your own blog on something like jekyll.
I see social platforms as a tool to promote viewing content on your own platform. Not as self sufficient beings. I can not risk my content being taken down by some freaky "moderator" and the work of my life being gone into void.
This is awesome Yaroslav. I sent you an email! Check it out when you can. I’m curious to know more of your thoughts.
My ideal platform for sharing content is Instagram and youtube.
could I ask you if you shared any of your projects on Instagram or YouTube? Or how do you share your projects?
My ideal platform consists of pure short-form video content!
Lol so your ideal platform is Tiktok?
I use Leakd. I've been working on this platform for a couple of years now.
It's an ecosystem of bloggers (mainly early stage Founders and subject mater experts), split between 'readers' and 'authors', sharing content about their business, themselves, their journey, experience...anything that ultimately enriches the entrepreneurial community.
Leakd covers most of the functions listed in the second comment under OPs post. I've found that real-time SEO imputation and content Insights are favourites among users. Insights are a funny one. I used to use Medium, who still remain the preeminent provider in this space, and their strengths were/are in usability and searchability, but I felt they fell short in the insights department. As an author, I want to know where my readers are from, how often they're reading my stuff, what they like reading about the most and how I'm getting them to my blog. For these reasons, I've built Leakd Insights such that users can asses time-based results based on key metrics like SEO keyword use, geographic spread and individual category choice. Having said all this, we are a work in progress, and always will be! There are shortfalls, bugs and usability issues but I guess that's why we're all in this game right? To solve problems (and maybe make some money along the way!).
If you've come this far, thanks for reading. I'll leave you with a lesson I learnt early (thankfully) in the piece. The latest tech, a slick landing page and powerful insights mean jack shit if the content you produce isn't helping the person reading it. It's not about you, It's about us.
Leakd - https://leakd.co/
This is an awesome concept and I see what you mean by wanting to immediately have access to the insights of who’s finding your content.
So will publishing an article have the potential to be found all over the Web?
And I agree with you. I think a landing page enhances an experience and helps with the conversion, but the content is what needs to be sticky.
I actually have a product coming out soon as well. Similar to yours but I’m not in the creative writing space. I’m more in the video and image space.
I do like what you have going on though
Come check out the new kid on the block. 😎
Qwurty. Your social hub.
If you like the product, please feel free to give us an upvote on ProductHunt 🙏
Hey that’s awesome man! Just gave you an upvote!
Thank you! 😁
Of course mate!
I know it's hard but If you can do this then must create mass users that add and interact with others' content so more people like to join your platform.
Yes, the chicken and egg problem. Comes with time. 😄
nice thoughts @iksmith
Appreciate it @erichui !
As a consumer of content: I just want to use a platform that allows me to see the high quality stuff I'm interested in without getting sucked into some for profit addiction tracking machine. I'm also happy to pay people some small amount of money on an individual basis.
As a creator: Platforms come and go, the only thing I want is a hungry audience. Tech doesn't really matter :)
That’s interesting. are you talking about algorithmic ads? The stuff that pops up and makes you wonder how tf they know? Lol
Agreed on paying a small amount. I don’t think people realize how beneficial it is to support their favorite creators. I’ve spent hours watching or listening to some of my favorites. I wouldn’t even think twice if it meant that they can share a full video or whatever without being copy written or whatever.
I always build my own blog engine and that’s my favorite content sharing platfor
That’s an awesome accomplishment. I’d love to see one of your blog platforms. Shoot me an email if you want! It seems like a lot of people love blogging haha
Here are two of my blogs:
https://cubitoo.com/blog — my “corporate” one that I also use for the mentoring platform
https://howdy.cubitoo.com/blog — new one for my app
That’s awesome and very well made. The theme reminds me a lot of Airbnb.
So Cubitoo is an incubator?
It’s like an incubator agency — clients come to us with their budget and a rough idea of what they want to have as a tech product and we build it. Or “I build it” because at the moment I’m a solopreneur 😆
We already have some success with this model, like https://Motidash.com or https://www.fast5.us which started with a super rough idea and in a couple of months (or more) become reality 👍🏻
Pretty good stuff! The fast.5 website didn’t load when I clicked on it but it could be user error.
Do you have any advice to give to someone non-technical who is outsourcing a project?
Yeah the client moved the CMS to WordPress the script kiddie who made it left some Elementor script generating the whole internet 🙃 try https://app.fast5.us
My somewhat biased advice would be "get a product builder" (like myself) because: you get everything in one person package: design, copy, UX writing, SEO, and of course a custom-made tech that is just so much better in the long run than some hacky WordPress site they will get hacked in like a week.
😂 us non techies tend to do that. One time I destroyed my slack page by trying to create a new channel.
I’m actually creating a product right now to help users distribute their content on their own platform. So far, my biggest take away is that it would be great to have an SEO feature. Everything else would have to slowly be integrated later.
I would say SEO is more of a guideline rather than a feature but yeah maybe your product could be used for SEO
Understood. Thank you
For me, a WordPress installation (website/blog) is my ideal content-sharing platform. I'm able to create the content there, tie into whatever plugins I need, and share the content wherever I need to.
If I'm working on an e-commerce business then I prefer Shopify and they have great sharing and marketing features.
That makes a lot of sense. Easy-to-build solutions are extremely convenient. About how long does it take to piece it together?
Shopify is hands down the solution for e-commerce.
I could have it all up in a weekend. WordPress website functional with a basic design and tied into all the plugins for SEO, content creation, and content marketing.
Creating and sharing high-quality content is what takes time, though. I used to connect WP to social media using IFTTT or Hootsuite or something but now I focus on manually creating high-quality content for each platform. For instance, turn the blog into a Twitter thread that can also be used on LinkedIn, record a YT video that can also be shared on TikTok, etc.
That’s awesome. I admire you! I’m not very technical, but I can usually figure things out like that. It definitely wouldn’t take me a weekend though. More like a week. And I’m so picky that I’d constantly make adjustments.
Do you think that’s the ideal path for most non-technical people like me? Or would you use a site that provides premade solutions.
I think you've got the right strategy. Use whatever you feel most comfortable using unless there is something wrong with it and you think there is something better.
I’m currently working on a project (outsourcing) that is hopefully better.
So fingers crossed
My own websites is my ideal content sharing platform. (working on a new one currently). Then working with SEO to get people to take part of the content and sometimes buy long tail keywords on Google to boost the amount of users.
Also to post content on platforms such as this, Reddit, Facebook Groups, Slack/Discord channels, Linkedin, etc.
Understood! Could I ask how long it took you to build your own site?
And of course. It’s easy to consume and generate content where there is already an audience.
I've used Wordpress, Shopify, SquareSpace, even coded some from scratch many years ago. But I'd say that putting the site together now a days goes pretty fast, 1-2 days for an initial version. The thing that takes time is the planning:
I'd say the pre-work mentioned above is 95% of the time of getting a nice, converting website up. But then I am usually setting pages up for businesses who wants to make $$$, that requires more effort.
That makes sense. I think that’s great for a more experienced guy like yourself. I think for casual consumers or beginners it’s more of a learning curve. Either they learn to do it, or they end up settling for a platform that does it for them.
Absolutely, I've spent many years trying to perfect :)
I really like the concept of subreddits on Reddit hence using that platform a lot recently over others. The need to follow 100s of people to get a proper feed is exhausting.
I also use a lot of Reddit! In some ways I think it’s overtaken quora for information just due to the amount of users.
Not a content creator at all, so take this with a grain of salt.
My ideal platform would a:
Additionally:
I do not care so much about "being a creator" because I have other stuff do in life. I would not mind having a YouTube channel, but I don't want to spend hours and hours on video editing. Similar with writing. I'd like to publish more, but need help with the actual writing :)
That’s an interesting take. So basically something that could essentially edit a video for you? So all you had to do is record, and it somehow picked up the key moments? Likely AI based?
Additionally, you should spend some time with second and third order thinking & your idea. Why do people want or need content platforms in the first place? Maybe "a content platform" is not even what is required to satisfy customer needs.
It doesn’t have to necessarily be a content platform, but in terms of being specific so people would have more of an understanding on where their mind should be, I used that. If I had just said platform, I’d get more questions about what kind of platform versus answers on what they would make.
That being said, a lot of users who generate actual income from content platforms need them.
It's more like "something that plans, creates, edits, uploads & gets me views for my video". Basically full-service. Probably already exists in the form of agencies.
It probably does, but if you had the technology yourself then I know you’d prefer to use it rather than an agency.