Advertising as the sole revenue source for content platforms creates a culture of “clickbait” articles, encouraging content creators and editors to create stories that will attract a lot of attention and clicks, but not necessarily by virtue of the story's quality. Separate from that, the advertising model provides no attachment to your content for consumers, as the advertising is rarely, if ever, related to the content platform owner itself.

Enter: Incentivizr

Incentivizr extends this model with a layer of user engagement that rewards content creators directly. It is designed for content platforms that have existing (paid) subscribers, but can be used with a recurring donation model as well.

Incentivizr repurposes a fraction of a user's paid subscription as reward currency which the user can then give to pieces of content she/he want to encourage and reward.

The key benefit is more psychological than monetary: the financial amount being awarded to content creators is more a “bonus” to their salary than a source of income, but it helps give them reliable insight into what content their readers/listeners truly appreciate. Similarly, the user feels a stronger sense of ‘ownership’ over the publication as she/he gets to have a say over which pieces of content are rewarded financially.

Additionally, users are given the opportunity to voluntarily increase the amount of money that goes into their subscription for distribution to content creators, creating an opportunity for them to express stronger appreciation for great content. This further helps encourage content creators to focus on writing great content

The result is that (paid) users are more engaged with the content because they'll have a sense of ownership over what gets rewarded, and content creators are encouraged to focus on quality more, and clickbait, less.

Incentivizr facilitates newsrooms to exercise the integrity and editorial quality they possess by reducing their dependency on ad revenues, by helping them understand what users truly value, and by helping them focus on creating great content.