One of the internet’s leading purveyors of blog infrastructure and hosting, has taken a step toward making blogging more sustainable by allowing sites to easily accept recurring payments. Think: subscriptions. The tool will be available to anyone with a paid WordPress site and to sites that use the company’s Jetpack toolkit.
Blogging has been declining in popularity from its heyday in the aughts, when you could make enough money to live on just from maintaining your site. Blogging isn’t dead…
“Especially from a small publisher, small business, sustainability perspective, subscriptions and memberships are such a key foundational element to monetizing your site in 2019,” says Mark Armstrong, the founder of Longreads and an editor at Automattic (WordPress.com’s parent company). The idea was to build something simple that could be integrated relatively easily, so that sites could immediately begin collecting revenue from their audiences. Armstrong said that an early version of the product was first tested at Longreads.
We’ve provided a lot of feedback in terms of the things that we had seen,” says Armstrong. “We’ve had a membership and subscription for Longreads, going back to 2011. So about eight years of experience working with memberships and subscriptions.
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