Article Editing To Become A Premium Feature
I had hinted in an earlier blog entry that we’re moving to the day that editing articles will become a premium feature due to the intense volume of edits (well over 8,000 this month alone) that are commercial interest driven (nothing wrong with that) instead of added value for the user driven (such as improving the information value or credibility of the article with an edit).
We’ve been burning many internal discussion hours to sort this out and I wanted to share with you what we’re thinking so far:
- Every article submission will automatically be given a (1) free edit credit to be used at any time during the life of the article. We’d hope that this credit would be used to improve the quality of the article, fix a typo that no one caught, add an extra insight to the article, etc…
- We’ve determined that the page mutation rate would be too steep and unnatural if we allowed every premium member to do global resource box changes with the click of a few buttons. Our estimate is that in the first month of offering a global resource box change premium feature we’d hike from 8,000 articles being edited in a month to easily over 100,000 mutating. This is a trust and credibility issue with our users and traffic referral partners.
- We have many business-class premium features in the planning stage for more than 2 years now and we’ve come to the realization that we must release the first feature in order to get this ball started. The first premium feature will be article edit credits combined with priority review for those edits (meaning fast review speed).
Questions:
For those who want to edit their articles beyond the (1) free edit per article, would you rather pay per edit with a pre-paid pack of edits (same concept as buying pre-paid cellular minutes) or would you rather sign up for a subscription service on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis that would include various levels of edits per price point or unlimited edits (same concept as buying a cellular service plan with a certain number of minutes/edits included per month on a subscription basis)?
Any other concerns or issues you think we should take into consideration on this new premium article edit feature?
Hi Chris,
I think it is better to have a pay per edit with a pre-paid pack of credits.
This will encourage people to write proper articles before they submit the articles.
Zack :)
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