Video: How to join goldhat.
When I quit my job as a headhunter in Tokyo and decided to return to my roots as an English creative writing major, I started a freelance writing business and created a website to promote my services. In order to lure traffic to my site, I wrote a slew of articles on the craft of writing and promoted them through comments on blogs and through traditional social networking sites.
Although I thought the internet was an excellent medium for the promotion of my business. I could see that it had many weaknesses. The lion share of content producers, hungry for traffic, abandoned quality in the pursuit of quantity. The idea being that the more 500-word keyword focused articles you had, the greater chance Mother Google would have to notice you. As a result, any real quality on the internet got drowned out by a deluge of garbage and fluff.
Social media didn’t seem to help much either. Saturated as they were with videos of surprised pandas and a never-ending procession of lolcats.
Monetization also seemed to be a problem. It seemed as though producers of an endless stream of fluff content had a distinct advantage over those who created content of any real and lasting value. Ad revenue seemed the only way to monetize content. In order to attract enough traffic to take advantage of this ad revenue, creating fluffy keyword-based content seemed to be the easiest thing to do.
I wanted to make money off my web content, but to me the monetization methods available were unsatisfactory. I was not willing to sacrifice quality to make money from my content.
After turning this problem over in my head for several months the solution came to me: a social donations site. With no prior knowledge of programming (Not even HTML!), I bought a stackful of books on web application development and set about to make this idea a reality.
Six months after getting the intial idea, Goldhat.org was launched in beta in March 2010. Since then I have switched my career focus to help making Goldhat succeed.
The mission of Goldhat.org is twofold:
1. Provide an escape from the Tyranny of “Free”: The internet has provided a lot of great artists and entrepreneurs an excellent venue to promote their services. Unfortunately, in order to attract vistors to their sites, they are forced to provide more and more free content just to stay ahead. This emphasis on “more free content” can severely limit the quality of content that they produce.
In order to attract more visitors, website owners will have to produce more free content, until essentially everything on the internet becomes ‘free’. Because most content producers cannot support themselves under this system, they will often rather give up than continue producing more great content for free.
This trend will not end unless we do something about it. Goldhat intends to put a stop to this by putting an expected donation ‘price’ to every piece of free content on the web. Consumers of free content will be encouraged to donate, much like the street musician that passes the hat around after making a performance.
2. Provide Quality Control: The current law of the internet is this: Content is King. Goldhat endeavors to change this law and replace it with a new one: Quality is King. Many content producers on the internet produce poor quality content at accelerated rates in order to attract more traffic to their sites. Because making a donation is a better measure of quality than keywords, links, or votes, Goldhat expects only the highest quality content to be featured on the front page of the site.