As a causal observer, I think one major weakness of Referly when put up against its ex-competitors, companies I'd consider to be Pinterest, Wanelo, The Fancy, Svpply, etc., is that consumer behavior on those sites was driven by the love of doing that thing--clipping, collecting, and presenting in a community of peers, whereas Referly was about monetization (baked into the name "Referly"). In my experience, in life, Referly loses that fight every day of the week.
I'm afraid the exact same will be true when you put Referly up against Medium, Svbtle, etc. You can tell on Medium and Svbtle that it's all about the writing and there's a real passion and community around the written word. If Referly continues to be about monetization, I think per post vs. affiliate is irrelevant, and Referly will lose.
A quick scan of the views on their posts suggests that the most popular posts are written by Danielle and Kevin, and I wouldn't be surprised if they drove the majority of those views via HN. Danielle seems to have a very strong personal network and through that she can attract prominent writers to get this thing kickstarted (like one I see via Francisco Dao). But HN and personal networks are great to bootstrap a baseline level of activity, but they need to quickly be leveraged into broader distribution, etc. (eg, it needs to relatively quickly flip from being Danielle and Kevin posting Referly articles to HN to randoms posting those articles, otherwise you're not bootstrapping anymore, you're propping up your traffic).
Danielle and crew seem very tenacious, and I wish them the best.
You make excellent points. Our existing users signed up to make money, so for them (remember this was an email to our registered user base) paid posts is probably the most valuable thing we can offer. Going forward we probably won't focus on that much as we build our core base of writers, and we are going to have a high editorial bar for paid writers that many of our affiliate contributors - quite honestly - are not going to be able to meet.
I had a life before Referly, a life devoid of affiliate stuff where I was an editor in Chief of a local tech community site [1] - and I'm super excited to be digging up those old skills.
SeekingAlpha seems to be doing quite well and their content is all driven by paid user submissions. I've never submitted content, but as a user I love it. Very high quality articles.
It's also very valuable traffic to advertisers so they can pay out attractive rates to writers while also making good money being the middle man.
If Pinterest, Twitter or Tumblr were to adopt this model, it probably wouldn't be very effective because their traffic is (essentially) worthless on a micro scale.
I'm afraid the exact same will be true when you put Referly up against Medium, Svbtle, etc. You can tell on Medium and Svbtle that it's all about the writing and there's a real passion and community around the written word. If Referly continues to be about monetization, I think per post vs. affiliate is irrelevant, and Referly will lose.
A quick scan of the views on their posts suggests that the most popular posts are written by Danielle and Kevin, and I wouldn't be surprised if they drove the majority of those views via HN. Danielle seems to have a very strong personal network and through that she can attract prominent writers to get this thing kickstarted (like one I see via Francisco Dao). But HN and personal networks are great to bootstrap a baseline level of activity, but they need to quickly be leveraged into broader distribution, etc. (eg, it needs to relatively quickly flip from being Danielle and Kevin posting Referly articles to HN to randoms posting those articles, otherwise you're not bootstrapping anymore, you're propping up your traffic).
Danielle and crew seem very tenacious, and I wish them the best.