Welcome to Part II of Edition No. 57 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
Friday Five
I. Paid Content Come To WordPress
II. GA4 Adds ‘Business Objectives Collection’
III. Head of Instagram Explains its Algorithm(s)
IV. Meta Threatens to Pull News from Facebook, Instagram
V. Love BeReal? Meet RealChat
VI. Other Important Updates
I. Paid Content Comes To WordPress
Now we’re introducing a big update — the ability to add paid subscriptions and premium content, whatever plan you’re on. Including the Free plan.
…And if you’re switching from another [newsletter] platform? No worries, you can bring existing subscribers along for the ride during the setup process.
Here is the WP Newsletter page. (Newsletters launched in December as a non-premium product.)
Payments are processed via Stripe. WordPress will take a 10 percent cut from free users and nothing from commerce users. (See below for details on plans that fall between the two.)
🛠 Why does this matter? WordPress is the most-used CMS in the world. Some of the most visited sites in the world are built on WordPress.
For larger organizations with big budgets, perhaps this isn’t a big deal. But for those just starting out – or who make a comparatively smaller amount of income from their platform – the fact that WordPress takes a smaller cut from already-paying users is attractive.
Furthermore, it will be easier than ever to incorporate newsletter “subscribe” buttons into on-site content. No more embedding third-party widgets that make button-clicking and sign-ups difficult to track.
As you may or may not realize, I use Substack to send this newsletter, but my website is hosted on WordPress. I’ll certainly be weighing my options going forward, and so should anyone in a similar situation, whether an individual or a content website.
That is, since I’m already paying for WordPress, if they’ll take less of a cut than Substack and I don’t have to log in to separate platforms to write every week, it may be worth the switch, especially if I don’t lose any of my archives or, more importantly, subscribers.
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II. GA4 Adds ‘Business Objectives Collection’
The new Business objectives collection provides a tailored set of reports based on information you provide about your business when you first set up Google Analytics.
Here’s the screenshot Google shared with the announcement:
🛠 Why does this matter? From the beginning, GA4 has been geared to e-commerce and gaming, and not content creators. Yes, there are many useful analytics tools for content creators, but the platform simply wasn’t built for us. Just look at some of the templates in the Explore template gallery:
Content websites – whether they sell products or not – can still benefit from features that weren’t created with them in mind.
The fact that GA4 continues to add new features – one month from the UA data collection doomsday – is a sign the platform was never ready to launch when it did, which is why there’s been such a long overlap between UA and GA4.
But it’s also encouraging since we never know what interesting feature might come next. Especially when those features are borne of user feedback (if not complaints). Custom channel groupings and the addition of bounce rate are two examples.
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