Twitter Has A New Rival – Post, A Publisher-Focused Social Media

A new Twitter alternative, Post, is now open to the public. This publisher-focused social media platform has emerged as a Twitter rival, and it aims to help publishers engage with people and monetize their readership.

Post's beta version was introduced in November last year and has grown to a standard platform with 6,50,000 users on its waitlist.

Among those waitlisted users, 4,30,000 have actually created an account on Post. While Post emerged as an alternative to Twitter, it was not meant to be a mimicry of the Elon Musk-led social media. Instead, the developers of the platform wanted to create a channel that could help publishers earn from micropayments.

Users will have to pay a small amount to read specific news items using Post. The average cost per mile (CPM) for Post is $25. Publishers are expected to make $1.30 CPMs on average from their free posts with the help of tips and solutions.

The Post Network

The platform has partnered with publications like LA Times, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Independent, Fortune, Politico, The Brookings Institution, NBC News, Insider, MIT Technology Review, Reuters, ProPublica, Yahoo Finance, and World Politics Review.

While some of these publishers have chosen manual posting, others are trying their hands with micropayments.

A few of them have chosen to do both. Besides articles from traditional media outlets with subscription-based paywalls, Post will feature different media genres. This may include subscription newsletters, free and ad-supported material, and so on.

With this initiative, the team Post seems to revolutionize the current pattern of online news reading. Presently, reading free news on today's web often seems to be a miserable experience. There are ads and in-house promotions for every article. Moreover, there are auto-played videos that run in their own pop-up windows.

Not stopping there; a bunch of cookie consent banners will appear to tempt readers to hand over more data. There are even prompts for signing up for publishers' newsletters, buying subscriptions, and whatnot.

You go to many news sites today, and you get bombarded by these ads, email capture forms, and subscriptions. So, a one-time transaction, but you're getting bombed.Noan Bardeen, CEO and Founder, Post

All these disturbances generally push readers to leave the news half away. The founder and CEO of Post, Noan Bardeen, the CEO of Waze (Google), wanted to address this challenge. According to Bardeen, the partner publishers of Post have found that users don't want to jump to external websites for reading news. Instead, they want to stick to the comparatively expensive option of reading news in their feed.

How Post is Transforming Online News Reading Experience

Post wants to help readers obtain a fantastic user experience by allowing them to scroll through articles without annoying interruptions. In addition, the platform wants to play right with pricing and minimize friction. This way, the platform is expected to introduce a whole new business model to the advertising world.

Presently, Post has onboarded 25 premium publishers, and the platform plans to substantially enhance its network in the coming days.

With Post's entry in the public beta period, Twitter seems to have started bending on angering publishers by snatching their verified batches for non-payment.

However, this action will probably not help the platform, as Post has already attempted to beat the competition by paying publishers instead of charging them.

It's being said that several local publishers are waiting to join the platform once they add more functionality and scalability.

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