My First Two Weeks on Koala Quill
Two weeks ago I saw a post on Reddit with the title āIām building a writing platform that pays $0.25 per readā. Iāll admit that initally I was skeptical. Iām always put off by sales pitches anyway, and the content of that post sounded very sales-y. But the creator seemed fairly responsive in the comments (rather than it just being a piece of drive-by marketing), and I was in the process of rebuilding my writing routine after a long period of ill health thatās seen it fall apart, so I figured why not give it a go.
Iāve now been using it daily for 12 days. My stats say that Iāve written 28k words since joining. I have 14 of which is currently committed to āGuildsā), and I havenāt put any of my own money in.
Iām unsure how Iām feeling about it. Itās undeniable that seeing the numbers go up every day has made it more appealing to me to sit down and write. The progress bars and the little pop-up saying āyou just earned $X!ā tickle the reward centres of my ADHD brain, and thatās a good thing. But Iām aware that Iām only earning money through my actual writing because Iām still part of the free trial, and that once that goes away the drip of money will go away, too. (And Iām undecided as to whether I feel this is worth a monthly subscription to keep earning a tiny bit of money purely from typing, because that would mean me cancelling a different monthly subscription to make room for it in my budget).
The claim of ā\$0.25 per readā is something I havenāt seen proof of yet, and I think thatās entirely down to a small userbase. People arenāt here to read, theyāre here to write, and discoverability of the things people publish to the site is fairly non-existent. At the time of writing this my most āpopularā post has a grand total of 3 views, and none of them have earned any money (presumably because the reader didnāt read far enough to be served an ad). Maybe this will change as the site grows.
Thereās also the fact that you can only monetise posts in which youāve spent 20 minutes actively typing. I have mixed thoughts about this. Writing and typing are not the same thing, and sometimes - often - the writing process does require you to sit and think without touching the keyboard. So to equate ātyping timeā to āwriting timeā seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how writing works. But, at the same time, weāre talking about money here, and the explicit aim of the site is āto keep quality high and prevent [ā¦] drive-by posts [and] AI-generated fluffā. So I understand that I line has to be drawn somewhere, and that that line will always be arbitrary. I canāt help feeling, though, that it penalises people who write succintly and who type quickly. (Hereās an example: I finished this post, which is around 1,000 words long, to find that it only contained 15 minutes of active typing. Thereās a very strong temptation to spend 5 minutes typing nonsense into the editor just to allow me to monetise it. I guess this is the time to find out whether editing the thing counts towards active typing time.)
Iām also a little confused about how the Guilds work. The way theyāre advertised is this: You pay a certain amount of money from your wallet to join a Guild. Each Guild lasts for a fixed amount of time, and your pledge is sort of like a bet with yourself that youāll turn up every day and write for X minutes while the Guild is running. If you fail, you forfeit your money. Everyone who succeeds gets the prize pot split between them, minus a small platform fee.
That seems simple in theory. In practice, the one Guild that Iāve joined paid out exactly the amount of money that Iād put in to it, despite me being able to see that a number of people didnāt complete it. Thereās a little bit of strangeness about how the prize pools are calculated, too. In theory the Prize Pool should be equal to the number of people in the Guild multiplied by the deposit they paid to join it, but one of my Guilds with a \$3 deposit has 101 members and a Prize Pool of just $124. I wonder if both of these things area result of this being a āstarterā Guild being used to demonstrate how things actually work, and therefore the pledges are being subsidised by the siteās creator - in which case it seems fair that heās not going to pay the people who showed up out of his own pocket as a result of people who signed up, joined a Guild, and then never came back. Iād like to see more transparency about that, though. I have another Guild thatās due a payout in the next 24 hours, so I guess Iāll see at that point whether I āearnā more than I put in or not.
Iām also not using it to work on anything ārealā at this point. Iām doing my warm-ups here and writing blog posts using the editor, but in order to start using it to write anything meaningful Iād need to see a much more in-depth set of terms and conditions and a privacy policy. Iāve asked the creator about this on Reddit and he assured me that heās not claiming any rights other than the right to display work that you choose to publish, but Iād like to see some actual legal text about that. Iād also like to see the ability to delete your account and all the data.
But I canāt deny that itās got me writing. The ability to find a āquillmateā to write with, and to see their time spent writing alongside yours, has a similar effect to body doubling, which is something that Iāve always found useful. And as I said, ānumbers go upā is always a good motivating force for me. Iāll admit that Iām still a little skeptical about the financial side of the platform, and Iāve spotted a few technical bugs, but itās very quickly become a part of my writing routine and Iām happy about that.
Thereās a very short list of things Iād like to see that would improve the platform (for me, at least):
- Clear T&Cs and a clear, explicit privacy policy.
- The ability to delete your account and data.
- More transparency about how calculating payouts from Guilds works.
- The ability to write in Markdown rather than a rich text editor. I do all of my work in Markdown, and my blog takes Markdown, and it would be nice to just be able to write in that format and be able to also publish to Koala Quill without it looking a mess.
Iām interested to see how the platform develops, and if youāre struggling to sit down and write every day I think it might be worth giving it a chance. I wouldnāt go into it expecting to make any money, but then thatās just good advice for being a writer in general (ask me how much I earned last year as a full-time writer with no other job). As it is, Iām going to stick with it for another couple of weeks and see what happens.