This opinion note was about looking for and filling in the gaps in the publishing offering.

But it seems that writing the first six (and a bit) posts has satisfied my inner urge and helped me close the mental loop. So I’m not spending more effort on writing this final one.

I’ll publish this one as it is—a collection of thoughts in case I want to revisit it any time in the future.

Video hosting and distribution is concentrated on platforms—YouTube and Facebook.
Audio and newsletters are open and fragmented.

Video is usually hosted on external platforms and then embedded into publishers’ websites.
Audio and newsletters are frequently integrated directly into the publishers’ website.

We should integrate this functionality directly into those websites’ production platform—WordPress.

Opportunities to detail out:

  1. Podcasts—Integrated publishing and hosting

    • Why?
    • Potential acquisitions:
    • Partnerships
      • Google - Subscribe button in search/podcast app

  2. Newsletters

  3. Unified blogging website: open.blog

    • Why?
    • Standalone posts—Write a post without creating a blog (similar to github gists or Medium).
    • Posts are associated with author. Author may also create a personal blog where all their posts from unified blog may be cross-posted automatically.

  4. Disappearing posts 🙂

    • Associate a timer with a post so it goes ‘private’ (or unpublished) after the timer has expired.

Other acquisition suggestions:

  1. Instapaper for promoting reading
  2. Hemingway App for promoting writing

All opinion notes:

  1. We need to do something about the WordPress.com Reader
  2. Jetpack: the Automattic experience for WordPress
  3. WooHoo.com—a hosted, tightly-integrated version of WooCommerce
  4. Woo Two — More ideas for WooCommerce
  5. Earn with WordPress
  6. Pricing—more and less
  7. Incomplete: A publishing platform for today’s content formats