You should charge through another platform! There's nothing exclusive about the relationship that we want to have with writers. As long as you're producing any content that is a) freely available and b) worth reading we want it surfaced to our community of readers and we want to compensate you on a per-read basis for it.
The writer compensation is both a value prop for our users (it's the #1 reason that users say they would want to pay for a Readup subscription) and a growth mechanism for us since some writers will have an incentive to tell their readers to read them on Readup. We think that initially writers who have a non-existent or small subscription base would be most inclined to want to promote Readup to their readers but that should scale up as we grow.
Yup! Essentially a premium "social reading" experience. Sounds kinda like marketing speak but it really is both a reading app and a social network that's powered by the reading activity of its members. The idea of having half of your subscription allocated to tipping the writers of the articles you've completed is also an incentive for readers (a powerful one based on the user surveys we've done).
I really appreciate the honest feedback. Also sorry for kind of blowing up this thread with all my replies but I'm pleasantly surprised that some other people were interested in checking it out and asking questions as well!
The writer compensation is both a value prop for our users (it's the #1 reason that users say they would want to pay for a Readup subscription) and a growth mechanism for us since some writers will have an incentive to tell their readers to read them on Readup. We think that initially writers who have a non-existent or small subscription base would be most inclined to want to promote Readup to their readers but that should scale up as we grow.