(Updated Aug 8, 2020)

Imprint is blogging as it should be. To us, blogging is:

Openly sharing your thoughts
Accessible content for all
Ownership of your work
Great ideas from anyone
Passion-rooted communities

We provide independent blogging spaces for everyone and simultaneously connect them to cultivate communities. Our mission is to make knowledge accessible for all, and we accomplish this by staying away from paywalls, giving our writers full content ownership for their work, and more. Imprint has some ambitious goals, so we want to keep our policies and business model transparent with you.

Platform Philosophy

In today's blogging landscape, most platforms are either fully centralized (i.e. Medium) or fully decentralized (i.e. WordPress, Substack). Centralized platforms exploit their writers with dominating policies and keep their content within paywalls. Decentralized ones do nothing or very little to help their writers grow substantial audiences, which also makes it difficult for readers to find good writers and content.

At Imprint, we're taking a different approach to blogs — a hybrid solution between centralized and decentralized. We provide independent spaces for each blog, show posts in our main platform feed, and send posts to your subscribers' emails to boost engagement.

We make some promises to keep true to our mission. Namely, we will never:

Instill a content paywall of any kind
Claim ownership of user-generated content
Coerce writers into writing any kind of content
Sell user data for profit
Favor certain opinions in our platform policies and technologies

In short, we are simply about making great blogs, which you can use for yourself, with a couple of friends, for your company... If you’d like to make money off of your blog, go right on ahead! We want to empower our writers and are working on more ways to help you get the financial support that you deserve.

Our Business Model

Imprint is a for-profit business. To sustain our platform, we implement several monetization models that honor our promises. Rest assured, we want to succeed together with our writers. Here are ways through which we intend to make money (in the works):

Super Reader Subscriptions. Imprint bloggers can enable a feature on their blogs where avid followers pay $5/month for each blog that they want to support. Super readers receive added perks and privileges in return. It's important to note that everyone, regardless of their subscription status, will still have access to all blog posts. The selection of Imprint-enabled perks is entirely up for the bloggers themselves to decide. Imprint generally takes a 20% cut from all subscriptions.
Sponsored Posts. We provide Imprint writers the option to pay for featuring their Imprint-hosted articles on the main platform feed. All sponsored posts will be marked. This feature helps our writers grow their audience and increase engagement.
Content Creator Plan. We provide additional features for serious content creators to help you better understand, grow, and engage with your audience. Details coming soon.
Enterprise Plan. We provide additional features for teams, enterprises, and organizations to benefit from better collaboration on blogs, advanced analytics, special components designed to improve conversion, and more. Details coming soon.

To further support our writers, we are working on the option for bloggers to enable donation boxes, from which 100% of the proceeds will go to the bloggers.

Content Ownership & Safety

On Imprint, everything you post on your blog is yours. This means you can:

Freely monetize, edit, and remove your content
Export all posts from a designated blog at any time
Access all of your subscribers’ emails
Use custom domains for your blogs
Express your ideas, beliefs, opinions, and stories with our base guidelines in mind

We’re here to build a long-lasting platform. In the unlikely case that we cannot continue hosting your content for any reason, we will heavily publicize the closing and leave a 3-month window after our initial announcement for you to export all of your posts.

Content Guidelines

We champion freedom of speech and expression, encourage diverse opinions and beliefs, and aim to create open spaces for commentary. In most cases, we stay as far away as possible from disciplinary actions on content hosted on Imprint. There is, nonetheless, a baseline of standards that we need to uphold in order for us to cultivate and maintain a safe and accessible platform.

Imprint is for:

Ideas. Share your thoughts, emotions, journals, etc.
Experiences. Help others with your personal or professional insights and stories.
Education. Give the gift of knowledge. Make a class blog. Share your scholarly work. Submit your essays for school.
Discourse. Comment on politics and other topics. Stand for something.
Monetization. Monetize your content according to your preferences and needs.
Enterprises and Organizations. Update customers on what’s new. Support, grow, and engage with your audience.

Imprint is not for:

Unlawful usage. Don't utilize Imprint to conduct unlawful behavior, like fraud or phishing.
Malicious speech. Don't incite violence or hatred.
Junk. Don’t spam. Don’t write thoughtless filler posts.
Deception. Don't mislead people into actions like providing their private information, downloading malware, or clicking affiliate links.
Privacy violations. Don't impair anyone's privacy. Don't post personal details without consent, including credit card numbers or social security numbers.
Exploits and resource abuse. Don't attempt to exploit, disrupt, or abuse Imprint's system resources.

Handling platform violations

We welcome all opinions and beliefs on Imprint, but violating our guidelines is not within the realm of opinions and beliefs. In most cases, we will limit the reach of violating content on Imprint by hiding them from the main platform feed and search engines. In cases of blatant and obvious abuse, we reserve the right to remove the content without warning or question as an absolute last resort. We will send a copy of any platform-removed blog post to the author(s)'s email because of their ownership rights. If a user, group of collaborators, or blog repeatedly violates our guidelines after warning, we will also restrict associated account(s) from any actions across the entire platform and take all technical means necessary to prevent similar behavior in the future.

If you feel that you've been wrongfully flagged, email us. We will quickly fix the issue if needed.