The Imprint Rundown
Our philosophy, policies, and business model
Aug 8, 2020
(6 min read)
(6 min read)
(Updated Aug 8, 2020)
Imprint is blogging as it should be. To us, blogging is:
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.
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:
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.
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):
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.
On Imprint, everything you post on your blog is yours. This means you can:
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.
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.
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.
We are a mission-oriented team here to empower knowledge-sharing. If you'd like to support us, we appreciate the following:
We will announce any major changes to our policies on Twitter and the official Imprint Policy blog.
Updates & Announcements from Imprint