Criteria for Paid Content
Rules we'll follow before placing content behind the paywall
Audience: All readers
Introduction: We’ve given some serious thought to how a given, individual article should be evaluated to qualify as paid content versus free content. We feel, as a duty to our paying users, that we should be as open and objective about how we do this as possible. This page serves as policy for our readers’ benefit and reference for us.
Criteria for paid content: We start with an admittedly subjective criterion: would we pay to read this? If the answer is no, then that article goes in the free category with no further analysis. If the answer is either definitely yes or maybe, then there are additional filters that should be applied to the content.
Novelty: The content in the article must be new, not re-hashed, nor even re-written material taken from other websites and other author’s work. Brief quotes from other authors are allowed under fair use, and links to supporting documents always allowable. Some human-edited content written using AI is also allowable, provided it is verified and checked against the existing content available via a Google or other search. The meat of the article must pass the novelty test to be paid content.
Research: It should go without saying that information taken from the Internet can be dubious, low quality, deceptive or just plain wrong. When we need to do research for an article, we’ll include links or references, and possibly commentary reflecting our assessment of credibility of the source material. We’ll attempt to refer only to credible sources; occasionally, this might lead to error, despite best efforts otherwise.
Given the uneven nature of Internet sourced material, we’ll apply at least some fact and reality checking, usually explicitly stated. However, we point out that, even in the case of credible and usually reliable sources, deception, errors and omissions can happen, and we take no responsibility for the content written by other writers. On the other hand, we do take responsibility for our own writings, and will be responsive to, if not always in agreement with, reader comments.
Verification: Paid content, not explicitly labeled as OPINION or EDITORIAL, must be verified as factual; if possible, also verified as true. We may include opinions as part of our paid content, so long as it is explicitly labeled in the title or the body of the article, and it passes some of the other criteria below. Opinions, of course, are the views of the author, and may not be verifiable. Content that can reasonably taken to be factual must pass verification tests, explicitly discussed in the article.
Interests: Special interest articles will have a brief section at the top of the article labeled “Audience:”. This is intended as a suggestion or guide rather than a hard and fast rule, and clearly represents the author’s opinion as to who is likely to want to read the article. Readers are always invited to read anything they care to; the Audience label is there to help busy people rapidly select what they wish to read, and what they would rather avoid.
For example, manager class readers may find deep technical articles too detailed, irrelevant and boring, and would likely prefer to peruse more business oriented fare. On the other hand, technical folk might find the deep tech articles more interesting and useful. The labels we apply are specifically there to help browse and select articles by probable special interests.
At any rate, we plan to have articles here under several special interest categories, including but not limited to: purely business content, particularly B2B service business, marketing, technical articles on artificial intelligence, coding, databases, networking, operating systems, security and systems engineering. All of this content will come directly from things we actually do; we will avoid writing fanciful or speculative content on subjects we don’t ourselves understand well.
In general, paid or subscription based articles will mostly fall into special interest categories, while more general interest content will usually remain free. Clearly, this is a judgement call on our part; we hope to make this distinction clearer over time with many examples each way.
Currency: We will try, and may succeed, to keep our article content current. This can and sometimes will demand updates to past articles. Such content might be considered ephemera by some, and we are conscious of this concern. For this reason, we’ll try to keep obvious ephemera, explicitly content that might be relevant now but irrelevant soon, to a bare minimum, and limited to our newsletters.
It’s much better from our point of view to publish articles with content that lasts. Newsletters, on the other hand, will include dates as part of the titles or subtitles, so that readers can navigate as rapidly as possible only to current content relevant to themselves. Newsletter content should be always viewed as ephemera, subject to later change or development, and will, beyond a few samples, always live behind the paywall. Rarely, if ever, will we update newsletters.
Depth: Not to be confused with length! Most, but not all, paid content will have sufficient depth of coverage to justify classifying it as paid content. In-depth articles may include executive summaries or “TL;DR” headers at the beginning of the article, succinctly abridging the longer form content to follow, giving interested, but busy readers the option to merely read the gist of an article without having to plow through a large amount of reading.
Viewpoint: We write, almost always, from the standpoint of a small, family owned and operated, bootstrapping startup B2B service provider. In that niche, we must wear many hats: business owners, marketers, sales professionals, software architects and developers, consumers and developers of artificial intelligence, automators, coders, designers, system and database administrators. There is enough there to generate content of rather general interest, particularly our critical evaluations of applied AI. Explicitly stating our viewpoint helps readers decide how they wish to classify and judge the content contained in this Substack.
Controversiality: One of the founding purposes of this Substack, but by no means the only, nor even the main purpose, is a home for articles we deem inappropriate for other platforms, most notably LinkedIn. Our policy for content published on major, robot-patrolled platforms typically includes living with the robot as best as we can.
We suspect, but cannot prove, censorship, and large platforms routinely do not publish the exact details of how their robot works. Instead, they publish advice and help pages, where some, but not all, of the behavior of the algorithms is hinted at or explicitly stated. Since it can often happen we don’t know where the boundary between (robot) acceptable and unacceptable content lies, we try to err on the side of caution and publish possibly controversial or robot-disapproved content here on Substack.
Articles we are certain contain controversial content will be labelled as such near the beginning of the article. We anticipate these will be few in number, as business and controversy rarely play nice with each other. That being said, we will occasionally feel some things need to be said, but privately. We trust paid subscribers will respect our discretion and avoid sharing our private paid content in any public forum.
Advertising: never in paid content. We promise. Always implied will be the hopefully obvious fact we are always looking for business, however, since the paid content is itself business, we’ll carefully avoid mixing the two. Free articles may include links to our own company advertising, or perhaps advertising of sponsors or paid advertisers.
Conclusions: Content placed behind the paywall must:
Meet our own subjective smell test: Would I pay to read this?
Novelty (a.k.a originality): Content behind the firewall must be new, fresh material, free from echo-chambering Internet sources, checked that the content is unpublished elsewhere.
Factual articles (OPINION and EDITORIALs excepted): Researched and fact-checked as thoroughly as time allows, references or links provided, doubts expressed. Facts will be verified, preferably by multiple independent sources. Wherever possible, especially in the case of computer topics, we will verify the facts ourselves by direct experiment.
Interest: We pledge to include brief guesses as to likely audience interest at the top of articles. These are only guesses, any subscriber is free to read any article they might fancy.
Currency: Content with lasting value and probity will take the form of articles. Ephemera, subject to change or later revision, will take place in the form of dated newsletters. Several of these are planned; schedule to be determined later from user feedback, but likely monthly or bi-weekly. Occasionally, very hot subject matter may demand weekly newsletters.
Depth: Newsletters may contain short entries, mostly announcements or brief news items. Some important content may be covered in depth. Articles will almost always cover their topics in depth. NB: this property is of necessity subjective; we’ll try to write the articles to cover their topics thoroughly and succinctly, and will be responsive to reader commentary on this characteristic.
Content placed behind the paywall will not:
Contain any explicit advertising of any kind, ever.
Content placed behind the paywall may:
Contain content we deem controversial or unpublishable on public forums. We’ll normally know this in advance, and explicitly label articles and newsletter items as such. We expect controversy to be rare, but occasionally desirable or necessary, and again will be responsive to reader feedback.
Our viewpoints, when included, will usually be explicit. Readers can expect our writing to reflect our point of view as business and technical practitioners. Opinions and editorial content will be marked as such.
This page may be updated in the future to reflect changing circumstances. Please note: subscribing to this Substack explicitly refers to free articles. Paid subscriptions require a positive decision on the part of subscribers to upgrade to the paid tiers.
Links to our Substack articles can be found at our index page, the Overlogix Table of Context.