#1

With Obsidian Publishing, is there any way to establish a paywall to content?

Is possible to place Adwords on the page?

Any other means for a true “publisher” to use it as a revenue source? Or is it meant only for in-house or small-scale non-commercial publishing?

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#2

Not right now. If you have such needs, feel free to write a more detailed feature request (or edit this one) to talk about your use case, things like what kind of content are you thinking of selling, and would you sell it at a one-time price or as a subscription. Thanks!

Right now it’s more for personal use, as a public knowledge or digital garden.

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#3

Thanks @rkaplan I was just about to ask this. I have a similar case, Like I mentioned to @Silver I’m building an Online Course for Obsidian for Personal Knowledge Managment.

Perhaps the single most useful feature to me, would be to have an unlisted (invite only) option,

Payment to access course, could be done through another service

In my case this would allow me to give access to those who buy my course (through another paying service) then once they paid I can give them a link to either log-in or visit an unlisted link with the course.

I’ve been looking for alternative platforms to share my course on, but I’d love to be able to achieve this with Obisdian Publish, specially since I can keep updating the course and everyone would have the same access to updates.

Whereas if I make it an obsidian downloadable vault, updates won’t reach everyone, unless they make a constant effort to redowload the vault often.

What would work perfectly is one of the following:

Log-in

  • ideally access is granted through a log-in, where those who have paid can log-in to my obsidian publish.

Unlisted Link

  • Alternatively, I could give them access to a an unlisted link through email once they’ve paid for the course.

Log-in is a lot safer and a prefered method, but if unlisted links are possible, I’d be happy to work with that as well

If this is a difficult long term feature to achieve, I’m happy to know if there are any work-around solutions to use the current version Obsidian Publish to achieve this.

Thank you!

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#5

That sounds like a good option for a paywall… perhaps Adwords would be an option for those who wish to monetize content without a paywall.

Even publications meant for public knowledge need to be capitalized somehow if they are to be sustainable and of good quality.

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#6

Yes, perhaps our needs are different @Silver let me know if it’s better to create a separate feature request post for what I mentioned above.

For anyone else reading this post, I talked directly to @rkaplan about using something like Hugo to create a website with markdown, and publishing it with Netlify.

This allows for more freedom to have a custom domain and including Ads or whatever you might need.

Hugo Is a bit advanced, eventhough you don’t need to know html and css and javascript, (it’s benefitial to know those things). experience with git saves a lot of time as well.

but other than that, if you are willing to learn it’s worth it, if your goals is to create a website with markdown. Here’s my main website as an example made with hugo.

Hope that helps!

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#8

Really cool stuff man, looking forward to seeing more!

I really like the Andy Matuschak style notes / braindump concept, might set one up too with Hugo!

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#9

@juen thank you I appreciate your kind words!

awesome, if you want to set it up I put the resources I used at the bottom of the main page


Screenshot_20201005-075008_Firefox
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Just a bit of advice,

for my whole main website I use hugo 100%

for publishing notes, I am currently transitioning to obsidian publish, it’s great to be able to keep all of those notes inside obsidian, without the extra work of converting everything to hugo (not that easy)

but overall for a full website I do recommend hugo, for notes I believe obsidian publish to be worth it, for a more frictionless process.

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#10

Thanks for the resources & advice! Agree that Obsidian Publish is serving the same function so might just use that for publishing notes “quick & dirty”.

Already using Hugo for my own website (jenglert.gitlab.io) so that’s why I was intrigued. Currently favoring the model of notetaking/writing in Obsidian and then publishing finished blog posts instead of already sharing the collection of unrefined notes.

But mabye they’ll even allow CSS for Obsidian Publish or an easy way to access public / published Vaults directly in the native Obsidian app!

Another feature I’d like to see to make those kinds of virtual gardens more useful would be a “path” in form of highlighted links or similar that leads you along a certain argument / viewpoint etc that the author wants to make so that you don’t get lost in side-links or dead ends all so often.

#11

Nice, that’s a cool website, got you yeah hugo is great, and if you already have experience with it then it’s worth testing what works best for you.

Those are some awesome ideas for obsidian publish, I’m excited to see where they take it!

#12

I second this feature request.

Gathering scattered bits of specif topic oriented notes has value for many people.

I built https://book.wardleymaps.com/ and would love to put it behind paywall or any source of credentials check.