GoPulse is a social news platform that I built to address the systemic problems that have arisen from the current generation of digital news distributors.
The platform was built using Ionic and written in TypeScript. Article and publihser meta-data is fetched as JSON from the News API and this meta-data is then shared and sent between subscribers. So it's essentially a social network dedicated to discovering and sharing news articles from vetted publishers. Bear in mind that content on the platform, with the exception of comments, is not user-generated. A user cannot upload or share an article they found onliine, it must first exist as content that was indexed by the platform. I like to say that the content is user-driven.
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Filter bubble or echo chamber. The pulse tab, which contains the top headlines seperated by category, is a common shared reality where all subscribers are presented with the same articles. There are no personalized recomendation algorithms. If the subscriber base gets large enough, the articles on the pulse tab will be human curated by a bi-partisan and intellectually diverse team of profesional journalists.
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Advertising business model. There are no advertisements of any kind on GoPulse, and there never will be. The platform will be monetized by charging subscribers $2.99 a month, after a one month free trial for first time subscribers. This recurring revenue source will bring in over $35 per subscriber per year. Another potential source of revenue in the future could be an affiliate marketing deal with publishers where GoPulse could take a percentage of new subscriber revenue for publishers behind a paywall. Becuase GoPulse already has a subscriber's credit card info, a one click subscribe button could easily be added to the publisher detail page for publishers who request it.
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Fake news. There is no user generated content on GoPulse, all news content is indexed directly from the source/publisher. At the moment there are currently 79 vetted news sources on the platform. All future sources/publishers will be vetted for quality and journalistic integrity.