About Goldhat.org

My name is Kenji Crosland, blogger at the career creation site unreadyandwilling.com and founder of Goldhat. Let me tell you a bit about Goldhat and what we do.

The Origins of Goldhat

Before creating Goldhat I had recently made a decision to create a career for myself that made the most of my talents and passions. I quit my job as a headhunter in Tokyo and decided to return to my roots as an English creative writing major. I started a freelance writing business and created a website to promote my services. In order to lure traffic to my site, I wrote a slew of articles on the craft of writing and promoted them through comments on blogs and through traditional social networking sites.

Although I thought the internet was an excellent medium for the promotion of my business. I could see that it had many weaknesses. The lion share of content producers, hungry for traffic, abandoned quality in the pursuit of quantity. The idea being that the more 500-word keyword focused articles you had, the greater chance Mother Google would have to notice you. As a result, any real quality on the internet got drowned out by a deluge of garbage and fluff.

Social media didn't seem to help much either. Saturated as they were with videos of surprised pandas and a never-ending procession of lolcats.

Monetization also seemed to be a problem. It seemed as though producers of an endless stream of fluff content had a distinct advantage over those who created content of any real and lasting value. Ad revenue seemed the only way to monetize content. In order to attract enough traffic to take advantage of this ad revenue, creating fluffy keyword-based content seemed to be the easiest thing to do.

I wanted to make money off my web content, but the monetization methods available seemed unsatisfactory. I was not willing to sacrifice quality to make money from my content. After turning this problem over in my head forseveral months the solution came to me: a social donations site. With no prior knowledge of programming (Not even HTML!), I bought a stackful of books on web application development and set about to make this idea a reality.

Six months after getting the intial idea, Goldhat.org was launched in beta in March 2010. Since then I have switched my career focus to help making Goldhat succeed.

Hopefully this site will help more artists, entrepreneurs and creative people do what they love full time.

Goldhat's Mission

The mission of Goldhat.org is twofold:

1. Provide an escape from the Tyranny of "Free": The internet has provided a lot of great artists and entrepreneurs an excellent venue to promote their services. Unfortunately, in order to attract vistors to their sites, they are forced to provide more and more free content just to stay ahead. This emphasis on "more free content" can severely limit the quality of content that they produce.

In order to attract more visitors, website owners will have to produce more free content, until essentially everything on the internet becomes 'free'. Because most content producers cannot support themselves under this system, they will often rather give up than continue producing more great content for free.

This trend will not end unless we do something about it. Goldhat intends to put a stop to this by putting an expected donation 'price' to every piece of free content on the web. Consumers of free content will be encouraged to donate, much like the street musician that passes the hat around after making a performance. The audience feels guilty not throwing anything into the hat. This is as it should be.

2. Provide Quality Control: The current law of the internet is this: Content is King. Goldhat endeavors to change this law and replace it with a new one: Quality is King. Many content producers on the internet produce poor quality content at accelerated rates in order to attract more traffic to their sites. Because making a donation is a better measure of quality than keywords, links, or votes, Goldhat expects only the highest quality content to be featured on the front page of the site.

Goldhat intends to pursue these two goals until every "Please Donate" button on the internet is replaced with a link to a Goldhat page.

We have yet to create a FAQ for the site. If anything is unclear, please ask us questions at