Overview
Publish is the publisher entry point into the ZZAZZ ecosystem — where publisher confidence gets built. It existed in basic form when I joined, but lacked the depth publishers needed to make real decisions about pricing and content strategy.
My contribution: Complete design — I fully designed the publisher workspace from the ground up, including pricing intelligence, performance analytics, custom dashboards, and earnings views.
What Became Clear Through Research
Direct conversations with publishers revealed four critical insights:
Publishers Adopt Internally First
Several publishers were willing to treat the LPM as an internal decision-making tool before publicly showing prices to readers. The internal tool IS the entry point — not a stepping stone to the “real” product.
Different Publishers, Different Workflows
An editorial team planning next week’s content has different needs than a revenue team analyzing monetization performance. One-size-fits-all dashboards won’t work.
Revenue Logic, Not Just Metrics
Publishers don’t just want to see how content performs — they want to understand how content earns across different access paths and what drives pricing changes.
Comparison Is the Primary Use Case
Publishers constantly compare: their content vs competitors, this week vs last, priced content vs unpriced. The workspace must make comparison effortless.
What I Designed
I designed Publish as a modular publisher workspace — modular components with consistent pricing logic underneath. Each publisher’s dashboard reflects their workflow, not a one-size-fits-all template.
Pricing Intelligence
Content pricing, cross-publisher comparisons, pricing shifts over time. Publishers can see not just what their content is worth, but why — and how it compares to similar content in the market.
Performance & Earnings
How content earns across the three TimePay access paths — cash, credits, and sponsored attention. Revenue attribution that connects specific content decisions to specific earning outcomes.
Custom Dashboards
Three primary configurations designed for different publisher workflows:
- Editorial Planning — what to publish next, trending topics, content gaps, competitive positioning
- Revenue Attribution — which content earns, through which access paths, with what conversion rates
- Competitive Benchmarking — how your pricing and performance compares to similar publishers
Custom Analytics Tools
Pricing trends over time, competitive positioning charts, revenue breakdown by access path, and content opportunity analysis — all designed to help publishers make informed decisions about their content strategy.
Research & Market Integration
Direct connections to Exchange and Signal Pill, allowing publishers to see how their content performs in the broader market context and how pricing signals appear on their own websites.
Key Outcome
Publishers adopted pricing internally before showing users — validating that the Publish workspace has standalone value as a decision-making tool, independent of the consumer-facing ecosystem. This internal-first adoption path became a key part of the ZZAZZ go-to-market strategy.