Google announced Qaya, which will enable people to create new digital businesses. The announcement was made in a post on The Keyword, written by Nathaniel Naddaff-Hafrey, Co-Founder and GM, Qaya.
Qaya is a small and agile team dedicated to helping creators build businesses on the web. Our project began with a simple idea: creators are the next generation of entrepreneurs. As the CEOs of their own businesses, they need the same commercial tools as any successful founder. Since we began live testing in early 2021, we’ve learned a lot from creators on Qaya, their fans, and other creator economy projects.
According to Nathaniel Naddaff-Hafry, “Creators on Qaya sell everything from trapeze workout guides to wellness training videos, photo filters, beat packs, ASMR read-aloud, productivity templates, knitting patterns and much more. We support pay-gated and free products, with tipping, subscription, and other monetization types coming soon.”
The Qaya website is available for interested creators to view. The site encourages people who want to get early access to sign up and choose their store name.
9to5Google reported that Qaya makes it easy for creatures to make centralized web storefronts. In addition to having a centralized hub, Google says users will be able to “design a personalized storefront” that visually scales from desktop to mobile, complete with links to all your social platforms and other sides. Qaya provides stats, customer management tools, and other analytics.
Right now, Qaya is “focused on the U.S.” but hopes to bring Qaya to more countries soon. They are also exploring ways to support creators as they experiment with other types of digital goods.
In my opinion, Qaya is Google’s way of competing with Patreon, Ko-fi, and other similar services. I suppose a creator who uses Patreon, or Ko-fi, might want to try out Qaya, just to see how it works. It might be possible to keep up with more than one of these types of platforms. The risk is that a creator’s followers and fans won’t want to move over to Qaya.