A flood of startup money may enable a flood of pro bloggers
We've seen a lot of problematic schemes to enable bloggers to make a living at their avocation. This one, though, looks like it might work.
UPDATE: After this was written, we considered investments in blogger ad networks as an economical means to empower commercial blogging.
Jump to topic: A stampede of capital is headling to content sites • New capital's role in accelerating the demise of print • No paucity of interest in content, or in local news • New opportunities • Examining two counter-arguments
• A stampede of capital is headling to content sites
Om Malik has written a sharp piece on Gather, a startup that pays content creators according to the amount of traffic they generate. A number of others are using a similar model: Squidoo, Backfence, PersonalBee, etc.
Malik doesn't think the business model has legs, but we think it (or something like it) will fly, pretty much the same way Blogcritics does. In fact, Blogcritics should be concerned, because they reimburse their reviewers with only attention and swag. Gather and its ilk will pay actual cash. (Whether they are starting out doing that is unclear - Bloggers' Blog says Gather is paying in "Gather points" and does not seem to know how they are redeemed. But competition in this space will eventually force more straightforward payments. Here's more on Gather from the Boston Globe. We think the comparisons Gather's CEO likes to make with eBay are ill-conceived, btw.)
It's unlikely that all these startups will succeed, but one or two will break out. Malik tries to make his case by citing the low pay of beat reporters as evidence that labor cost is not the main problem newspapers today are experiencing. Whether this is true or not (yes, reporters are poorly paid), reporters' pay is irrelevant to the viability of this business model. What's important is that startup money is being invested specifically in the means to enable writers (currently in the forms of Gather et al) to earn an independent living. Sooner not later, the investment trend will embrace localbloggers (the online beat reporter) as well.
As we've noted in previous posts, EPIC provides a model scenario for the enabling of local blogging. The current trend toward empowering online writers is just another EPIC prophesy coming to fruition. [top]
• New capital's role in accelerating the demise of print
Those who cover local news for local papers will jump at the wider exposure the web affords their stories. Mister Snitch gets searches from all over the world for Hoboken news and opinion. While it's true that local papers such as The Jersey Journal and Hoboken Reporter reflect the papers' content, users prefer to get local information from bloggers if they can. The reasons for this include firewalling (the Journal puts its stories behind a paid firewall after a short time), opennness and responsiveness (bloggers are often if not always more approachable and frank than local media representatives), and site dynamics (NJ.com and the Reporter's site are appallingly slow and buggy. Searches do not always work.).
Beat reporters who see newspapers' own obits in the cards will begin jumping to burgeoning web sites as an alternative means to make a living. This loss of talent (it's not easy to find a beat reporter in an upbeat economy) will accelerate the death of local papers, and in turn accelerate reader migration to the web.
Of course, the real reason papers are hurting is because of loss of ad revenue. Just about everyone knows that Craigslist has decimated newspapers' classifieds business, Monster has scooped up jobs' listings, and other sites (including eBay) are picking through the leavings.
Megasites such as Yahoo and Google are showing an increasing interest in news, and in particular local news (it's sort of the final news frontier). Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has openly expressed an interest in funding local online news sources. Amazon's A9 has 'gone local' in its unique way, and will almost certainly build on their hyperlocal database (if they haven't already) by selling local ads linked to their street-level images. It's not hard to imagine local news following A9 (or even Google maps) as an additional incentive to community-building.
As newspapers' stock values fall, many are being placed on the auction block. Few newspapers will be able to find new sources of capital that will enable them to develop online presences, and fewer still are likely to succeed. Meanwhile, the new gold rush of internet capital is heading to content aggregation schemes. Megasites (Yahoo, Google, AOL, MSN) long flush with capital, are looking hard at building local news identities, and are keenly aware of the competition. Local online news will happen sooner rather than later. [top]
• No paucity of interest exists in content, or in local news
Citizen blogging, aka participatory journalism, was a big meme in the last couple of years, but it never really took off. Some are claiming that this, plus the demise of local papers, indicates the public has no interest in local news. We feel strongly that citizen blogging does not work well because it's a great deal of work for no pay. Would-be local bloggers just can't afford to keep it going, and frankly, not everyone can compose a decent story.
The continued growth in blog readership, and online use in general, indicates an increasing acceptance of the medium. It bodes well for the future of online local news - people will take their content online. In fact, many prefer it.
Newspapers are dying, but that also is not necessarily due to a loss of interest in local news. The trends are clear - as surely as the film-based camera is all but dead under assault from its digital brethren, local newspapers will fail. The local Jersey Journal nearly died a few years ago, and was saved only by union concessions and a new (tabloid) format. Their circulation continues to slip. They are dying, and a rich market for local news is going unserved. This is a vacuum that will inevitably be filled, and as blog readership and general online use continues to rise it's apparent how it will be filled.
Beyond the startups, some farsighted radio networks looking to differentiate themselves from satellite radio may decide to get into the online news business themselves, seeking out and competing for local writers. "Local" is what radio has always done best. [UPDATE: Shortly after this was written, Google bought dMarc advertising, a radio ad firm.] They would do well not to build from scratch, but to invest in and build-out truly local, existing news sources. Baristanet comes to mind in that regard. In Jersey City, there are quite a number of small local sites such as DojoMojo that are ripe to be strung together into an online news source. (We don't even have a fraction of the existing J.C. sites in our blogroll yet.) Batesline and Dustbury are outstanding Oklahoma-centric writers with an established regional/national readership who could anchor a local online news entity.
Newspapers are consoling themselves that their online presence will pick up even as their paper-based mindshare dwindles. Dream on. There are a few bright spots among the bigger papers (The New York Times, for all the criticism heaped on its TimesSelect effort, is actually outstanding), but most of the smaller (local) papers' online news presences are dismal. As was succinctly noted in the Craigslist article we mentioned, Craig will "get" journalism long before local papers ever "get" online news.
The Times has never covered the outlying communities well - it's too top-heavy. Craig could cross the country to Hoboken faster than the Times can cross the Hudson. [top]
• New opportunities
How will these local reporters get paid? Seems to us, they'd be paid by the number of readers they attract. This is hardly a novel concept (syndicated writers such as Dear Abby have always outearned lesser-known local scribes), so we can't see where Gather et al are off-base here.
As online local news matures, local writers with an eye toward national and world news will also be in demand. We envision writers such as Fausta not only making a living (doing what she's now doing without compensation), but weighing competing offers for her services. [top]
• Examining two counter-arguments
Jason Calacanis, who sold his Weblogs company for 25 (or so) million dollars last year (to AOL), mocks a Boston Globe writer for quoting Gather's founder Tom Gerace: "Eventually, popular writers will be able to earn a living by posting their work and attracting eyeballs to advertisements.". Calacanis notes that sites like Gawker has paid its writers for years. Weblogs' writers are likewise compensated. Om Malik invokes Jason and reiterates the point.
But Gerace is trying to say something that Malik and Calacanis (both of whom seem to have an anti-Gerace agenda) are missing. Gawker and Wonkette are brand names. A writer leaving Wonkette (as just happened) gets replaced with another writer, and life goes on. Same with BoingBoing - it's founders could leave, and others could fill the pipeline to the brand's audience.
Jason's model - and the model we've seen followed elsewhere, so far - is building a brand out of a niche. A travel blog, a cooking blog, a crafts blog, etc., are created. An audience is gathered to read about these subjects, and (hopefully) it keeps returning for more. The blogs link to each other, reinforcing the brand's channels (after all, some craftspeople also cook and travel).
The problem with both models, for the writers, is that the writer remains somewhat anonymous. That can change - BoingBoing et al are major platforms, and a blogger can make a name for his/herself after some time has passed. (It's less likely that a writer of knitting issues would establish a name that can stand independent of the blog, although we'd never say never.) The writers are obliged to fit the mold dictated by the brand.
Gerace is attempting to build an actual platform for writers - an alternative marketplace. (As opposed to creating a job building someone else's brand.) It's a model that's much more challenging to the writer than filling a channel. They'll have to find an original, compelling voice. (That lack of freedom many writers grouse about when working on a single-issue blog can also be a comfortable, cozy niche. Stripped of that niche and offered the freedom to express themselves, many writers falter. It's the real reason most copywriters never get their movie scripts produced.)
The problem with using blogs to build a writer's rep is the amount of work required in finding an audience. Creating strong, original pieces, not just commentary on others' content, is substantial labor. Add to that the labor (and happenstance) involved in marketing that work (in the many ways the web enables). Then add in the non-compensation factor, and the 'noise' factor.
We suspect that many bloggers signed on to the rather moribund Pajamas Media site in hopes of achieving the kind of high, consistent traffic numbers (with less of a self-marketing burden) that Huffington seems to enjoy. Alas, all brands are not created equal. James Lileks, on the other hand, built his own brand over a number of years. A shortcut to that sort of self-branding is the siren call of author-enabling site schemes.
The blogosphere tends to favor its noisier inhabitants - outstanding writing is not often heard above the din. We recently noted that the 25 most-trafficked blogs of 2005 actually produced only 4 of the most-trafficked posts. Big traffic numbers do not necessarily equate to compelling writing - blogs acquire their traffic through many different factors.
The model employed by Gerace (and others) attempts to solve writers' marketing problems by acting as a destination for readers looking for the best, most compelling writing. Theoretically this creates a level playing field on which writers compete for attention by way of merit, not affiliation with a higher-trafficked blogger. (Not that we object to such relationships, or their attendant traffic, per se. It's part of blogging. It just isn't, or shouldn't be, a major determining factor in what gets written, or what writing gets read.)
Back to Jason's model now: Not all the niche-interest markets have yet been filled. The biggest niche market of all is the blog that speaks to local interests. This is the blog that eclipses the fading local newspaper. It's the last big niche to be filled, because it's the most difficult to fill. Any competent writer can learn enough about knitting to fill a knitting blog's channel. That writer need not even be a competent blogger (i.e., self-promoter) because the brand-blog owner handles that. A blog/online newspaper about Spokane requires a Spokane resident who has blogging and writing (again, not the same thing) skills. The blog then has to be marketed to the people of Spokane. This means you can't just get your x number of required readers from anywhere on Earth, which is what the web does best. It's a handicap that hinders most local blogging, unless you live in a place like New York (Gawker basically covers NYC, but even they focus on issues that can be sold to the rest of the world).
Because of these challenges, the local niche market is still largely fluid, undefined and unfilled. Noted localblogger Bill Hobbs recently took his leave of blogging local issues due to the strain of performing this grueling work over a long period without adequate compensation. The much-touted Bayosphere is also encountering shallow waters. What's about to happen is that the mentality of 'net investors is about to change. Money that can invest in long-term returns (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Craigslist, etc.) is beginning to take the local market seriously. As local papers diminish, the opportunity increases. Whoever establishes the best local-interest model at the earliest time will dominate the field. Right now the best local bloggers, like Hobbs, are hungry and somewhat discouraged. Fine breaking-story reporters like Dan Riehl are frustrated by the lack of viable opportunities for truly independent reporters to market their work. This could be about to change. [top]
UPDATE: Steve Rubel doesn't believe Gather will fly. Good comments on his site.
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Previously on this subject: Think globally, blog locally, So you want to be a newspaper publisher
Linked to: The Conservative Cat, Jo's Café, Bloggin' Outloud, The Land of Ozz, Committees of Correspondence, Pirates! Man your Women!, and Don Surber.
Categories: Paid+online+content, Professional+blogging
Labels: blogosphere, local+blogging
posted by Mister Snitch! at 12:51 AM
13 Comments:
Jeff,
Blogging locally is a very sound strategy, for several reasons. First, we know the market, people, and subject matters. Second, because of who we know and those who know us, attracting local paid sponsors or advertisers is relatively easy (in our first month we raised $3500 dollars in paid advertising). Third, getting people we know to contribute content is an easy task - people love to write about their home town subjects. And finally, attracting readers is easier - because you know the target audience. In our case we were able to put together an email list of about 2500 local executives (our target market is the Sacramento Business Executive - we have worked the past 7 years consulting to local companies). We market to the email list. Perhaps key to all of this, because we are local and our readers and content are locally based, we have networking events where we invite the readers to a really great local venue where local politicians, academia, and business leaders are invited. These events turn out to be the catalyst for more content, readers, and sponsors. We even have attracted the media - the local newspaper and a major national magazine to cover these events.
Pierre Cutler
The Sacramento Executive
Pierre, it sounds like quite a success story you have going on. Thank you for taking the time to share it with us. I'd love to hear more about it - traffic figures, how long it took you to build up to current levels, where you go from here.
On Gather's business model:
You don't need legs to fly....
No, you don't. But not having them doesn't guarantee you will, either.
Very interesting and surprising to visit your site and see Blogcritics mentioned, mr. snitch!
Very very thought-provoking piece that hits on the "playing field" in blogs and online media exceptionally well.
Your thoughts about the challenges and pitfalls about creating a platform of writers who create stand-alone, high quality pieces really hits home. We fully edit and publish more than 60 of those kinds of stories every single day! Yet getting visibility for us is so much harder than those sites that fill a smaller niche and do so by largely linking out to other content.
Eric Berlin
Executive Producer
Blogcritics.org
Hi Eric. Yes, your site gets left out in the cold in these discussions, and I suppose it's due to not being part of the "cutting edge" of this. In other words, if Google parked some money with you, you'd get some headlines.
Another factor is, do writers emerge from Blogcritics with reputations? Can they make a living by working for your site? I don't know about the former, but the answer to the latter is "no", and the current discussion is about writers being able to earn at least a median living, and building a rep, by writing online.
There are other sites similar to yours I could have mentioned. Film Rotation, for example, attracts a substantial readership. (They don't get paid either, as far as I know.)
I think the key is going to be local news, not film or product criticism. That is what will enable some writers to make a living online, because they have to be local to succeed and that limits the pool of competition. That means, if I wanted to cover Hoboken, a writer in Kansas is not my competition. Conversely, I cannot compete with him.
Once a writer can make a living online doing local news, (s)he can broaden his/her reach pretty easily. Events draw the world's eye to various locales all the time (last year it was New Orleans). Local news and events will be the platform for a new generation of national writers.
Of course, you're as well positioned as anyone to establish a local presence in some key areas, Eric. You have the presence and structure. You'd need to pay the local writers, though, because they can't get switched in and out as easily as critics. You'd need a backer.
I'm still betting that radio networks will do this first, especially now that Google has confirmed its interest in radio through its purchase today. Look at the NPR site as a merging of blog (text), pictures, video and audio (from the radio station of course), and one can see how this can be really compelling as a means to gather and display local news.
Hello Mr. Snitch,
As founder of a www.comagz.com - a newcomer to the citizen journalism stage. I would like to point out that paying writers is not going to work for the long run.
First of all the amount of money that can be made from advertising is in the range of a couple of dollars per 1000 page views. This income is divided between the writer and the site. So an article has to get 10s of thousands of pageviews to bring any money. Therefore most writers will make money which is too small to be considered as an incentive.
Second, I would like to see on such websites articles of people who like to write, not articles written by people hoping to make a few $. These articles are likely to be populistic rather than informative and serious.
Thirdly, people who would like to make money from blogging should have their own blog, but it takes a lot of time, effort and tallent to get to a point where it pays off. I see sites like comagz.com and gather.com as places for people who want to get large exposure for their articles but still do not want to be professional bloggers with all what's involved in it. Especially in terms of being able to post articles occasionaly and not having to do it daily to retain the readers.
P.S.
I invite you to check out CoMagz.com
and Linkadelic Magazine
Best Regards,
Nir Ben-Dor
I think you are doing some of the best analysis out there on this emerging market. Here's my two cents:
Nice thing about an entry level job with a newspaper is that it often led to a better job. Don't forget the health insurance. Not convinced that any of these blogging models will pay more than loose coin except for the operators. All these big blogs are dependent on a large, volcanic and constantly replenishing talent pools, but their writers know they are giving more than getting and have little reason to be loyal. That's a huge weakness.
The beautiful thing about newspapers is they have the basic infrastructure that these start-ups don't have and can pump some real dollars into into the hands of bloggers. If I were a newspaper publisher, I would diversify -- form local blog networks, aggregation services, offer legal help and mechanisms for sharing ad revenue with bloggers. That could expand a newspaper's advertising reach by broadening its local market. For bloggers, my gut feeling is that access to a local advertising market will pay more than a pay per click ad. And there are local blog markets -- but they just haven't been recognized yet. And you're right -- they're not citizen journalism but they are locally focused.
Brick and motar retailers where slow to counter the threat posed by amazon and pets.com in the late 90s. as well as the million other start-ups that Wall Street gushed about before the crash. The big box operators were much like newspapers are today, slow to recognize the threat and respond -- but they built their own online operations and leveraged their strengths and many are doing quite well today online. Newspapers can use what they have to adapt to these changes. There's nothing that says they can't. And they will because they have no choice -- we're just not seeing the creativity and bold strokes yet but they're far from stupid.
It's not too hard to pull together a web site and promise bloggers some money but that doesn't mean these tiny operations are going to grow into something serious. If anything, the MSM is probably smart seeing what survives and what doesn't and buying up the winners or duplicating their models and improving them. (How many news stories have we seen about yet another wonderful, exciting blogging model -- it's making me ill.)
We're a long way from knowing how this will turn out, and right now I'm not betting on any outcome.
Nice to hear from Kob again. I think an area of agreement you and I and Mr. Ben-Dor have is that money isn't everything as far as blogging is concerned. If it were, we wouldn't have 20 million of them, would we? There's much that can emerge from it.
Nir, many people who love to write are in need of a few dollars, because they love to write. I agree that writing about making money writing (blogging) is not somethiing any of us want a steady diet of.
At one time I would have assumed newspapers would protect themselves from - not so much the encroachment of online resources, but their abandonment from readers who prefer going online. In my neck of the woods, The New York Times more or less 'gets' this. But the locals, here across the Hudson, don't. Kos stopped by to comment on my letter to the new publisher of the Jersey Journall. Absolute silence from them. Their lunch will be eaten. Jay Rosen also noted that the newspaper community has been absoluetly clueless about Craigslist, which is devouring their primary income source. Craig is now expressing initerest in local news. Google is buying into radio. From them I expect local sites with interactive maps, news and other features that resemble NPR. Neither Craigslist nor Google will throw up anything 'fly by night'. The stuff unlikely to last ('Bayosphere' for example) is much of the stuff out there now. (Your companies excepted, I'm sure.)
So yes indeed. Lots of models will be tried. To me, that means competition for the better local writers, because they are less of a commodity than, say, a general-interest writer. To write about a locality you simply have to be there. This means some models will begin to pay writers. Not much, but perhaps enough to survive if they keep some other balls in the air.
As far as the numbers needed to survive - quite right, tens of thousands of views are needed! However, consider that local papers (in Hudson County at least) currently have tens of thousands of readers. What happens when those papers are gone, and those readers are obliged to go online? What happens subsequently, when an online story gets the occasional national bump-up?
I for one get hit form all over for Hoboken stories even on ordinary days. Had I been online for 9/11 I'd have been flooded. God forbid such a thing ever happens again, but we are loctaed in a place where national events occasionally happen. And then there are regional issues that can draw the whole region's attention into one place. So I could foresee a local online news presence here that averages well into the range where money could be made.
It is hard to know what will survive and thrive, and where the survivors come from. BUt to me the direction is clear.
Thanks to both of you for stopping by. I'll follow DC Blogs and Co-Magz along with other developments.
Much of this is fascinating - however, the "demise of print" is not happening by a long shot (not any more than it has been the last twenty years or so), in fact, it's rather akin to the "end of the world-ers" who predict such every 100 years or so. True, the decline in ad revenue is a valid point, but this will not "kill" print - in fact, it will strengthen the hold on legitimacy print has in certain areas (key phrase there - in certain areas). Namely, academic and scholarly/scientific journals and print avenues, where ad revenue isn't an issue - however, as far a the mainstream news media goes, I imagine it isn't too much longer before the generational gaps narrow and the news print medium is completely overtaken, on the whole, by the Web/digital medium.
Hi NQG. Actually, I never use the phrase "demise of print" or any variation thereof. Designing pieces for print and supervising print runs is an important part of the way I make my living, and print is thriving due to a good economy (which means packages, catalogues, and other printed materials) and various new technologies.
The "demise of local newspapers" (not magazines, not books - I'm being quite specific here) is something else again. They're dying, by every measure. Revenues are drying up. Younger readers are shrugging them off, going online. Older readers - well, they die, sooner or later.
Textbooks and scientific journals are not part of this discussion, although I think they are also likely to go digital, because such materials require frequent updating, which of course is done better online. The only drawback I see at this point is that the display mechanisms (monitors) are tiring on the eyes after an extended period. New types of monitors are in the offinig that will offer a resolution more nearly matching the (heretofore) unparalleled resolution of print.
However, textbooks and journals do not require a whole new instrument of creation. The existing outlets, whose key assets are their contacts in the education industry (yes, I am familiar with that business as well) will simply move away from prinit and toward online distribution. This process is already well underway. One thing that may happen is a more "wiki" model for creating these books and journals. Some publishers will observe what's become of onetime-giant encyclopedia publishers such as World Book and Britannica in the face of Wikipedia, and decide to pre-empt that process by adopting it themselves, while their industry contacts still afford them an advantage.
Essentially I think you and I do agree. I do not see the end of print at all. But I do live in a thriving city with two dying and dysfunctional newspapers, right across the river from a major paper (the NY Times) which has and will be unable to pick up the slack when they shuffle off the coil. You seem to likewise feel that local papers are going the way of the dodo.
We may have less agreement on the subject of textbooks and journals, but that is not a centarl theme here.
Printing goes through cycles with the economy. We are emerging from a period of deep consolidation among medium to small size print shops. Those remaining are bigger and stronger than they were before the last recession, and struggling to keep up with demand. They are investing in new technologies to avoid commoditization, and life is generally good for many or most.
Thanks for stopping by so we could clarify this 'death of print' meme.
Gather sounmds like much the same model The Mining Company (now About.com)used except now we have blogs in place of standard HTML editorial content. It started off great and TMC shot to the top handful of sites on the web. Ten years later, and About.com is struggling to stay in the top 100 after stiffing many of its best content generators through consistent pay cuts, gross mismanagement and cramming so much advertising in that you have to search to find the content. I wouldn't count on long term income from any company doing this - once you have filled their site with content and helped them rise to the top, they will probably follow About.com's model and cut you loose so they can replace you with a lower paid version.
Wow, I have not heard The Mining Company mentioned in years. You really are a veteran.
You make good points. About is now an ad-bloated, slow-loading site that does not feel particularly responsive or authoritative. It's generally a mess, and a boondoggle for the Times which bought it but can't seem to integrate it into its business.
I don't know that Gather will follow this same pattern but I must say - content creators beware! I like the alternative of independent blogs networked as ad platforms better in terms of protecting creators.
Thanks for commenting, and bringing back some memories of how far we've come (and what we ought to have learned on the way). Well done.
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