So far on this entrepreneurial quest, I've picked up that making money on the internet as a publisher is a tricky enterprise--especially if the project aims to be journalistic.
It didn't used to be so tricky. In the beginning, when advertisers didn't know anything about the internet or its users, they were much more willing to spend money on, say, a display ad. Now, they know how many users click on ads, and they know how long those people stay on the product's site. And they use both of these indicators to determine whether or not advertising on a specific site is worth their while.
Take for example a site like Ecopolitology, which is part of Matt Embrey's LiveOak Network. Say there's a Nissan Leaf ad on the site. I don't know what Nissan's sales strategy is, but it would make sense that they would be targeting readers of a site like Ecopolitology--which focuses on the politics of climate change and clean energy. But Nissan doesn't want to be paying for ads unless people are clicking AND reading about the Leaf, and this puts publishers like Embrey in an awkward situation. Already strapped for cash and somewhat at the mercy of the advertisers, it may not be a smart business decision to run a story that examines the drawbacks of electric cars, especially if it mentions the Leaf. On the other hand, posts examining the environmental benefits of electric cars, or a video that highlights the high-tech features the Leaf, is the kind of content that might inspire more click-throughs.
Obviously, every advertiser offers a different product, and each relationship is different. Some--like, for example, one with an online college, or a Haiti earthquake relief organization--are not so inherently awkward as the Nissan example. But still, the current situation is something wannabe publishers, as well as wannabe multimedia content-makers, should be thinking about.
2.12.2010
2.10.2010
High-Frequency Novelty Production, Stock, Flow, and Truth
I agree with this recent anonymous answerer on Explainthis.org (I'm pretty sure it's Ed Yong): the blogger vs. journalist trope is downright exhausted. Obviously, the term blog does not refer to the journalistic integrity of blog posts, or bloggers. In the context of journalism, blog shouldn't imply anything but high-frequency novelty production. If you are not telling the truth with your novelty, you are not a journalist. The same is true for microblogs. How much novel truth are you telling?
A good reporter-blogger is like a really good museum tour guide--the one whose tour keeps growing as randoms that happen to overhear can't help but join the group. If you are still trying to figure out what I mean, read Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo for a week. Marshall manages to combine his knowledge of the insider games with clear-headed writing style to produce a consistently enlightening flow of truthful, digestible information packets.
Truth is truth, whether it's a marathon New Yorker piece or a 128-character explanation + link. Twitter is not about telling people what you are doing, it's about sharing truth. NYU professor Jay Rosen says he uses Twitter for "mindcasting." I'm not sure that's exactly what I do, but it's something like that. When I was a kid, I would get hyper when I found certain new facts in my picture books about dinosaurs, constellations, and germs, and would immediately feel the urge to run and tell one of my parents, my sister, or whoever I happened to see first. That pattern of behavior has never really gone away, and that's why I love Twitter.
Robin Sloan's stock and flow analogy is apt:
A good reporter-blogger is like a really good museum tour guide--the one whose tour keeps growing as randoms that happen to overhear can't help but join the group. If you are still trying to figure out what I mean, read Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo for a week. Marshall manages to combine his knowledge of the insider games with clear-headed writing style to produce a consistently enlightening flow of truthful, digestible information packets.
Truth is truth, whether it's a marathon New Yorker piece or a 128-character explanation + link. Twitter is not about telling people what you are doing, it's about sharing truth. NYU professor Jay Rosen says he uses Twitter for "mindcasting." I'm not sure that's exactly what I do, but it's something like that. When I was a kid, I would get hyper when I found certain new facts in my picture books about dinosaurs, constellations, and germs, and would immediately feel the urge to run and tell one of my parents, my sister, or whoever I happened to see first. That pattern of behavior has never really gone away, and that's why I love Twitter.
Robin Sloan's stock and flow analogy is apt:
"Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.The new journalist must not only navigate job-less waters, he or she must also always be balancing stock and flow--a feat that's lot easier said than done. I'm trying to wire my brain so it will think in terms of stock and flow at the same time. Sometimes it works, but often it just leaves me with a headache.
Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time."
2.04.2010
Q&A with Matt Embrey, co-founder and publisher of LiveOak Media
Over the past five years, the green blogosphere has become a force to be reckoned with. And I would bet it's here to stay, because the mountain of interesting news and information about sustainability-related topics is growing every day. I had a chance to chat via telephone with Matt Embrey, the co-founder of the green blog network LiveOak Media, and he had a lot of interesting things to say about content, building readership, and navigating the turbulent internet advertising market.
Q: How did LiveOak originate?
Matt Embrey: It's actually an ongoing story because we're still coming together right now. A friend and I started with one site, called Green Upgrader, about two years ago. We both still work full-time jobs. Right off the bat, Green Upgrader was focused more along the lines of product-based, specific upgrades for your life. It started taking off and doing really well. It was on the early-middle half, I'd say, of the green uprising on the internet. Not quite as early as Sustainablog, which has been around since 2005, or Treehugger, which came before that. Anyway, it took off and it kind of morphed into a general green living site where we were publishing all kinds of news, from posts about corporate responsibility to interesting humanitarian issues. I realized we would be better suited to have separate channels for the stuff that's a bit more focused, and bring Green Upgrader back to just products. That's when I started working with Tim Hurst, and we started this network. And we're actually still in the process of rolling out the different channels. Ecopolitology will focus on policy and politics. Earth and Industry will focus more on sustainable business. And we have two more coming down the pike--one will focus on green technology, and one will focus more on advocacy and activism. Green Upgrader will still be there. That allows us to tailor the content more towards the audience. We don't have the resources to be a Treehugger and publish 40 articles a day, so we decided to refine the message down to these specific channels, and I think that makes for a better conversation with the readers.
Q: Did you find that specific types of content on Green Upgrader were consistently more popular than others?
ME: Certain topics did get better engagement than others. What really drove it, though, was editorial engagement. It's fine to publish an article a couple people might post, but it's a much more enriching experience when the author of that article is posing a question to the audience or at least is responding to the comments and interacting in the social media area--wherever that story has moved on to. That way the conversation continues beyond the original post and article. That led logically to having the whole publication be more of a focused conversation, instead of bouncing around from topic to topic.
Q: So you found that the posts with more editorial voice were popular with readers?
ME: Well, there's definitely a certain flavor that people tend to like. And I think when you engage the audience, either by posing a question or talking about something that is relevant to them, as opposed to just reporting on a piece of news, it tends to do a better. You can quantify popular in a different ways. Popular could mean that it gets picked up by a lot of other sites and syndicated in different ways--popular with bloggers and journalists. Other times it's popular because it gets a lot of comments on site. And the third way it could get popular is if it gets picked up on Digg or Twitter and it permeates like that. Social media is really geared toward the activism and advocacy sort of articles. People respond really well to that type of thing.
Q: What is your strategy for building readership?
ME: When we started out, it was all social media traffic. We spent a considerable amount of time out engaging in social media with people, submitting to Digg and responding to comments and Twittering and whatnot. I was spending more time promoting these articles than I was actually writing them. But we've refocusing our efforts on quality editorial content as opposed to the social media. Social media is great way to get your content in front of a lot of eyeballs. At the end of 2008, if you got an article that was really popular on Digg, you could have 50,000 people come to the site in one day. But what ends up happening is that only a small percentage of those visitors stick and become readers, so the conversion from those types of social media aren't really high.
Q: How does the change in philosophy affect your revenue model?
ME: Right now we are all display advertising. You can get a lot of traffic from something like Digg, but it ends up watering down the conversation on the blog. You don't have a lot of engaged people, and those are the people that tend to be more interested in clicking on sponsored links and going through. So while advertisers are paying for every time the ad shows, they are also evaluating what kind of a return they are getting. They could put their ad on a site that gets a million hits, but if none of those people that go to that site actually care, then they've wasted their money. From the business standpoint, as a publication, you want to produce quality content and keep your readers engaged in a way that, hopefully, the advertisers will also fit into it. Otherwise, they'll advertise once and they won't come back.
Q: How did LiveOak originate?
Matt Embrey: It's actually an ongoing story because we're still coming together right now. A friend and I started with one site, called Green Upgrader, about two years ago. We both still work full-time jobs. Right off the bat, Green Upgrader was focused more along the lines of product-based, specific upgrades for your life. It started taking off and doing really well. It was on the early-middle half, I'd say, of the green uprising on the internet. Not quite as early as Sustainablog, which has been around since 2005, or Treehugger, which came before that. Anyway, it took off and it kind of morphed into a general green living site where we were publishing all kinds of news, from posts about corporate responsibility to interesting humanitarian issues. I realized we would be better suited to have separate channels for the stuff that's a bit more focused, and bring Green Upgrader back to just products. That's when I started working with Tim Hurst, and we started this network. And we're actually still in the process of rolling out the different channels. Ecopolitology will focus on policy and politics. Earth and Industry will focus more on sustainable business. And we have two more coming down the pike--one will focus on green technology, and one will focus more on advocacy and activism. Green Upgrader will still be there. That allows us to tailor the content more towards the audience. We don't have the resources to be a Treehugger and publish 40 articles a day, so we decided to refine the message down to these specific channels, and I think that makes for a better conversation with the readers.
Q: Did you find that specific types of content on Green Upgrader were consistently more popular than others?
ME: Certain topics did get better engagement than others. What really drove it, though, was editorial engagement. It's fine to publish an article a couple people might post, but it's a much more enriching experience when the author of that article is posing a question to the audience or at least is responding to the comments and interacting in the social media area--wherever that story has moved on to. That way the conversation continues beyond the original post and article. That led logically to having the whole publication be more of a focused conversation, instead of bouncing around from topic to topic.
Q: So you found that the posts with more editorial voice were popular with readers?
ME: Well, there's definitely a certain flavor that people tend to like. And I think when you engage the audience, either by posing a question or talking about something that is relevant to them, as opposed to just reporting on a piece of news, it tends to do a better. You can quantify popular in a different ways. Popular could mean that it gets picked up by a lot of other sites and syndicated in different ways--popular with bloggers and journalists. Other times it's popular because it gets a lot of comments on site. And the third way it could get popular is if it gets picked up on Digg or Twitter and it permeates like that. Social media is really geared toward the activism and advocacy sort of articles. People respond really well to that type of thing.
Q: What is your strategy for building readership?
ME: When we started out, it was all social media traffic. We spent a considerable amount of time out engaging in social media with people, submitting to Digg and responding to comments and Twittering and whatnot. I was spending more time promoting these articles than I was actually writing them. But we've refocusing our efforts on quality editorial content as opposed to the social media. Social media is great way to get your content in front of a lot of eyeballs. At the end of 2008, if you got an article that was really popular on Digg, you could have 50,000 people come to the site in one day. But what ends up happening is that only a small percentage of those visitors stick and become readers, so the conversion from those types of social media aren't really high.
Q: How does the change in philosophy affect your revenue model?
ME: Right now we are all display advertising. You can get a lot of traffic from something like Digg, but it ends up watering down the conversation on the blog. You don't have a lot of engaged people, and those are the people that tend to be more interested in clicking on sponsored links and going through. So while advertisers are paying for every time the ad shows, they are also evaluating what kind of a return they are getting. They could put their ad on a site that gets a million hits, but if none of those people that go to that site actually care, then they've wasted their money. From the business standpoint, as a publication, you want to produce quality content and keep your readers engaged in a way that, hopefully, the advertisers will also fit into it. Otherwise, they'll advertise once and they won't come back.
1.31.2010
Preemptive FAQ
Q: What is the point of this project?
A: This virtual space is a requirement for my graduate school seminar called "Entrepreneurial Journalism." Beyond that, it's inspired by the idea that humans have the capacity to completely re-imagine things.
At the moment, thoughtful people are re-imagining all kinds of things. For example, synthetic biologists are re-imagining energy production, while creative young journalists are busy re-imagining the news media.
"All I'm saying is, free your mind," said my professor Adam Penenberg (an entrepreneurial journalist himself) in class last week, "You can create a new art form."
So I guess the point is I'd like to try and do that.
Q: WTF does "meta-morph" mean?
A: Meta-morph is a made-up verb, built out of two conceptual bricks: metamorphosis and metacognition.
Brick 1, Metamorphosis: Today's technology allows individuals to mine vast amounts of discreet, meaningful packets of information, and instantly distribute them throughout multiple extensive social networks. It's too early to tell what it all means exactly, but one thing is for sure: as the way we research, communicate, and collaborate transforms, our brains and minds are changing in response. Our individual and collective thought processes are undergoing some sort of metamorphosis. What will climb out of the cocoon?
Brick 2, Metacognition: In this February 2009 article from Seed, science writer Jonah Lehrer explains how the human tendency to think about how you think has "immense practical value." In fact, some researchers believe if we examine our tendencies, we may be able to figure out how to avoid certain types of seemingly unavoidable mistakes. As Lehrer puts it, "Although the mind is full of flaws, we can learn to outsmart them."
So how do the bricks come together? In a theory: to be keenly aware of the strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies of the mind (individual or collective), is to be better equipped to re-imagine -- and then to meta-morph -- the way it makes decisions, especially given the vast information stores and transformative communications technology that can be applied toward this goal.
This project is a multimedia-based attempt to apply this theory practically, and to show how it manifests itself in the real world four-way intersection of science, business, politics, and journalism. I guess we'll have to see what happens.
If this post strikes you as mere psychobabble, don't be discouraged. From here on out it's about the content. This was just the concept car.
Meta-morph it.
(Photo Credit: chekabuje, Flickr)
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