Cit Media

Microsoft’s Offer To Buy Yahoo For $44.6 Billion is likely to turn in large part on whether the founders, who still hold a great deal of stock, go with their investors who want to take the money and run. I’m betting they will, reluctantly, though I still believe Yahoo could have a great future as a stand-alone company. More than almost any other Web company, Yahoo understands aggregation and the best of bottom-up media. Microsoft barely has a clue.

But Google is getting pretty worrisome in its own way — too big and powerful to trust. We need large and small counterweights, and perhaps a Microsoft-Yahoo combination will be one of them.

It’s worth noting, meanwhile, that the offer of slightly less than $45 billion isn’t much higher than ExxonMobil’s 2007 profits. The juxtaposition in today’s NY Times, below, is pretty startling.

There are plenty of reasons to wonder about citizen media’s business model. One, which I’ve talked about many times here and elsewhere, is the tendency of site owners to rely on free labor. The method goes roughly this way: “You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.”

People do things for many reasons, but it’s always about getting something of value back. The value may be a psychic reward of doing something good for someone else. It may be ego. It may be money, or the ability to save money. In community-driven websites it may be contributing a tiny bit of effort to something that gives the overall community, and thereby individuals, great value. Usually it’s a combination.

But when the big money starts to flow to a few who are leveraging the work of the many, a disconnect emerges. And that’s why I’m so bothered by part of an announcement of some interesting new features that will give users or reddit, a news-recommendation site owned by the parent company of Wired magazine, new ways to help each other understand the news. reddit is refining the process in a smart way, by dividing the recommendation system in ways — assuming it works — to make it better and, perhaps, more reliable.

There’s no sense of whether the “private” and “restricted” section of the site, in which the Chosen will presumably elevate the content because they are doing things better, will have any stake in the outcome beyond being given more responsibility. I hope so, and we’ll know more when the features roll out more widely.

What really bugs me most in the reddit blog posting about the changes is the following:

Right now we really only have English and German, but if you would be generous enough to translate reddit into another language, please email feedback@reddit to offer your support.

As usual, if you’re interested in working on reddit, please email jobs@reddit and describe what a badass programmer you are.

Read it again. You are invited to translate the site into another language, because you are such a generous person. If you are a badass programmer, however, you are invited to apply for a job and make some actual money.

I like reddit a lot, and think it’s doing some terrific work with community-driven news. But this request goes beyond the pale.

Conde Nast, a privately held empire that owns some of the most profitable magazines on the planet, paid a bundle for this site. It can afford to pay for translations.

If you are generous enough to do this kind of work for free, please consider doing instead it for a nonprofit site of some sort. Please don’t be giving away your time to mega-wealthy media barons.

(This is the eighth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

The most common way for a website to earn revenue is one of the most traditional forms of monetization: selling advertising space. This process has gotten much easier in recent years with the rise of ad networks like Google’s AdSense and AdBrite. The ease, scope, and effectiveness of ad networks may make them attractive for many citizen journalists, but they are not the only form of advertising available to you. Affiliate programs and merchandising are two other routes that may be even more profitable to use instead of (or alongside) ads from a network.

Once you determine what type of ads you’ll display, be sure to consider how your readers will see your ads (both in terms of effectiveness and the level of intrusiveness). Consider also how advertising may affect your journalistic integrity and your appearance of objectivity, as well as your legal obligation to disclose that you are being paid to promote or review a product, should you ever choose to engage in that kind of activity.

AD NETWORKS

Ad networks are companies that arrange many deals with many advertisers to display ads all over the internet. They are typically very easy to sign up for and implement and some even integrate automatically with certain blog-hosting sites. Blogger, for example, allows you to put an AdSense sidebar on your blog with a few clicks.

CPC vs. CPM

Ad networks make deals with advertisers on a Cost-Per-Click or Cost-Per-Thousand basis. These rates of payment are often abbreviated CPC and CPM (M being the Roman numeral for 1,000), respectively.

With CPC ads, which will probably be most common for smaller outfits, you are paid a certain amount each time somebody actually clicks on the ad. You are paid nothing just for displaying CPC ads, and whether or not the click results in a sale is irrelevant. Unless you use a network like CrispAds that uses a fixed amount per-click, you will be paid a percentage of whatever money the network has worked out with the advertiser.

CPM ads are just based on the traffic. If you get 20,000 hits and each visitor is shown 1 ad, you’re paid for 20 thousands. Obviously, CPM ads will only be attractive to owners of sites with heavy traffic or those with low content or keyword “profitability” (see next section).

Relevance and Keywords

Some networks like AdSense and Vibrant Media use a program to “crawl” the content of your page to find information for which it can display an appropriate ad. For example, if you have a post that mentions taxes, you may see an ad for tax software or services next to it.

Others, like CrispAds, rely on keywords you provide. The benefits of using keywords are reliability, consistency, and control. Ads based on keywords are static; they don’t change even when your content does. Perhaps the most important reason to use keywords is being able to assess and capitalize on “keyword profitability.” The idea of profitability in this sense refers to the likelihood that your typical readers would be interested in buying or learning more about the products associated with a given keyword (and thus the likelihood that they will click).

For example, if you write a technology blog, you may want to use the keyword “iPod.” Using this keyword would be attractive for at least three distinct reasons, all of which suggest more clicks or more revenue for your site:

• Because your readers are the sorts of people who care about music and technology, they are likely to want an iPod.

• iPods are items that many people shop for and buy online anyway (as opposed to, say, furniture).

• iPods are hot commodities. Sellers of products that exist in such highly competitive marketplaces often will pay higher ad rates.

On the other hand, unvarying keywords do not allow for an ad on the latest trend, movie, magazine, or service you just happen to write about that isn’t covered by your keywords. A crawler would find that text and may have an ad ready for it. If you take the same technology blog on location to a video gaming conference, it will probably start to attract video game search engine traffic. People who are reading for the video game content may be much more likely to click an ad that a crawler finds (perhaps relevant to a particular game or gaming console) than they would an ad for an iPod.

Note: Using the video game example, you may want to supplement your ads with a button for a user to actually purchase the discussed video game using a site like Amazon.com. That way you can bring in revenue either for the ad or for the sale. You can find more information on affiliate programs like that offered by Amazon in this earlier post.

Google AdSense

The biggest of the ad networks, Google AdSense utilizes Google’s searching (crawling) technology to display relevant ads based on the content it sees on a given page. After you sign up, you are given a wide range of ad types from which to choose. They vary based on format (text, image, or video) and size (horizontal banners, vertical “skyscrapers,” squares, etc.) Text ads are further customizable by configuring colors to match the layout of your site. AdSense then supplies you with JavaScript (a Web programming language) for you to copy and paste into your web site’s code. When a visitor accesses your page, the JavaScript searches your page, compares what it finds with the AdSense database of advertisements, and displays the contextually relevant ads it finds.

AdSense also offers “AdSense for search,” which takes the form of a Google search bar. When a user uses it to perform a Google search, you make money on the ads that are displayed alongside the search.

AdSense offers both CPC and CPM ads. Like other networks that offer CPM, in order to display any in that category your site must be approved (based on content and traffic) by the individual advertisers. Google does not publicize a flat percentage of revenue that it pays out, but it does make detailed statistics available to allow for you to determine when and how much money came from which ads.

While AdSense’s average payment per-click tends to be lower than that of other networks it has a higher click-through rate (the percentage of page visitors that click on an ad) due to the success of the crawler in displaying highly relevant ads.

CrispAds and Sponsorship

CrispAds is an advertising network specializing in blogs. Instead of using a crawler or search engine to select ads based on the current content of your website, you submit keywords when you sign up which determine the ads displayed.

CrispAds not only displays text ads based on your keywords, but also puts your page into its database of blogs for advertisers to consider for sponsorship. If a company’s marketing department decides that they like your blog, they can sponsor you for a month at a time, displaying their graphical ads in the same place where your text ads were (the code does not change).

Being sponsored directly by an advertiser has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, you set your own advertising rates and therefore have the opportunity to make more money with sponsored ads than you would otherwise (this is, of course, dependent on the size of your readership). On the other, while the individual sponsoring companies may take your keywords into consideration, CrispAds will no longer display ads based on your keywords once you have been sponsored. It is possible that the shuffled ads based on keyword may be more appealing or more relevant to your readers and therefore earn more clicks than the ads displayed by your sponsoring company.

For text ads and any ad for which you have not set the rate yourself, CrispAds pays out 70% of what they make from the advertiser. This appears to be the highest publicized rate of all the ad networks (tied with BlogAds), although CrispAds does not have quite the same size advertiser base as other networks, such as AdSense. With fewer ads to draw from, there may be less chance for variation and relevance.

One advantage of CrispAds is the ease of payouts. Whereas AdSense requires $100 to accrue in your account before sending payment, CrispAds will send any amount over $5 via PayPal.

BlogAds, Flat Rates, and Hives

One of the older networks, BlogAds, now operates on an invite-only system. This site is designed for blogs with focused content, accordingly requiring bloggers to describe their work by choosing no more than two categories (for example, “gossip” and “politics”). Advertisers targeting niche markets use these categories in combination with traffic statistics to choose particular blogs to sponsor.

Instead of CPC or CPM, BlogAds users charge for a fixed duration of time displaying ads from a particular marketer. Starting at a minimum of $10, a company can choose to buy a week, two weeks, a month, or three months worth of time for its text, image, or Flash ad (which go for more, but bloggers can choose to not offer).

You are supposed to have an invitation from another BlogAds user in order to sign up, but you can also send them an email describing your blog and expressing interest. If they see a demand for a site like yours, they will contact you. Just signing up/applying does not guarantee you an account, however. The ideal candidate has a sharp focus on one topic or community and a sizable readership (all of those listed currently claim at least 3,000 ad impressions/week).

While the number of categories you can select is limited, you may be a part of as many “hives” as you want. Hives are groups of similarly-themed blogs that cluster to provide a convenient way for advertisers to market to many sites at once instead of picking one at a time. They also exist to group around features that BlogAds categories may not cover (like “bargain ads” or “Oregon progressives”). Hives are run by individual users who may accept or deny applications for inclusion.

One of BlogAds’s major draws is its high payout rate. For every $10 an advertiser pays, the blogger collects 70%, whoever invited/referred the blogger gets 5%, if the ad was purchased through a hive then the hive administrator receives 5%, and BlogAds keeps the rest.

While not available to smaller outfits, BlogAds is an appealing choice both for its lucrative rates and, perhaps most notably, its simplicity.

Pheedo and RSS

Pheedo specializes in RSS text ads. Noticeably missing from several of the larger ad networks is the ability to display ads inside feeds. Pheedo capitalized on the resulting demand by using technology to place ads at the end of posts, appearing at intervals you define (i.e. after every post or every three posts). While focusing on RSS ads, Pheedo will also give you code to place on your regular blog pages as well. The on-site ads are less flexible than many others, but may be worth considering for the sake of ad consistency if you like Pheedo for RSS ads.

As opposed to using a crawler or keywords to select relevant ads, Pheedo allows you to browse and select exactly the ads you want to display. This process allows for greater precision, but it is time-consuming and assumes that you have a certain amount of marketing savvy and knowledge about your readers.

Pheedo pays out 65% of the revenue they make from advertisers.

Vibrant Media, IntelliTxt, and Inline Popovers

IntelliTxt, an advertising service designed by Vibrant Media, takes further the idea of keywords. Instead of using keywords you submit to gauge which ads should be displayed, it scans the text on your page for keywords advertisers have chosen. When it finds one, it double-underlines it and scripts it so that when a reader’s cursor moves over it, an advertisement (text, banner, video, or interactive) springs up.

While “inline popover” ads such as these may succeed in achieving a higher click-through-rate (the percentage of readers who click an ad), they are commonly seen as a nuisance not far removed from their pariah cousins, the popup ads. Some, like Engadget’s Ryan Block, declare them to be even worse because “at least [popups] can quickly be cleared out with an alt-F4 / Apple-W.”

One problem with these that you’ve probably experienced is encountered when trying to scroll up or down on a page that uses inline popovers. The ads that spring up due to inadvertent mouse rollovers block the text you want to read and sometimes even play distracting sound or video.

Most importantly, inline popovers blur the lines between advertising and content, therefore putting your journalistic integrity in jeopardy. Your readers should be able to expect that the words they’re reading have not been commercially influenced. People who aren’t vetted web surfers may not even consider double-underlined links as somehow separate from your own regularly-underlined hypertext. This could lead readers to feel deceived, thus resulting in decreased ad clicks and, most importantly, decreased readership. Perception of your site could further be hurt by people’s memories of unwanted inline linking being associated with (and abused by) adware/malware.

Yahoo Publisher Network and Adobe Acrobat

YPN, currently (still) in “beta,” offers contextual text ads very similar to those from AdSense. It also, like Pheedo, enables you to include ads in your RSS feeds. YPN is one of the larger ad networks and deserves attention, but the feature that makes it most unique right now is its recently announced integration with Acrobat PDF files. This, of course, allows you to offer good-looking PDF documents without losing ad revenue for content viewed offline.

AdBrite

AdBrite caters more to regular websites than blogs, but is compatible with both. In addition to text, banner, and inline popover ads, AdBrite offers some more unique (though often aggressive) formats including InVideo, BritePic, and full page interstitial ads.

InVideo and BritePic are services that place ads on the top of your displayed media files. Additionally, a menu is accessible on the bottom of each that allows for social media features. For example, the “share” button acts much like that found on YouTube videos. When someone displays the video on another web site, it links back to your page and all clicks on advertisements displayed are credited to you regardless of where it is posted.

Interstitial ads—or “intermissions” as AdBrite calls them—are full-page URL hijacks that display an ad from another site before redirecting back to your site. You have probably seen this type of ad in use on many popular sites like the New York Times or The Internet Movie Database. Typically it will work such that when a user attempts to access your web site (or clicks a link on your web page to another section of the site), a full-page advertisement takes over their browser with a small-print link to “skip this ad” or “continue to [your site's name]” before the content they asked for appears. These ads are considered intrusive enough that many pop-up blockers have incorporated tools to filter them out and automatically jump to your destination page.

AdBrite doesn’t supply you with ads from a database, but rather facilitates transactions between you and advertisers. You tell them where on your page ads will go and, generally, how much you want for that real estate. Advertisers can then browse the different options and may choose your space for text or banner ads depending on which you are accepting. In most instances, the rates are determined by auction. Advertisers bid on your space and you are paid one cent more than the second highest bid. They also provide you with a “your ad here” image that gives potential advertisers a link right on your web site through which they can buy ad space.

You set the rates for all ads. Generally, the more intrusive the ad, the more it pays you. Accordingly, interstitial ads allow you to earn the most revenue. Bidding for interstitial ad space starts at one cent per view, as compared to banner ads, for which the bidding starts at ten cents per thousand displayed.

PRIVATE SPONSORS

While ad networks are by far the easiest way to make money from ads on your web site, the biggest profit margins come with private sponsors. This is the more traditional method of obtaining advertisers—getting them yourself. You might go about doing this by taking the statistics for your web site (site traffic, reader demographics, content, rankings on sites like Technorati and Alexa, etc.) to various companies, bringing along a detailed map of where you want the ads to go. By cutting out the ad network middleman, you have a lot more work to do, but you keep 100% of the revenue. Unfortunately, this is only going to be a viable option for those who already have a substantial readership. Companies with advertising budgets rarely give time to small sites. If you are just starting out or do not have a lot of traffic, an ad network is probably a better bet for you.

WARNINGS

Click Fraud

You may be tempted to click your own ads, launch a program to click them automatically, have your friends click the ads, or otherwise manipulate the advertising system to make more money. This is called “click fraud,” and should definitely not be attempted. When an ad is clicked by a person with no intention to buy the advertiser’s product, it still costs the advertiser money. Advertisers in turn become angry with the ad networks (or you, if you’re sponsored directly) and may take legal action for damages. Lane’s Gift and Collectibles, for example, sued Google for failing to filter out click fraud (see the final order about the settlement here). If you’re suspected of click fraud as a publisher, all of the ad networks have provisions to terminate your account and you may face legal action (Google successfully sued AdSense publisher Auction Experts, Inc for $75,000 in click fraud damages in 2003).

Integrity

Too much or inappropriate advertising is one of the biggest turn-offs on the web. Think about how likely you are to take seriously any site that bombards you with popups, tries to install mystery software, presents ads as if they were unbiased content, or showcases the ads more than the content. While a lot of people know that ads are what make great free content possible, they have less and less tolerance for pushy or intrusive tactics. They also know that if they don’t like what they see at one site, there are probably many alternatives.

It can be difficult to present your ads in such a way that they are profitable while at the same time maintaining or increasing your reader base and looking professional. You may need to work by trial and error, but striking a balance is possible.

SUGGESTIONS

• Don’t overdo it. Too many ads can make your look sloppy—or worse, greedy.

• Don’t use inline popover ads if you can help it. The threat to reader trust is too great.

• Don’t try to deceive or trick your readers into clicking or viewing an ad. Without their trust, your site is nothing.

• Don’t feel like ad space is your only means for revenue. Affiliate programs, merchandising, and donations are all worthwhile alternatives or supplements.

• Do experiment with placement and format of ads to strike a balance of profitability and aesthetics. If you cannot find this balance, err on the side of aesthetics and usability.

• Do think about what your readers would most like to see ads for. This usually results in the same answer to the question of “what are my readers most likely to click on?”

• Do remember that ads in RSS feeds, PDF files, videos, and images are pretty uncommon. Think about the extent to which you want to look different in that regard.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

 (This is the seventh in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site.   To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

Call it a “tip jar” or whatever you like, but citizen journalists should not rule out getting donations as part of a business model. This generally involves a form on the main page (or every page) of your web site that allows readers to donate however much they think your journalistic efforts are worth.

Other than requesting that readers send checks through the mail, use of PayPal’s “donate now” buttons is perhaps the easiest way to allow users to give.  For example, Ed Cone uses this by way of a subtle “help a brother out” donation button on his blog’s sidebar.  Because of its simplicity and ubiquity on the internet, readers may be more inclined to donate if you make it easy for them with a PayPal form. Money you receive from donations accrues in your online PayPal account, from which you can request a check or have it transferred to your bank account.  For the service, PayPal charges a transaction fee of $0.30 plus 2.9% of the amount received.

On his blog Among the Trees, Environmentalist Eric Baerren uses not just a PayPal donation button but also a banner from Blog Patron.  Blog Patron is similar to PayPal in that it’s a money transferring service, but instead of the range of services PayPal offers, Blog Patron’s primary feature is the “recurring donation.”  The site manages people’s donating, allowing for contributors to set up a repeating schedule of donations.  For those who give to one or more organizations on a regular basis, this is a useful organizational tool.  More importantly, by providing people with the option to repeatedly donate, it has the potential to bring in a steadier revenue stream using the same logic as a subscription system (for more information on subscriptions, see this earlier post). Blog Patron charges a fee schedule that tends to be a little higher than PayPal’s: $0.25 per transaction plus a flat 4.5% transaction fee.  Also, Blog Patron only accepts credit cards (no bank transfers or transfer of funds already in your Blog Patron account).

For those with a specific monetary goal in mind (or an arbitrary estimate of how much you’d like to raise), ChipIn provides a free widget that displays the cliché fundraising thermometer along with information about where the money goes, number of contributors, percentage to goal, and the contribution deadline, if applicable.  It also allows you to enable supporters of your cause to display your widget and raise money for you.  Sam Mayfield and the Center for Media and Democracy have a blog that covers their trip to Ghana to help the area’s first and only community access television station.  They display the ChipIn widget prominently to raise money for travel and equipment costs.  ChipIn doesn’t actually collect the money, but rather redirects users to PayPal for payment (standard PayPal transaction fees still apply).

Earning revenue through donations can be difficult, especially if you fail to consider carefully the presentation of the solicitation. On one hand, aggressive or sloppy solicitations can look unprofessional or greedy.  On the other, if the link is too subtle, people might not notice it or think it important. Remember that your number one priority is to gain and keep readers. If you provide a quality service, you may be rewarded.  But if you pester, panhandle, or ask for donations while at the same time bombarding users with advertisements, you may turn many people off.

Creativity in your presentation goes a long way. Michael Fortin has a tip jar in his blog’s right sidebar with the text “Enjoy this blog? Buy me a coffee or a drink. May I suggest a venti Starbucks dark roast coffee for $3? Or choose any amount you wish to tip” and a link to donate via PayPal. This friendly, no-pressure approach to soliciting donations may prove valuable to many.

One of the most successful and unique applications of the donation system can be seen at OhMyNews, a South Korean news site with the motto “Every Citizen is a Reporter” (note: the link is to the English version).  With the vast majority of its content coming from citizen journalists, OhMyNews reimburses writers of articles that meet certain standards.  On top of this reimbursement, contributors are able to receive tips from appreciative readers.  According to Don Lee of the LA Times (courtesy of Global Tech Forum), “Kim Young-oak, a Harvard-trained classics scholar, holds the record: More than $30,000 poured in after he wrote an article questioning the logic and wisdom of moving the nation’s capital outside Seoul.”  To keep the site going, OhMyNews keeps a portion of the donations.  In a recent talk at UC Berkeley (as covered by The Tyee), founder Oh Yeon-ho mentions that content-related income accounts for 20% of the company’s revenue. 

Another possible approach is to ask for donations instead of displaying ads and make it clear that donations are what makes it possible for the website to run ad-free. Whether you use this method or not, describing exactly why you ask people to give and explaining where the money goes—in other words, transparency—is key for building trust, which is necessary in matters of money.

Suggestions

• Do explain to readers exactly why you ask for donations and where their money will go whether hosting fees, travel expenses, morning coffee, or even reimbursement for time spent.

• Do be careful not to appear greedy by asking for donations amidst an assault of other advertising.

• Do be as creative as possible in your methods.  As seen in the example of OhMyNews, a donation system can even add value to the reader.

• Don’t pester your readers by hounding them for donations or trying to make them feel bad for not donating.

 

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

(This is the sixth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

Once you have a decent readership or a clever idea, you may want to start merchandising. When successful, selling merchandise on your site not only brings in revenue, but also can be valuable marketing for the site.

One simple way is to take your logo or design idea to a local shop that makes t-shirts. You can make a batch of 20 or so, take a picture, and display the picture alongside a PayPal button on your web site. Once a reader sends payment through PayPal, you package and ship the shirt to them. Creative Commons, for example, raises some funds via a store on its site that displays available t-shirts, stickers, and buttons. Interested supporters are taken to a form to enter their shipping/contact information, then directed to PayPal for payment.

Beyond PayPal, you can create an eBay, Amazon, or Yahoo store, making your merchandise searchable and opening it up to a much larger audience. While PayPal charges a fee per transaction (link to fee schedule), a “Basic” eBay store starts at $15.95/month (plus traditional eBay transaction fees), Amazon WebStores are $59.99/month, and a “Starter” Yahoo store goes for $39.95/month. While they provide many features that may be great for those looking to jump into e-commerce (for example, the ability to set sales tax rates by area [owners are still responsible for paying their own taxes, if applicable…more on this in a later post]), these store-hosting services are probably more than any citizen journalist would need. Nevertheless, you can read some pretty decent reviews and comparisons of these services here, here, and here.

While making and shipping products oneself is theoretically simple, it can be time-consuming in practice and requires at least a small up-front investment. For many site operators, an online branding service may be more attractive. Sites such as CafePress, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, and PrintFection allow you to put the graphic or text of your choice on any one of hundreds of different products like t-shirts, posters, hats, mugs, and key chains. As everything produced by these companies is made-to-order, there are no overhead or set-up costs unless you choose one of their premium services, which usually isn’t necessary. They will also take care of credit card processing, shipping, and customer service. CyberJournalist, a blog about how technology is changing media, has a CafePress store that’s a good example of the variety enabled by this sort of production.

All of these mass customization sites are pretty easy to set up: upload your designs, type in your text, select the products you want to sell, tweak the look of your presentation, and integrate it with your site. The biggest technical challenge for you will be the formatting of your graphics to look how you want them to look on the product (dark-colored clothing, for example, present some challenges). It’s easier to do these things now than it was in the past; most, if not all, of these sites offer some good tutorials and templates.

CafePress is the ten-ton gorilla of custom merchandising. It offers one of the wider assortments of products, but in the free “basic shop” only one version of each product is allowed. An example of a basic shop is the one set up by phpthrowdown, celebrating a recent events by selling a commemorative “Yeah, I got what it takes” t-shirt. For $6.95/month you can sign up for a “premium shop,” allowing you unlimited product designs and better shop customization/organization. While other sites offer somewhat similar services without charging, CafePress does have an advantage in traffic. All of these sites have a marketplace in which people search for designs. If your product could stand alone—if it’s not just a logo that people who don’t frequent your site won’t recognize or care about—it could very well bring in revenue (and perhaps readers) via people’s search results in the CafePress marketplace. A good example of a citizen media site using CafePress is iBrattleboro. The local Brattleboro, Vermont, journalism site runs a shop offering a wide range of products with clever little descriptions like that from a logoed infant creeper: “Babies love Brattleboro, too. Crawl around in style!”

Zazzle has no monthly fee for any of its services, but it’s somewhat more difficult to integrate with your site and you have no way to remove its giant corporate header from your presence on its site. Instead of stores, it hosts “galleries” and provides you with a “Flash Panel” for placement on your page. The Flash Panel is a bright, sometimes gaudy, scrolling display of your products that links readers to your gallery. One of the best features of Zazzle is its product API, which allows your readers to do some of the customization. Perhaps best illustrated by the Zazzle-supplied example, License Plate Shirts, the API allows you to create a template with placeholders for dynamic text or images. Zazzle also boasts the friendliest return policy (the “Zazzle promise”). While this doesn’t appear to directly affect you, the seller, remember that experiences your readers have with your products (and the companies that you have service them) can hurt you.

Spreadshirt, founded in Germany but with a growing US service, looks like a solid option for those with a European presence. Its services and product offerings function very similarly to CafePress, offering good integration with your web site and a tiered account system. As an example, the online windsurfers’ community iWindsurf has a store just offering a couple t-shirts. Merchandising may be particularly successful for community sites like this since members are likely to associate the site with their identity and thus more likely to want to brand themselves as such. For $10/month, a premium membership allows for removal of all Spreadshirt ads, better branding, and special sales tools like “limited time offers.” One of the major drawbacks is in the Spreadshirt payment system, which mails checks only on a quarterly basis, much less frequently than the rest.

PrintFection is the youngest of these four custom merchandisers, but it offers a lot. For starters, it’s selling a basic white t-shirt with a custom design for $2. The company also has advanced integration and design customization features, the ability to remove PrintFection ads, no limit on product offerings, and no account status that requires payment for an upgrade. When thinking about how the products could reflect back on you, the issue of quality probably comes to mind. A frequent suggestion in merchandising forums and comparisons is to buy a comparable t-shirt or other product from each company and judge for yourself. If not for the fact that it offers a lot of features at no cost, PrintFection may be a good place to start simply because they’ll sell you your first shirt for $2.

The major drawback to using one of these custom merchandisers versus the traditional route of producing and selling products yourself is the payout. These services all use a base price per product that you can then mark up as much as you want. A basic white t-shirt will generally have a base price of about $13. If you sell such a t-shirt on your blog for $15, you will be paid $2.

On top of revenue from sales, almost all of these sites offer some kind of affiliate program through which you can earn an additional percentage, often even when referring people to your own store (for more information on affiliate programs, see this earlier post).

For a more varied comparison of these sites, the T-Shirt Forums is a pretty active message board dedicated to such topics.

The world of mass customization is broader than just clothing and doodads. Some authors are turning to sites like Lulu.com for publishing books and other media. Lulu makes it easy to create not just a book, but handouts, brochures, DVDs, and CDs. This opens the possibility to make paper copies of a series of news stories you’ve written, CDs for your podcasts, DVDs for your videocasts or event footage, or a booklet made up of words taken from your blog archive. These services work much the same way as the merchandisers above in that you determine your profit margin above a base price and have several options for customization. Mia Garlick of Creative Commons conducted an interview with Stephen Fraser of Lulu in 2006, which covers much of how the site works as well as licensing options.

Another merchandising service that may come in handy for journalists who use photography in their work is DigiBug, a company that allows you to sell prints through your site. Using DigiBug API, sites like the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge are able to sell photos in various print options and even create separate price lists for different events or categories.

While doing all of the production, marketing, packaging, and shipping may yield a better profit margin, sites like CafePress give you an easy way to make some extra revenue. Even when the branding service takes a large portion of the profits, $2-$6 is not such a bad return on something that is pure promotion for your site.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

MinnPost.com has launched — and it’ll be a useful addition to the journalism scene in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. As far as I can tell, however, it has nearly zero to do with edge-in community journalism.

Still, an interesting experiment and one to watch.

(This is the fifth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

Not every business model includes the direct exchange of money. A blog or other website can have an economic impact in more indirect ways, such as branding and promotion. While such sites can use affiliate links, banner ads and other means to raise money, they’re much more about playing a supportive role in boosting the career of the author.

Let’s be clear first what we’re not talking about: pure marketing or sales sites. Almost any business’s web site that exists solely to sell a product or service fits into this category.

One group that has learned to use blogs and other conversational media effectively is lawyers, who’ve even created a clever word for the genre: blawgs. The term, which, by most accounts, was coined by Bag and Baggage’s Denise Howell, refers to any blog about law (usually by a lawyer). While the majority of “blawggers” do so in some part for enjoyment, a great professional benefit comes with a well-executed blawg. An ideal situation would have a lawyer so proficient at running her blawg that it was popular enough to directly attract clients. Indeed, Howell says her blog reinforces her expertise, and that people can easily find her via search engines; the result is significant business derived from the brand she’s created in part via the blog.

As Eric Turkewitz explains in his own blawg: “If someone published an article in a legal journal, will that gross them any money? No. Except as an indirect form of marketing as they become known in their field for what they do. Blogging is conceptually no different.” The benefit of blawgging comes from building a personal brand. Such can be seen in examples like MassLawBlog, GrokLaw, and PrawfsBlawg.

The last of those, PrawfsBlawg, is a blawg written by professors of law. Blogging by academics, once widely regarded as professionally dangerous (see Ivan Tribble’s 2005 article “Bloggers Need Not Apply”), has trended towards widespread use as a showcase for ideas and research, not to mention an avenue for getting one’s name out. Just as getting one’s name out could mean more clients for a lawyer, it could mean more (or higher-profile) consulting gigs for an academic. One of the earliest and best threads on the subject is from CrookedTimber in a post that asked academics if and why they write or read blogs. Some of the common themes from the numerous answers involved the idea of personal branding, but other reasons included writing practice, class preparation, sharing and getting feedback on research, and using their blog as a platform to discuss or start work on a publication of some kind.

Eric Gordon, Assistant Professor of New Media at Emerson College and author of PlaceofSocialMedia, says:

While [books and academic journals] are still essential for career building, increasingly, scholars are looking to blogs to assess “what’s going on.” Beyond the assumed affordances of blogging - immediate, networked, participatory - it has taken on a new function of stake-claiming. For instance, I’m working on a book about location-based media and situated computing. If I were to simply write it and wait for it to “hit the stands,” it wouldn’t be until mid-2009 that I could join the conversation. Through my blog, I am able to join the conversation right now by opening up the research process to readers. This is good for two reasons: 1) I can join the conversation, and 2) I can begin building a reputation based on a work-in-progress. With the rapidity in which technologies change, this rapid-prototyping of academic ideas has become essential to intellectual and cultural life. [Disclosure: Eric Gordon is one of my professors and advisors at Emerson.]

Writers of all kinds are using blogs to promote, research, and develop their books. Several examples of this can be found in the comments of this thread on Global Neighbourhoods, which is, appropriately, a blog started in 2004 to promote a book that is still regularly updated today.

Professionals and academics are not the only people using blogs to enhance their careers. AlmostDailyBlog is run by an animator who, since making the switch to computer graphics, found he missed drawing and so created a blog to post doodles. As it became more popular, he started to sell prints and eventually put out a book of them—all stemming primarily from his blog and networking with other animation bloggers.

Business blogs have a similar purpose. Technology companies such as Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have launched a variety of blogs, including a popular CEO blog by Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz. Smaller enterprises benefit, too. ClearAdmit runs a very detailed blog as part of its site dedicated to providing information about MBA schools, programs, and the admissions process. These all serve to build the ClearAdmit name and reputation so that, when the time comes, interested parties may think of ClearAdmit for its off-line consulting services and events.

A word of caution, however: Just as a great blog can build personal brand, a rarely updated smattering of nonsensical or thoughtless entries or a page that looks like it came direct from a public relations department can be more of a drawback than aid. The best blogs have human voices and/or relentlessly useful information; they don’t sound corporate or like a sales or PR pitch. Also, with the rate at which blogs are increasingly aggregated, archived, and referenced on the web, an unflattering moment has the potential to haunt you.

For anybody passionate about what they do and with enough time to commit, blogging is a way to not only develop your own knowledge and skills, but also to share them, get feedback, and (most importantly in the context of this series of postings) to build a personal or business brand. If your only goal is to market yourself in the short-term, you may want to consider other avenues.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

(This is the fourth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

UPDATED 10/24/07

As web-based media becomes more popular, some news and information sites find they can charge for a subscription or membership as a source of revenue.

The benefits of selling subscriptions are many, but the reason magazines and newspapers have been using the model for decades is because it takes some of the unpredictability out of the business — and can help with cash flow with advance payments. It also creates a sort of attachment or loyalty to the content or brand in the customer’s head, perhaps leading to renewals and word-of-mouth publicity.

The magazine and newspaper models don’t translate exactly to internet outfits. Also, what works for online sites of mass media institutions doesn’t necessarily translate to citizen media sites.

Sites with subscription systems are rare, and citizen media sites even rarer. Making content “premium” puts both a monetary and psychological barrier between people and your words. That is to say, some people might not have the money, but the vast majority just simply won’t pay because they’re trained to be cynical about anything on the internet asking for money – after all, they may reason, what can’t be found for free with a Google search? Also, one of the greatest things about citizen media is the connection between publisher and reader.

Another more practical concern is that implementing a membership or subscription structure can involve some sophisticated coding and can generally work only if you have your own web site (blog-hosting sites like Blogger make it nearly impossible). While companies like Membergate and Interlogy offer services to organize and maintain subscription-based web sites for you, they have several drawbacks in terms of design, customization, and cost (Membergate’s software packages range from $4,000 to $30,000, all of which include their design). If you would like an idea of the design feel, this page has a list of sites running Membergate software, and this one from Interlogy’s site has a list of client “case studies.” Some useful tools to help you with programming and design will be covered later in this series of postings.

Still, it can be done. These types of membership/subscription structures aren’t necessarily all-or-nothing pay-or-leave systems. In fact, as we’ll discuss, you can charge for a subscription to content that’s simply delivered to you in a more aesthetically pleasing way.

There are several possible membership structures. Here are some of the most common:

• Full Membership/Subscription

Content on these sites is not available to anybody without a paid membership. Full membership news sites, be they big media or citizen, are pretty uncommon. They are often used by highly specialized trade journals like those available at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ website. The AAIA offers a membership to their organization that gets you discounted rates on subscriptions to the various journals they publish both online and in print.

This structure is especially difficult for citizen journalists who don’t have any built-in recognition/value like would an online presence of a larger organization. Given the failure rate of even well known companies’ ventures, chances are extremely low that a new enterprise will be able to successfully implement (or launch with) a full subscription system.

• Partial Access

Partial access means that certain content is only available to subscribers. One example of a partial access site is TheStreet.com. The Wall Street financial web site has a great deal of valuable information available for free, but charges for special “subscription services” featuring a greater level of attention to particular aspects of investing. The idea is that people will visit the site for the free information, get a great benefit from what they read, and want even more (“the REALLY good stuff”).

Along these same lines, real estate site Inman News provides a great deal of frequently-updated free content. It also offers a subscription service if users would like access to other features (special reports, reprint rights, search functionality, etc.).

Another example, though not journalistic, is the online rating and dating site HotOrNot. Startup-Review.com published a case study late last year detailing how, even though the buzz is long gone, the pair of grad students who started HotOrNot were very successful in adding a layer of pay content to their web site while maintaining the popular rating system. Essentially, their site offered a fun (arguably) picture-rating program that attracted millions of visitors. Shortly thereafter, they introduced functionality that allowed users to be indirectly contacted through a “do you want to meet me” bar above their pictures. Mutual “yes” clicks could agree to exchange contact information for a fee. Millions of non-paying visitors continued to frequent the site, simply playing with the ratings and not using the dating service.

While a great success story, HotOrNot obviously shares little in common with citizen journalism web sites. The reason for its inclusion as an example here is just to demonstrate how well creatively designed premium material can work with a solid no-charge foundation.

Be careful not to misinterpret “partial” access for “illusory” access. If you don’t provide enough good free content to attract regular non-paying visitors or if too much content is fragmented between the premium and regular service levels (i.e. a site that gives away the headline, but charges for the article), you’re really running a full membership system.

• Early Edition

Content under this system is made available to subscribers before presented to the public. Two examples of this are the videocasts Red vs Blue and Diggnation.  Both of these sites allow users to pay for an upgraded account that allows them access to some or all episodes before everybody else.

A few months ago, The New York Times’ web site combined Partial Access with an Early Edition style of membership with their TimesSelect program. In addition to members-only features, subscribers to NYTimes.com were given the opportunity to read selected articles from Sunday’s New York Times before they were even published in the newspaper.

The fact that the Times has abandoned this strategy and is now promoting a different premium service that focuses on ease of reading just goes to show how fluid and constantly changing these matters are. Even the New York Times is struggling to find the best way to monetize their online content.

• Ad-Free Version

Another idea is to set up a separate page layout for members, which presents content without any advertisements. People don’t like ads, but if the content is good enough they can be seen as a necessary evil. If you make it clear that the reason ads are displayed is to offset your costs in both time and money, most people will understand.

This model is perhaps the least likely to chase away potential readers. If the price is reasonable and membership is not compulsory in order to view the site’s content, some people may pay to avoid advertisements, while others (hopefully) will tolerate the ads and continue visiting your site.

This model seemed to be a bit more popular a year or two ago. The fact of the matter is we’re now trained to tune out most ads on the web. We know roughly where they will be and can instantly spot edges between ads and content; and if we happen upon a site that puts its advertisements in an unconventional place (i.e. in the middle of the screen) or if the lines distinguishing ads from content isn’t clear, we feel put off or uncomfortable. That being said, ad-free membership systems seem like a nice option to offer, but don’t expect people to line up for it.

Also, it’s a bad idea increase the intrusiveness, frequency, or amount of your advertising to make a paid account more appealing. People have ever-decreasing tolerance for ad-infested websites and tend to simply move on.

MacRumors makes use of this strategy by charging a fee for an ad-free front page ($25/year at time of writing). Slashdot has a more complex system that allows you to buy 1,000 ad-free pages for $5. You are allowed to customize these ad-free pages to remove ads from comments, articles, the main page, or all pages depending on how quickly you mind going through your 1,000.

Suggestions

• Don’t increase advertising to funnel people towards an ad-free membership.

• Do seriously question an implementation of a full subscription (and to a lesser extent, partial access) format. While a move for an existing site from free to paid content is somewhat notorious for destroying readership, a successful start-up with a full subscription format is practically unheard of without a reputable brand or core group of interested parties going into it.

• Consider other revenue models, too. This is the only structure that puts your costs directly on the reader and, aside from possibly the ad-free and early edition formats, the only one that will definitely result in fewer of them.

• Weigh what content you decide to charge for and whether you’re okay with trading many would-be readers for revenue.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

(This is the third in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

Affiliate programs involve you marketing the products or services of another website in some way. Perhaps the most well-known example of this is Amazon’s Associate Program, which allows you to point your readers to Amazon’s website (via a deep link) to buy certain products. If there is a sale, you get a small percentage (Amazon pays up to 10%).

The Amazon products you advertise can be an arbitrary offering your readers might like or products relevant to a blog posting (a CD you mention, a certain laptop, a book on a topic you are writing about, etc.). EBay offers a similar type of direct relationship. It allows you to place relevant auction ads on your site and offers monetary incentives based on both a percentage of eBay’s revenue when your reader has the winning bid, and the number of new eBay users that sign up after clicking through your site’s ad.

For those who are somewhat less savvy with web programming or who want a little more design customization from their auction ads, there are even “sub-affiliates” who facilitate or enhance the affiliate experience—for a cut of the proceeds, of course. One example of such a “sub-affiliate” is the aptly-named AuctionAds.

In addition to direct relationships and “sub-affiliates”, there are also affiliate networks that operate similarly to ad networks (more on those later) in that they act as mediators between you and hundreds of advertisers. LinkShare is one such affiliate network that allows you to pick the company whose products or services you will promote (including many well-known brands). The selected company will then review your site for content compatibility and, if accepted, you will start displaying their ads. Unlike most advertisements, those from affiliate networks do not pay you for each time a person sees or clicks the ad—like the Amazon or eBay link they must follow through to “action” by buying or signing up for something. When this occurs, a commission is sent from the advertiser to LinkShare, who keeps a portion for its networking service before paying the rest to you. Other examples of similarly-functioning affiliate networks are Commission Junction and ClickBank.

While a banner ad of random products for sale can be as ignorable as any other imposed ad, these customizable connections to generally-trusted ecommerce names can provide value to your reader if used correctly. What determines “correctness” may depend heavily on your content and design.

Why content matters: People who are interested enough in a topic to be reading about it will generally be the most likely to want to purchase a related product or service. For a site like DVD Talk, linking to Amazon may provide a convenient service when presented alongside a given review. The same DVD link to Amazon may not, however, be as appropriate coming from a political blog. Instead, Bill Clinton’s book might be more applicable.

Why design matters: If the ads and “buy me” buttons pepper every page or if the content seems to be secondary to the marketing—or worse, inspired by or inseparable from the marketing—people may feel untrusting or put off. On the other hand, if the ad or button is relevant and apparent but unobtrusive, it’s more of a service (“by the way, if you want it…”). You can even explain to the reader that their purchase will help your site.

Best practices

• Do tailor the offerings to your content.
• Do experiment with different designs and product promotions.
• Don’t be pushy or let the ads take focus away from your content.
• Don’t feel like you need a constant overarching theme to your affiliate ads. You might want to offer the same things all the time, something different for every posting, or you might want to use these programs only once in a while when you have something that you truly use or endorse.

While these systems are used well all the time, I would really appreciate some examples from all of you of truly outstanding utilization of affiliate programs to be used as reference.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

(This is the second in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

The recent rise of citizen journalism owes a lot to the lowering cost and rising accessibility of the internet and online technologies. We’re at the point where many citizen journalist websites are increasingly difficult to distinguish from mainstream media sites in terms of presentation and quality of content.

While it may be free and require little effort to create a Blogger account and editorialize about topics that interest you, developing and maintaining a citizen journalism site like OhMyNews, SlashDot, Gotham Gazette, or H2o Town takes significant resources (whether it be money, time, or people). The question then becomes how to either make money or at least recoup the costs you incur.

There are several sources of revenue and business models available. While the best option for you may be the ubiquitous Google AdSense bar of text advertisements, there are many other options to be considered that may better suit your site and your readers. Maybe, for instance, you’d prefer to link your readers to Amazon, where they can pick up that spectacular documentary you were raving about or maybe your style is more conducive to offering cutely-branded t-shirts.

Before you decide on a particular model, take some time to consider what effects and implications each will bring. While a more detailed review and comparison will come after the individual discussions, there appear to be a few common factors to keep in mind. These core ethical and/or strategic themes will probably come as no surprise:

Trust – Long-term success depends on the trust of your readers, which doesn’t only relate to factual accuracy, honesty, and reliability. If your readers love your content but feel tricked, annoyed, or put off in some way by blatant money-making attempts, they might think twice about returning. Beyond simply getting people to return, trust also breeds referrals and links and therefore exponentially-increasing traffic. Trust is paramount.

Value – The best kind of revenue model is one that adds value to the reader’s experience. It provides an avenue for more information, a convenient link to buy something relevant, or perhaps a welcome deal on a product or service that the reader has interest in.

Creativity – Nobody wants to feel like a target market or a potential ad click. Anybody who has used the web to some extent knows how we subconsciously tune out certain types of marketing. Numerous studies have been done on optimizing advertisement space in terms of where people are most likely to look or click, but there’s something to be said for less-scientific creativity.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)