Dana Blankenhorn

Making Money Online

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 48 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Making money online, for myself and for publishers, has literally been my life's work.

I started in the spring of 1985, over a quarter of a century ago. In the years since I have found many business models try and fail, many compensation models try and fail. But I've also found something that works, and I want to offer it to you now.

It's a modified pay-per-view structure, very similar to what I've seen work at ZDNet and (more recently) Seeking Alpha, which I began writing for this June. Setting it up is as simple as being able to measure page views, assign a value to those page views, and link page counts to the names of authors.

Seeking Alpha's model is very simple, a penny per page view. If you get 1,000 people to read your “premium” content, that's $10. Average 150,000 page views per month, as many writers with something to say can, and it's $1,500 – not a serious salary but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Building Online Communities Means Scaling Intimacy

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 33 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The man who now runs the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, as surely as the Koch and Murdoch billions run their wing of the GOP, got his start 8 years ago with a simple memo.

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (right) had been hired by Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's campaign manager, to consult on what to do with all this great traffic and interest their campaign blog was generating. Along with Jerome Armstrong, he suggested that the blog format be scrapped in favor of a Community Management System (CMS) that could, in my words, “scale the intimacy.”

The suggestion was ignored. Dean lost as a host of leaderless activists descended upon Iowa in orange hats, and tried to stampede 100,000 Iowa Democrats with their enthusiasm. Moulitsas and Armstrong, by contrast, took their own advice. Armstrong's site became MyDD. Moulitsas built out his own blog, which went by his nickname. Kos.

DailyKos is now the heart of a small publishing empire with an outsized reach. Markos is, at heart, an entrepreneur, not a politician, and he has built on business-like lines, expanding into other areas of interest like religion (Street Prophets) and sports (SB Nation), while maintaining firm control over his technology platform and expenses.

He could be a very rich man. But he prefers to be the William F. Buckley of his generation to the Rupert Murdoch. Instead of sailing he bicycles. And instead of inviting activists to his estate at Sharon, he holds a yearly convention called Netroots Nation that had 2,500 people at it this summer.

Kos' story is important because there are a lot of business, professional and political organizations who have suddenly looked upon his idea of blogging, and online communities, with new eyes. They have seen that the key to political influence lies in activating people to do your work for you. Lacking, like Kos, the money of a Koch or a Murdoch, they think, well maybe we could start a blog.

You could. I blog. I think I do it well. But I've been at it, or something like it, for almost 50 years, since the day my dad got me a typewriter and a record called “How to Learn to Type in an Hour” for Christmas, 1963. I was too young to know you couldn't learn to type in an hour from a record, and within a very short time I was at 60 wpm. I haven't slowed down.

Your mileage will vary.

The Cloud Backlash will FAIL

The big story of this month is the backlash against the cloud.

It began with Amazon's downtime, and has continued with the revelation that Amazon itself was the source of the hack attack that took down Sony. This has caused nervous nellies like Murray Jennex of San Diego State to suggest cloud computing be ignored by the enterprise.

But the problem here isn't the cloud. The problem is identity. A Bloomberg story describes the Amazon sign-up procedure:

Signing up to the service requires a name, e-mail address, password, phone number, billing address and credit card information. Users get an automated call from Amazon and are asked to dial in a four-digit verification code to complete the registration process.

Note what's missing? Proof that you are who you say you are. A hacker can use a stolen identity. He doesn't have to prove he is who he is.

Curation and Open Source

The hot new word for 2011 is curation. (This particular curator is a video game monster.)

Curation has been around for years, but it has mostly been done by people. Boingboing  is mainly about curation. In its heyday Slashdot was a great curation site. The Huffington Post is mainly about curation, and its big-bucks acquisition by AOL is what got everyone's attention on the space.

The term originates in the art world, where the selection and presentation of good stuff (as opposed to just old stuff) is a vital economic function. In the digital world  the true meaning isn't really given. We're talking, in the end, of becoming the source, the place people go to in order to find out what's going on.

Google News is considered a curation site, but it's mainly an illustration of how far curation has to go, in a software sense. Google News divides stories into headings, some created by the site, some by the user. (I use the heading open source regularly.) Google News also defines what gets treated seriously. The New York Times is considered serious. This site is not.

But that's an arbitrary decision, and when The New York Times paywall comes down  we have a problem. Links to it are already disappearing, just as they've become rarer to the Murdoch papers in England that created paywalls.

Google has to do that because customers who run into links demanding payment don't just get mad at the paywall, but at Google for leading them to a dead end. And this is one reason why the Times' paywall is doomed.

Why Today is the Golden Age of Open Source

I'm heading to California next month for the Open Source Think Tank.

I suspect I will meet many executives there concerned about the future of their business:

• What with Apple and Microsoft making big gains in the mobile space, pushing open source out of their app stores.
• What with Oracle taking over big open source projects like OpenOffice, mySQL, and Java, then squeezing the life of them for short-term gain.

The message I have for them is quite different.

Today is the Golden Age of open source.

Hidden Risks of Open Source

Open source is computing the way it used to be.

That is, you have choices. Basic choices. You make a choice that seems right, but later it can seem wrong, and meanwhile you've gone down a long road where your work seems wasted.

Over at Datamation, Serdar Yegulalp offers an interesting take on how this relates to Movable Type, the software this blog is written on.

I don't want to get into his accusations against this software or the decisions made by the people managing it. He does that well enough. But there is a broader point to be made.

Going with any software platform is a major commitment. It's a bigger commitment with open source because, in order to get the most value from it, you have to become part of a community, participating through bug reports, beta-testing, and (if you are capable) by writing enhancements.

Every piece of software you choose in open source is a platform. In the same way that going with Oracle or Microsoft or Apple means choosing a platform. As your time with a platform goes up, your investment does, too, and leaving the platform becomes increasingly expensive. This is lock-in, and proprietary vendors are great at profiting from it.

The Struggle to Get Paid Online

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 8 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Always be wary of any business where the first word is submission.

It was a joke when Tony Bove fed me the line, nearly 30 years ago, but we both knew its truth. For writers, the struggle has always been trying to get paid.

Benjamin Franklin used words to build a printing business. Mark Twain made most of his money from “monologues” – he invented stand-up. Charles Dickens gave away American rights to his novel “Martin Chuzzlewit”  to protest our theft of his other work. Copyright – the economic power of ideas – has mainly been respected as a corporate right, not the personal right the Founders intended it to be.

When I began my career, back in the late 1970s, some teachers at Northwestern University's Medill School  were foolish enough to call what I was doing a profession. Others were wiser. They called it what it is, a trade, and abjured the title “professor” or “doctor” because they believed no journalist had earned it.

Like nearly all journalism schools Medill does not carry the name of a journalist. Joe Medill was a publisher. Joseph Pulizer (Columbia) was a publisher. Walter Annenberg (USC) was a publisher. Journalists, as heroes, were always portrayed as lower middle-class, too happy in their work and lives to care about money-grubbing. In plays like “The Front Page”  they were always wage slaves, and anyone who sought to be anything else was “getting out” and “going into the real world.” (This made the writer a perfect role for Rosalind Russell in the film version.)

So my life, from its start, was always a fantasy. The best advice I ever got, from the late George Heitz, in my first Medill lecture, was “if you want to have a good living find a spouse with a good job.” I practically ran back to our apartment to tell my lovely bride-to-be she was going to be a career girl. (The best break of my life is she both married me and took the advice.)

 

Citizen Moulitsas

News that AOL is paying $315 million for the Huffington Post forces me to write again about one of my favorite people in this business, Markos Moulitsas.

And his biggest screwup ever.

It goes by the name DK4.

By saying this I don't mean to criticize the new site itself. It's lovely. Nor do I wish to criticize the many decisions Markos has made, both in front of and behind the screen, in order to make the new software happen.

The problem is that it's kept his whole attention.

Markos is an entrepreneur, but in this case he has been betrayed by his nature. He is, by nature, a techie. There is nothing wrong with being a techie, if technology is your business.

But technology is not Markos' business. Content is his business.

Egypt: Trained Minds Demand Democracy

You can't build a modern society without trained minds.

What we have long called the “developing” or “underdeveloped” world isn't as dumb as it appears to be. As Hans Rosling notes in this BBC documentary, most of the world has gone from being “poor and sick” in 1810 to “rich and wealthy” today.

What made the difference comes down to one word. Education. People learn how to create more value, and over time find that the real store of value isn't in their muscles but in their trained minds.

It's a change the Internet accelerates, by bringing a firehose of new ideas and learning to everyone it touches. And so we come to Egypt.

A Solution to Your Imaging Problems

I caused big problems, for myself and my employer, back in April when I used an image, with credit, but without permission on one of my employer's blogs.

I have always been more interested in solving problems than causing them, however. Despite my poking at critics, I knew both I and Chris Buzelli are in the copyright business, and believed technology could create some common ground.

The good news, I've found, is that a Web permission engine exists. The folks at Picscout called to tell me they've been in this business for almost a year, and best of all they have a competitor, LicenseScout, which has been in the business a while longer. (Competition is always good. It helps a market grow.) LicenseScout sees its mission broadly -- including all kinds of content -- while PicScout is focused on images. 

The difference between PicScout and a regular photo agency is that everything's automated, and can be integrated with browsers and search engines. For image owners, it integrates with a service called PhotoShelter, aimed at increasing sales of images for re-use. (The picture above leads to this sales page.)

Amy Love, PicScout's  vice president of marketing since September, was kind enough to lead me through it.  The heart of the offer is ImageIRC, which indexes images through digital fingerprints, maintains a metadata registry on the images, and offers an API through which buyers and sellers can connect.

The result is a suite of software-driven services:

• ImageExchange, which identifies images with metadata and throws up pricing information, then handles transactions. (There are currently versions for Firefox and Explorer.)
• ImageTracker, which lets owners of images see who has accessed them, again by following the metadata, and
• ImageQualification, which helps site owners know the status of their images as soon as they are posted. 

What has me most excited is PicApp, a spin-off that not only allows access to license-free thumbnails, but includes meta data aimed at helping sites hosting the images get more traffic. They're pitching it as a free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service for sites and a tracking system for image owners. There's a plug-in for Wordpress and a Firefox plug-in.

Most of what I have described is a service for owners and users of stock photography, and in fact big rights owners like Corbis and Getty Images are already playing. But Amy said any artist can register to have their art catalogued, free, because once art goes online it becomes an image by default. Artists can either do this directly or through the agents they prefer to use.

There's money here for someone. Reuters signed up with PicApp last month and traffic has been growing smartly as word has gotten around that friction in this market can be reduced.

I like a happy ending, don't you?