Last year, I received an e-mail from a woman who was starting a rehab center for the stars in Hawaii. She wanted a blog on her website to increase her google rank and asked me to write a blog for her. I wasn't interested in writing rehab posts, but I thought I might start a business hooking up all my semi-employed publishing and writer friends with businesses that needed content.
That lead to much scheming and planning and research, along with two friends of mine. We quickly discovered that there was no profit in good content. There's plenty of profit in bad, typo ridden content that is mass produced by people who aren't that proficient in the English language. One of these content farms was located in the Philippeans.
Businesses use these content farms to produce lots of words, infused with special magic words that increase its google rank. System Engine Optimization in other words. Google swears that it has some hot new algorithm that can sniff out SEO, but I imagine that won't take much for the content farms to psyche out the formula and adjust.
AOL made Arianna Huffington very rich a couple of weeks ago, darling. Huffington's genius was to hire a staff of people to do what Matt Drudge does. She steals content from other sources. She uses the smartest SEO types. She gets her celebrity friends to write vanity posts. She pumped a ton of money out of venture capitalists. Still, it's not entirely clear that her operation is all that profitable.
The New York Times is going to withdraw behind a paywall soon, like the Wall Street Journal. It hasn't made enough money from ads on its website to justify offering all that content for free. It will certainly lose a lot of readers, but those readers were free loaders anyway. Maybe a handful will start paying for the content.
Except for a handful of random bloggers, nobody is getting rich from the ads on the sidebar. It's beer money.
So, where's the money? The money is with Charlie Sheen. In two days, he gathered 1,000,000 followers on Twitter. A local company helped him set up his account and showed him how to use picture add-ons. That company works with celebrities, like Kim Kardashian, who advertise products like lipstick and perfume on twitter. Kardashian makes $10,000 per tweet.
There's got to be some way to make smart content profitable on the Internet. Right now the only money is found on celebrity tweets, recycled content, barely literate content, and porn.
(disclaimer: writing on an iPad in Starbucks.)
Apt. 11d 
“The New York Times is going to withdraw behind a paywall soon, like the Wall Street Journal.”
The death spiral begins. Speaking of which, does anybody run a media dead pool?
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I don’t know if that will hurt the NYT. If, as they did last time, you can get access to the web version everyday for the price of a Sunday subscription, I’d probably take the Sunday subscription again. I was always a little bit sorry that we don’t have a Sunday paper anymore. You can now read the web edition in the bathroom (thank you, Mr. Jobs), but it isn’t exactly the same.
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The “problem” with making smart content profitable is only a problem for people who want to profit off of smart content. For those of us who enjoy reading smart content, there is not a problem at all.
The New York Times is awesome. I used to subscribe. I still love it. But — for what I want from a paper — it’s just not more valuable to me than getting Politico for free. And the Reuters and AP stuff. And good bloggers. I used to pay regular subscription rate, and now I don’t even read in online for free now.
Apparently, there are tons of people (like you!) who are willing to give us thousands of interesting, though-provoking words for free every week. With so much goodness almost as good as, equal to (and sometimes better than) the NYT for free, it’s simply not worth it.
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“Apparently, there are tons of people (like you!) who are willing to give us thousands of interesting, though-provoking words for free every week. With so much goodness almost as good as, equal to (and sometimes better than) the NYT for free, it’s simply not worth it.”
I’m seeing folks like Laura deciding that the work they do isn’t worth the non-tangibles they get in reward all the time these days. Many of my regular blog sites have stopped regularly updating their blogs. Laura’s sticking with us, right now. But, I wouldn’t count on it forever (and, I’m not finding replacements these days).
I have not found Politico and other free sources an adequate substitute for the NY Times (and, of course, if they’re re-aggregating the news, there won’t be news left any more, if the paid sources disappear).
I think consumers (like me and Ragtime) are wrong if we believe that the free information is going to remain “good as or equal to” without anyone paying for it.
So, I subscribe to the NY Times. But, I don’t think that’s going to be enough to sustain the model the NY Times is built on (one where classified ads were a major revenue source, for example, and people relied on the physical newspaper to read). I don’t subscribe to the LA Times, Wash Post, or Atlantic, which I also read. I think the “media” is wrong if they’re thinking they can sustain the old models. But I think consumers are wrong if they think that they’ll just get everything for “free.”
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Amy P, if the NYT and other newspapers go down hill that’s A VERY, VERY BAD THING. It’s not something to be celebrated and those right wing bloggers who are gleeful about the downturn of traditional media are morons. There is absolutely no substitute for having a full time journalist at the White House and state capital covering events. If they go away, all you’ll get are people like me spouting off opinions in Starbucks on the way to the gym or Charlie Sheen crap. That’s it. And when media goes away, the jackals will come out to play.
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“And when media goes away, the jackals will come out to play. ”
The LA Times broke the Bell scandal, with straight up old-fashioned reporting. They’re running stories on contracting corruption with the building of community colleges in LA county. In defense of blogs, I do think the steadfast work of a volunteer blogger played a significant role in uncovering financial malfeasance in Seattle Public schools. But, the work needed to break into the main stream press to have a real effect.
And, as an alternative we have some great local neighborhood blogs. They cover a lot of what local newspapers used to (high school games & little league & local human interest stories). But, they fund themselves on a sponsorship model that blurs the line between advertising and news (sponsorship means you get a news story, too). And, they’re not going to do any gut-work reporting to uncover financial scandals.
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PS: I need to put in another plug for Adam Canfield of the Slash, a children’s book about newspapers and investigative journalism. The book is written by an ex-NY Times reporter, and celebrates what newspapers can do.
(Oh, and the lawyers, remember them. They keep the jackals in bay, too.)
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Me: “The death spiral begins. Speaking of which, does anybody run a media dead pool?”
Laura: “Amy P, if the NYT and other newspapers go down hill that’s A VERY, VERY BAD THING. It’s not something to be celebrated and those right wing bloggers who are gleeful about the downturn of traditional media are morons.”
That wasn’t glee, just a factual observation–heaven knows we’ve all been making fun of the NYT for years now, although to be fair, mainly the style section.
There will always be White House reporters. Even after a nuclear apocalypse there’d be mutant pool reporters writing up the president’s day golfing in his bunker and remarks on iodine shortages. That said, the White House press corps is an anachronism. You could achieve the same effect as a news conference by just taking in questions over the internet.
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In my California girl days, I was good friends with a woman who was involved in the start-up phase of … let’s say a name that was once well known but is now no longer with us. One day she said to me, “The only people who will ever make money from all this are the pornographers.” More than a decade after this conversation, my friend has yet to be proven wrong.
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And even the pornographers aren’t doing anywhere near as well as they once did, thanks to the rise (you’ll pardon the word) or amateurs and what the industry apparently calls “the tubes” — all of the porn knockoffs of YouTube. Now I’m regretting not bookmarking the article that laid (sorry) out what amateurs and aggregators were doing to what had been a lucrative corner of the Internet.
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Business is hard.
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Doug — this is the article you are thinking of, I think. From the late and always underrated Portfolio. http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lifestyle/culture-inc/arts/2007/10/15/YouPorn-Vivid-Entertainment-Profile/
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Try this statement on to get a sense of things:
“Except for a handful of successful novelists, hardly any fiction writers make a full living from sales of their published work”.
This would be, more or less, an accurate representation of the market in pre-Internet fiction, whether we were talking genre fiction or mainstream fiction.
The pyramidal structure of most culture industries predates the Internet. The major difference at the moment is:
a) people that the editors and owners of the old culture industries would have judged unprofitable have been able to operate near the top of the pyramid
b) some of the less realistic digerati expected that everyone would be able to make money in producing culture
c) some of the old culture industries got kicked in the nuts by digital distribution and their only answer so far has been to lawyer up and/or sit in their rocking chairs on the porch and complain about the young’uns
But it’s a) that is kind of interesting. I think you’re a bit dismissive here of the “handful of random bloggers”, at any rate. There are people who’ve figured out how to blog as a loss-leader (e.g., to establish themselves for some other professional or publishing opportunity) and there are people who make something between beer money and megamillions.
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“Except for a handful of successful novelists, hardly any fiction writers make a full living from sales of their published work”.
Except that most nonfiction writers, taking a generously wide definition that would include journalists, used to make a living from publishing their writings. And that seems closer to the point here.
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I wish that you were right, Tim.
Political bloggers. There is absolutely no money in political blogging. The only political bloggers who are making any money were swallowed up by magazines and newspapers several years ago. It’s like 10 people. Advertisers won’t go near political content with a ten foot pole.
Mommybloggers. Again it’s like 10 people who are making a real income through their content. And it’s very hard to do that anymore because blog readers have gone elsewhere.
The people who have leveraged the Internet well are already well known. Like Charlie Sheen or Ariana.
Meanwhile traditional journalists and book editors, who are smart, good folks, are unemployed. The Internet has killed the old system without replacing it with a viable and worthy alternative.
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oh boy, that last comment was like the nail on the coffin, wasn’t it? there’s no reading & commenting here without going through the whole comment section, which is great, of course.
All I was going to say after I read was “this is very true and very depressing” but not I’m even more depressed. The world as we know or knew it is ending, isn’t it? Because of the new technologies. and all those dystopian science fiction novels seem to be very relevant (and scarier) right now. The only problem is that we don’t know where this whole thing is taking us… 😦
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And netbots are getting smarter and smarter. (Was that you, MH, or a real one?)
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The deadpan delivery was genuine MH. Thanks for the link, Helaine, I think the article I’m recalling is a more recent version of those event, but the general thrust is the same.
I, too, miss Portfolio (though a bit abstractly, as print copies seldom made it overseas). I’d like to think there’s a market for a magazine like Portfolio, and I wonder whether they didn’t spend too much money on things that weren’t putting-ink-on-paper or pixels-on-screens. Is Monocle selling in the States? Because it seems to have cracked the smart content nut in an interesting way.
Consolidation and corporatization of book publishing were well underway when I was a bookseller in the early ’90s. Was there a boom in between that I missed? Or are the present difficulties a continuation of a long-term trend?
The money to be made in writing is very seldom in things that are great fun to do, or in things seen by the public. I’ve been quoted $2/word by NY corporate writers for things that I wanted to commission, and when you can get that it’s a very tidy afternoon’s work. At the other end, the Science Fiction Writers of America consider 9¢/word to be a pro rate, which is true only if you think pro means something other than making a living. At which point, Inigo Montoya.
I’ve read that many newspapers are/were nicely profitable, just not profitable enough to service the debt that their various owners had larded them up with. Owners are blaming the internet for their own business mistakes.
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First, I think Doug’s point is important: the collapse of journalism is a much more complicated thing than just “content is now free!” Much the same thing is true of the music industry: the business model it had adopted just prior to the rise of Napster was a big part of the reason why Napster succeeded.
With journalism, it wasn’t just some bad business decisions in the 90s that mattered. It was also that American journalists had degraded the value of their own product by becoming increasingly captive to powerful governmental and corporate interests. This also happened well before the web and well before Fox News. What the Internet did was less to provide free content and more to shine a much brighter light on the compromised state of journalistic practice.
There is a kind of technological determinism in these tales of woe that obscures a lot of the story and has become an important alibi for the people who made a living off of the old culture industries.
That said, the Internet has also made a big difference, and it definitely recasts sharply the question of “what is valuable enough to be worth paying for?” Good cultural criticism & good editorial commentary, for example? There are a zillion ‘amateurs’ who are as worth reading as any ‘paid professional’ in a newspaper. In fact, many of the amateurs have made clear just how ghastly the op-ed columnists and cultural critics of many newspapers and magazines really are. This is a good thing. I cannot find it in me to feel sorrow if there will be no Maureen Dowds making a good living from column writing from this point forward.
This holds true across a pretty wide span of content: much photography, much punditry, and so on. Which is not to say that there is no money here: what in many cases has happened is that people are getting beer money for something which is their passion. We’ve shifted from a tournament economy with a very few winners relative to the number of contestants to a flatter economy of small supplemental income. There are some very bad things about that shift but some good things too.
What content creators are going to need is to figure out what they have to sell that is really worth paying for, and a payment model that doesn’t involve having to go to PayPal every time you want to make a voluntary micropayment. In the case of journalism, this is going to mean high-value reportage that delivers what the readers need and want first, second and last, not what their government source wants them to leak or what some spin doctor wants them to push.
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Good discussion, BTW.
I am very surprised that you guys are pushing back on my claims that the Internet has made content unprofitable. It’s been very documented that advertisers won’t pay much for online ads. I am a member of the blogger advertising network. I get a monthly newsletter from them. They are having a very hard time getting advertisements for blogs. Most of the ads that run on my blog are public service notices that pay zippo.
I do think that the Internet has made journalists more accountable, has increased the number of voices, has given people new access to information, lots of good things. What it hasn’t done is provide a living wage to online writers. While getting to the op- Ed page of the NYT was always a tournament sport, there were many, many people making a living wage as editors of publishing companies or reporters for regional papers. They are all out of work right now.
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Just curious. I’ve been blogging for a long time and know lots of smart bloggers. I don’t know anyone who is making supplemental income by blogging, other than the ones that are now blogging for traditional magazines or newspapers. Who’s making money from this?
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“…and a payment model that doesn’t involve having to go to PayPal every time you want to make a voluntary micropayment.”
Very true. It will be interesting to see how the Amazon portal model (where you buy your usual stuff via your favorites) is going to work. Somebody recently bought an ipad (or similar gewgaw) through my husband’s amateur astronomy blog where he talks about making various gadgets. I don’t know how much that actually netted us, but it was very gratifying. He used to be making up to $1,000 a month in royalties on purely hobby programming for Palm, back in Palm’s heyday. The per-download royalty was pretty small ($7?) but thanks to the internet, the volume was big enough to create a very nice income stream for a while.
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This strikes me as relevant: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/magazine/27FOB-Medium-t.html.
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“They are having a very hard time getting advertisements for blogs. Most of the ads that run on my blog are public service notices that pay zippo.”
I don’t know about you guys, but I have very high sales resistance when browsing on the internet. If I’m reading, I’m reading, I’m not shopping, and I recoil with horror if I realize I’ve accidentally clicked onto an advertisement, because that usually means falling down an internet rabbit hole where it may be difficult to click out of. Even if I’m looking for that particular product, I might be reluctant to click on an ad on any sort of website.
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Timothy Burke already said what I was going to say, but just to emphasize that I think he’s right: the way that the Internet managed to devalue MSM in my eyes — not just in some moral sense, but literally in what I’d pay for it — wasn’t so much by providing competing content as providing continually takedowns of its work. Sure, you read it ten years ago and you suspect that a piece is slanted, or that they’re not even mentioning a major player in the story, but what could you do? Now, not only can you find other people’s takedowns of MSM, but it’s trivial to figure out these things on my own. You can go to that major player’s blog and see them stating that so-and-so never even contacted them for a quote. If they list a source as a “non-partisan” organization, I can figure out in 30 seconds who it was funded by and see the full range of positions it has staked out in the past. If a reporter is hostile to the Tea Party, I can do a quick search of her work and see that every piece she’s ever written on them has been hostile. Etc.
I would gladly pay for most everything I browse, but I am lazy, lazy, lazy. I can’t stand to keep track of 50 different meager subscription fees — what I’m not paying in dollars I’m paying in mental space/organization effort, which I value more. My dream system is a plug in for my brower with a little on/off switch and a numeric field. When I’m on, I pay per minute to the sites that I’m reading whatever number I’ve put in the field. When it’s off, it’s off.
The only thing I use now for rewarding content providers is the Amazon affiliates portal. I think I’ve “given” upwards of $40 to Ann Althouse in the past two weeks without buying anything I wasn’t going to anyway. It only works because Amazon has already made it trivially easy for me to buy there, and because she has started to remind us about the portal. (Not only am I lazy, I’m forgetful.)
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“The only thing I use now for rewarding content providers is the Amazon affiliates portal.”
I should do that. I am pretty good about buying people’s books when they come out.
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The spam above wasn’t me.
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I’m intrigued by Timothy Burke’s claim that, in the field of opinion journalism at least, a tournament model (i.e., one Anthony Lewis and millions of people around water coolers) has been replaced by a flatter structure. But Laura implies that it isn’t true. So it seems there is an empirical question: do people like Profs. Volokh, Althouse, Bainbridge et al. make “beer money”? Or not? (I would define “beer money” as being in three figures per month.)
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I just came across the following screaming headline: “This 26-Year-Old Is Making Millions Cutting Out Traditional Publishers With Amazon Kindle.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/amanda-hocking-2011-2
The article looks suspiciously like a paid ad for Kindle, but it is interesting. Amanda Hocking gets .99 to 3.99 per download and she sells 100,000 copies a month, with Amazon getting 30% of the proceeds. Doug’s science fiction writers should take note, because that’s got to be a better deal than they’re getting now.
Even in the print world, there are opportunities. My amateur local historian relatives have self-published a couple of coffee table books (with the help of a local graphic designer and printers in China), did a revised version of a classic local guidebook and distribute some books by other people. One of the relatives owns a store and is able to sell his book there, but as the books got going, they’ve picked up a couple of distributors. The higher profile brought by the books has helped my other relative to get more and better gigs at the local college. My relatives have sold thousands and thousands of copies of their books, clearing $10 a piece on each one that they sell themselves.
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In the world of tv fandom, I know people who’ve made supplemental income from running newsy web sites.
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I tried to get into amateur history by editing Wikipedia pages. All that happened is I got in an electronic shouting matching with an idiot.
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I am very surprised that you guys are pushing back on my claims that the Internet has made content unprofitable. It’s been very documented that advertisers won’t pay much for online ads.
Two points.
1. The news content was always unprofitable, but it was subsidized by the classified ads, which have now migrated to Craigslist. I used to read the paper for the baseball scores and weather, now MLB.com and weather.com(not newspapers) gives them to me for free. Now, the only thing we need from a newspaper is news. The internet’s main impact on newspaper profits wasn’t really from making news free — it was by unbundling and stripping away all of the non-news things that newspapers used to offer to make money.
2. Advertisers are paying TONS for online ads — they just get diluted among more tons of websites, so no one outside the top few hundred websites are getting a big piece of the pie. You can make money on ads if you happen to have a father as funny as the “Sh*t My Dad Says” guy.
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“Or not? (I would define “beer money” as being in three figures per month.)”
And, I would have thought beer money was about $20/ month.
I have this theory that coyness about money (“3 figures”, which ranges from 100 to 999, and are really different sums of money, for me at least) allows re-sellers/middle-men/whatever we want to call them to capture more of the economic value of content.
My group of middlemen is large, ranging from google to youtube to amazon (in the form of their reviews) to smugmug (and their photo forums).
Tim Burke mentions the tournament getting flatter, but what I think it’s done is got more uneven. There use to be middling providers of content (local newspapers, middle range books, local photographers. . .) who are driven down to the flatter, non-living wage while fewer win the tournament. It’s an even more selective tournament with no middle. I think that’s what’s happening in everything these days and that’s part of the reason why we worry so much about our kids.
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“. My relatives have sold thousands and thousands of copies of their books, clearing $10 a piece on each one that they sell themselves. ”
I think the success you’re describing shows part of what folks who trained as experts are seeing as the brave new world. There’s a method of training (and I am a product) where one gains expertise in a topic and in doing so hopes to slot into a pre-engineered position. Academics, law, medicine, and old business models (you get hired as a junior executive at IBM and work your way through the ranks) are all examples. All of these models had paths to follow.
What you’re describing is a risky entrepreneurship model (and one with only moderate payoff. 10 a book at 1000’s of books is still only 10-30K, not a lot for the person who was looking at a lifetime of 200-300K earnings). I think that is the new world, and one of the reasons why we have to think so hard about training our kids in marketing, entrpreneurship, risk-taking (and not just proving that they can learn content and pre-determined problem solving skills).
(so speaks a new Girl Scout cookie selling convert — I’ve learned so much more than I knew about how small businesses must work and the concerns that face them).
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And, I would have thought beer money was about $20/ month.
That’s only a case of the cheap stuff.
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10 a book at 1000’s of books is still only 10-30K, not a lot for the person who was looking at a lifetime of 200-300K earnings).
I was looking at writing a booklet on some piece of software that I had spent a couple of weeks just bashing my head against the wall to get going and a couple of months to master. Since somebody else already paid me for the effort of learning this stuff, making $10,000 would a have been nice check for just putting it down on paper. I stopped when I realized it was too specialized for me to hope to sell 1,000 copies even if I could reach everybody who used this software.
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Don’t get me started on meager royalties on book sales.
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“What you’re describing is a risky entrepreneurship model (and one with only moderate payoff. 10 a book at 1000’s of books is still only 10-30K, not a lot for the person who was looking at a lifetime of 200-300K earnings).”
The risk is huge. Imagine ordering 5,000 copies of your book for something like $10 a book, and then needing to sell 5,000 books for $20 apiece, which is what they managed to do with the print run for just one book. Just the storage demands are huge. Their ace in the hole is that they started with excellent vertical integration in the form of a pre-existing store in which to place the books prominently and sell them hard. They placed the books in other stores in the area, in museums, on a ferry, and eventually got two or three (I think) distributors to cover the more geographically distant areas (i.e., a person to stroll into the stores periodically and say, it looks like you’ve run out of Fantastic Local Book–can I get you another case from my car?). Also, as they discovered, a new book creates a fresh market for your old book, and if you are distributing a number of different books, it helps the sales numbers for all of the books.
Previously, a talented local author had produced a book that was a genuine classic in our area. The author’s family self-published a huge number of the books some years ago, but they didn’t have a proper outlet or distribution set-up, so they were left with hundreds of copies of their excellent book. Some years later, my relatives were able to pick up that book as part of their distribution chain. Self-publishing is very risky, especially if you don’t have a strong marketing plan. My relatives have all done this at a stone age level (except for a small presence on Amazon), but a big blogger could replicate their vertical integration online, without a store.
Amy’s relative A (I’ve mentioned him more specifically before) has a small cattle ranch, has timber growing all the time, has a store, adjuncts a bit for the community college, is starting a new tourist venture now, and (as you can understand) is having a hard time finding leisure to write his next book (his wife is also involved in a number of these ventures). Amy’s relative B (who I’ve also mentioned more specifically) has a number of rental properties, is a college adjunct, boards students in her home, and just took on an administrative job with the college. She’s had two recent offers to edit books, but is having trouble finding time to work on her next book. Her public appearances for the book and her sales have greatly improved her stature at her college, where she had previously been living la vida adjunct, with all that that implies.
As my relative A would explain, any one of these ventures is small potatoes. But take five or six of them together, and you can really rock and roll. Also, the risk is actually much smaller than if either Relative A or Relative B had all of their eggs in one employment basket.
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MH,
Go for it!
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For anybody planning on trying this stuff at home, a quick note–my impression is that the book business that I have described has been run on a cash basis. Neither relative has mentioned borrowing any money for the venture. This is important because if there is anything sadder than having 5,000 books in your garage that you can’t sell, it’s having 5,000 books in your garage that you can’t sell and $50,000 of credit card debt running at 30%.
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My sense is that most of the people making money on the internet are selling informational products about how to make money on the internet.
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I looked up Amanda Hocking on Amazon. I’ve seen the covers of her books, as I browse the free and very cheap Kindle novels when I can’t make it to the library. What can I say? Everyone needs a hobby.
First, there’s a great deal of terrible writing out there. I am very grateful Amazon allows customers to sample Kindle works first. Some of the terrible writers have publishers. Some of the self-published works are not bad. I feel much better paying $1 for a self-published work, knowing the author gets most of it, than I would paying $25, knowing the author gets very little of it. As a reader, I don’t care if a book has a publisher or not. In the electronic medium, much of the publisher’s value disappears.
Everyone should have an editor, though. I think, in time, e-publishing houses will emerge. For a small cut of the proceeds (NOT an advance), a freelance editor and her graphic artist friend will whip your book into shape. The text will be pruned and made appealing to readers, and a suitable cover image (which looks good in 1″ x 1″) will be created. Perhaps there’ll be a rights division to handle derivative rights, such as movies.
Writers can get to the readers without binding themselves to publishers. Publishers won’t be able to demand the lion’s share of the proceeds, because the cost of publishing a book consists only of producing the book in the first place. Selling a million copies is no more expensive than selling 10.
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One further point about whether journalism in the past was a tournament model. First, local papers are actually doing better in some markets than major urban dailies. That’s what’s really taken on the chin: the Philadelphia Inquirers, the Los Angeles Timeses. And those indeed did support some well-paying middle-class jobs. But it’s precisely those papers where you have to look carefully at some terrible pre-Internet missteps they made to understand why some of them were so thoroughly incapable of adapting to the Internet.
Genuinely local papers for the most part never paid much of a wage. That was my wife’s first job out of college, just before we got married, and I can tell you that she was making just about the minimum wage. There were two local or regional papers where she was. Each of them supported one writing job that paid decently: the editor’s job. The reporting jobs were done by recent graduates building credentials, much the same way that graduate students take adjunct jobs early on. This is precisely what you’d expect from a tournament economy: jobs that get done only because talented people are trying to make their first move up the pyramid.
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Fistful is actually reasonably well-trafficked and regarded, and it seems to attract prestige readers/linkers beyond the numbers involved. I don’t actually see the accounts, but my understanding is that the ads we get (almost all Google at this point, with periodic Blogads appearances) are enough to pay for hosting and all the other associated expense. Actually, a bit more comes in than goes out, so at any given time, I think there is about $1000 in the account. So it’s not quite beer money by y81 standards, but it’s at least a self-financing hobby.
On the other hand, I did the math about five years ago and figured it was never going to be more than lunch money, given the number of writers (and people active on the back-end side) and what our traffic looked like. And that’s sorta when blogs were big. Or at least newer. So I’ve always put it in my loss-leader category, or possibly writing warm-up category. On the other other hand, our most prolific writer (about an order of magnitude more than me, and I am #2) has become a moderately large player in economics debates (links from Krugman, etc.), which would have been next to impossible without the Internet (Englishman in Barcelona, no big institutional affiliation).
Julie, your publisher priced your book into the university library market and out of any other conceivable market. Are you freer to experiment with other modes now that you are tenured?
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That book got you tenure, Julie. That’s worth a lot.
The only way to make money from google ads is if someone clicks on the ad. It has nothing to do with traffic levels. I make about $4 a month on google ads, because my readers don’t click on the links. (Which is fine. Don’t click on them.) I make more from the BlogHer ads, but the number varies greatly. I get requests to put ads on my websites, which would pay more, but they would be really annoying for you all. And it would take a lot of time to manage all those ad accounts.
It’s a hobby. And that’s fine with me. I have fit blogging into the spare moments of the day and it has been enjoyable, even without the $$$. It has led to other opportunities, some of which are a little more profitable, but not by much.
(I have more on the newspaper business, Tim, but I have to scram. The big kid is panicking about missing the Pokemon event at the local mall. It’s the new culture’s Dungeons and Dragons.)
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I’ll probably be dealing with Pokemon later in the week. (I should rent myself out as a translator between geek kids and professional parents.)
One small thing on ad revenues: niche sites make more money from ads because the ads are more precisely targeted to the audience. (The most successful webcomics, for example). Also more targeted blogs and other content sites can often make small monies off of their own merchandising of some kind (t-shirts, etc.) and more off off of Amazon referrals for books and other stuff. Political sites are in many ways the worst off in the new media world because they don’t have any of those hooks.
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Well, I for one humbly resolve to direct more of my online shopping through Laura’s website.
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The Wall Street Journal has a long article today about the success of inexpensive self-published ebooks, entitled “Cheap E-Books Crowd Best-Sellers.”
Amazon.com Inc.’s top 50 digital best-seller list featured 15 books priced at $5 or less on Wednesday afternoon. Louisville businessman John Locke, for example, a part-time thriller writer whose signature series features a former CIA assassin, claimed seven of those titles, all priced at 99 cents.
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