Now Can We All Agree That The "High Quality Web Content" Experiment Has Failed? | Hacker News Reader

Now Can We All Agree That The "High Quality Web Content" Experiment Has Failed?

techcrunch.com

67 pointsColinWright59 comments

This hides a significant range of issues:

And, even on niche sites, the number of salable page impressions required to even break even is huge.

What it means to "break even" varies a lot, though. It seems that the article is focusing on large organizations with fairly large staff, a headquarters building, etc. Basically the "online magazine" style of organization.

A niche publication with two or three full-time journalists working out of their homes has a considerably different break-even point. For example, even before he was bought out by the NYT, Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com was more than breaking even, producing relatively low-volume (only a few articles a week), high-quality niche content.

You nailed the problem. It's absolutely possible, even easy, to break even with a blog when the revenue has to pay a salary or two. Much less so when you expect the blog or online magazine to pay for a whole staff of professionals. I don't remember who, but someone popular blogged about this very issue. (A Smart Bear? DHH?)

Anyone know of links to articles? I know it can be done, and I am thinking more for a comic than blog, but I just need about $3k/mo. I keep getting told I am delusional, that it can't be done. The evidence seems to be it can be done, I'm just not sure how.

Thanks.

From all I know about blogging, "easy" is quite an exaggeration unless you live in rural China. Blogging is a hugely unreliable source of income unless you're a blackhat SEO. It's strictly possible to make a decent living, but the odds are worse than almost any other profession. Your chance of making $10 per month is vastly higher than your odds of making even $1000 per month.

I'm looking at doing a webcomic. There are webcomics that support themselves. I do not know of details on exactly how they do that. I have looked at some webcomics that support the author and they have ads, sell t-shirts, take donations, etc. I would still be interested in seeing any articles with harder info that anyone might happen to know of.

Thanks for the feedback.

Zach Weiner of SMBC-Comics.com did an AMA on reddit and said that he makes a living off of, "Mostly ads, though t-shirts sales are a decent percentage as well" [1]. He lists the ad networks he uses in the AMA.

You could try asking him for more specifics; he seems pretty friendly and open.

The percentage breakdown varies, by comic. Something Positive was apparently making 35% of its income from ads [2]. Dominic Deegan's artist "makes most of his income selling self-published compilations of his webcomic at anime and comic conventions" [2]. I've also read of other artists—can't remember which, sorry—saying they make little through ads, and that most of their income came from merchandise sales.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9zaf3/i_draw_saturday_...

[2] http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/articles/2011/08/02/the_new_...

Awesome. Will check out the links.

I routinely make $3K/mo from my technical blogs, and I post infrequently, dedicating a couple of hours a week to them. I'm writing a book to teach people how to do the same (http://technicalblogging.com). I'm not saying that making $3K from blogging is easy, but it can definitely be done if you are serious about it. And if we are in the realm of full time writing done by a professional journalist (as per the original article) it's not that hard. You just need a solid idea, plan, and execution.

Thank you. I am looking at your blog, but I am not a technical person. I have other strengths. Still, it's a resource and I appreciate it.

What's your primary revenue stream?

Affiliate offers. Sponsorships. Ads. In that order.

Did you have preexisting contacts who were able to send affiliate offers and sponsorships in your direction, or did you have to build up your reputation from scratch when you started blogging?

If the latter, how did you do this? What mediums did you primarmily rely on (email, Facebook, Twitter) and how long did it take for you to hit pay dirt? I can imagine it's not easy getting the attention of good sponsors.

Was it one of those things were you were holding for a lucky break, or did you have a gradual buildup to success?

Don't fall in the "this makes money trap". Many niches can make you money, and you'll probably make more money with niches you have more experience with. You just need persistence.

One year (and a half) earlier, I was making almost nothing (per month) from the Internet. I was looking here and there for ways to make money, tried almost everything; and made nothing.

Then I decide to stick to one thing: Create and sell scripts (http://codecanyon.net). They give you 50% and script prices are between $5 and $15 (too low). But there were a few making money with it (cool money), so why can't I?

First months, it sucked. I was working hard to release my first and second products. I discovered that it was hard to build something. I made little money ($5-$30/month).

Only this month (1 year and a half later) that things started to move. I'm about to cash $500 even I'm not optimizing my landing pages, improving my rankings, doing some promotion... [It's good to mention that I made around $1500 doing custom development related to my scripts]

And now I'm a whole lot more optimistic: I believe I can make $2k-$3k from CodeCanyon alone, and I'll be doing it in the next couple of months (and not next year). I'll write about my experience, and how I made it once I setup my blog.

But back to the original point: Persistence. Stick to your plan.

Thanks. I have spent a lot of time thinking about it and I feel pretty confident that I know the niche I need to pursue and that it can and does make money for some people. Still, well-meaning folks sometimes try to discourage me and tell me "it's not a real business" and stuff like that. Actual figures are helpful. I do still have a day job, so I don't have to be some overnight success or something.

Take care. And best of luck with your endeavors.

I think the problem is a bit deeper than that: I think that journalism as a product rather than as advocacy has failed. There are hundreds of amazing free blogs out there, surviving on donations from people who appreciate their existence and/or sacrifices from people who think it's worth it to be heard. It's idea capitalism, and just because you have half a billion dollars to spend doesn't mean that people will want to read you any more than Bill from Baltimore.

A criticism of that point of view is often that good journalism needs the money to send journalists into the field. I think that point of view forgets what journalists are by function - a way to connect people to other people; a technical problem. If we can make sure that anyone who wants to be heard can speak somewhere where everyone who wants to hear them can, we're done. The network effects implied by that will probably shift through a lot of stable configurations in future, but none of them will be effected at all by simple distribution monopolies. Computer networking and mobile are changing everything.

Product journalism is even newer than commercial music, and will also end up in the history books as a relic of the 500 year period on history where the kinks in the mass reproduction and distribution of words, images, and sounds were being worked out. Then we move on to touch:)

I came in here to post "Wikileaks" as a rebuttal to OP, but I see you have it covered.

Oh, you mean like how Wikileaks shut itself down for a few weeks until its donation ransom was met?

I'm thinking more about easy to use low footprint FOSS blogging software, cheaper smaller processors, wireless, mesh networking, internationalization, distribution (a la bittorrent, group blogs, arXiv, Wikis, mirroring/CDNs, even '+1'ing, 'like'ing, 'digg'ing and 'stumbling'), encryption, computer translation, etc.

Wikileaks is a fascinating, unpredictable result of the technological amplification of voices going on at a lower level.

edit: I'd rather see a release of their submission engine (or a better one) and an easy way to distribute and hide content in a way that it can't be suppressed by angry governments than to have the entire idea of leaking tied to a single personality - not that I don't like Assange:)

I seriously believe that event-based journalism, for lack of a better term I can't think of (eg. sports, war, elections, etc) need real journalists on the ground in order to capture nuances that would get missed through virtual networks. My issue isn't about the quality or accuracy of the facts, but it's about curation of the facts to grab what matters and put it into an efficient and coherent story. Without the effort of quality journalists on the ground, I'm forced to try to curate all that myself, which is very time consuming, or rely on someone else who is equally removed from the subject to curate it for me, which is pretty much journalism anyway (except they might miss something they wouldn't if they were on the ground). I know few people with that much time. I certainly don't have it. :(

I see curation as the important problem right now. It's telling that the two web juggernauts right now are Google and Facebook - both basically curation companies through search and social networking.

Of course blogs don't have to be first-order (in fact, more of them need to be!) Most blogs (like most traditional media these days) are parasitic off of factual traditional reporting and academic papers, and other blogs go off into third-order meta-analysis.

If you need your narrative, there's somebody out there who wants to give it to you, we just have to figure out a way to make sure they can eat. Tax deductions for donations? Monthly billed funds to make sure that you can donate to sources that support the information you like to consume, but you may not have an awareness of?

Magazines like Slate want to believe two things:

1. Customers are unwilling to pay for high-quality content

2. It costs a lot to produce high-quality content.

Both are wrong. Many people would happily pay for high-quality content if they had to pay for it. Newspapers and magazines were hugely successful for years before the internet.

The real problem is #2. The internet has drastically lowered the barrier to entry for experts to publish content. Some of the best information I got on timely content, like Libya and Fukishima, were from blogs that I am unlikely to ever read again. People freely publish information every day about any subject you can imagine, and it keeps me quite satisfied.

I'm not unwilling to pay because I'm a stubborn scrooge, I'm unwilling to pay because I don't need to pay!

That said, there are plenty of content distributors who do well thanks to advertising. High-quality blogging can also server as a marketing tool, drawing potential consumers through viral and search marketing. The SEO industry (e.g. SEOmoz) produce very, very good content because it allows them to sell their tools!

Yeah, there are some absolutely terrific writers that I'm going to miss, but I'm really worse-off for it.

The internet has also lowered the barrier to finding high-quality, timely content. The best information I got regarding Libya and Fukishima, I found because it made the frontpage of Hacker News. I don't need to pay an information curator/gatekeeper because the upvotes are doing a pretty nice job of that already.

That said, when my income is a little more steady I expect to subscribe to Stratfor [0], because they offer a depth of content that's hard to find elsewhere. There are viable free alternatives to a lot of content on the web, but I haven't yet found one for that particular set of content.

[0] http://www.stratfor.com/ - strategic forecasting

This is a huge point that I think is often overlooked. Not only is it cheaper to write and distribute content to the entire world, it's also cheaper and easier to curate all that content and offer a page full of links to it. Newspapers/reporters also served that function as well - going through all the news of the day to find the most interesting and relevant things to report on.

I don't think newspapers and magazines are good examples. I'm given to understand that the consumer cost of a newspaper or magazine just barely covered materials and distribution. Advertising revenues covered every other expense. This changes your perception of what newpapers and magazines cover, at the very least.

Is it? I see lots of high quality content all over the web, particularly as blogging has picked up ever more people who are prominent in academic fields.

I think this should be re-titled "Can We All Agree That The Webmag Experiment Has Failed"?

Or possibly: "Let's All Agree That We Only Ever Read One or Two Articles Out of Most Magazines and Then Only Because We Were Stuck In Phoenix's Airport: To Be Perfectly Honest, We'd Never Read 'The Economist' or 'Harvard Business Review' Otherwise".

It's definitely mistitled, and a better title is sitting right there in the article:

the grand experiment in free online content has failed

Although ad-supported is not quite the same thing as free, so that is also subtly wrong.

I don't think this is correct, though. I think the free content model has actually been spectacularly successful. If you don't agree, I don't know what you've been reading for the last 20-odd years. It just hasn't replicated the form of old magazines.

That's why I think the webmag model has failed but also why I predicted that would happen back when dial-up ruled the country and there was lots of talk about webmags. They are a transitional product, not an endpoint. Blogs, however, are an endpoint and they've only become more important as people have adapted to how web content wants to work.

I read most of The Economist every week, although sometimes I do tend to skip a few articles in the Britain and Asia sections.

Agreed, Economist is very well made. I don't read it every week, but maybe every second - usually when I'm flying and have the time.

I used to read The Economist on a regular basis as well, along with FP and FA. But over time, it has lost a lot of its appeal, being steadily replaced by blogging academics and research papers for me. All those mags serve a sort of middle ground between research and journalism, my reading habits have moved to a more polarized model.

What interesting blogging academics do you read? Finding alternative sources online is still left to chance. I like reading the economist but it's not always available everywhere in my country (France).

I tried doing this for a while, but actually, it's hard work picking out blogs that do good writing, and thoughtful/incisive commentary.

Plus, when you find ones that do, they invariably only keep it up for a few months to a year because it's so much damn hard work to write and research well.

Much easier just to pluck an economist of the shelves at the bookstore than to continually refresh your rss feeds.

Meantime, it would be petty of me to name those of our rivals in the technology blogosphere who have embraced bullshit slideshows and top ten lists over their more costly cousins: actual fucking reporting.

It would be petty of me to name startup blogs that are sensationalist and link-baiting, but claim to be the real journalists in Silicon Valley.

when most consumers want to find something, they do a search. for that most go to google. they dont go to the economist. they dont go to HBR. as a result, if search is done right (quality results), free high quality web content will be found, read, shared, and read again. but there is no loyalty built there for the news source's brand. very few publications will get the status that the economist, wsj, or nytimes enjoy.

We used to be loyal to the Economist, WSJ, NYTimes to bring us quality content. Now, we are loyal to google.

So would search engines specializing on a certain field be the replacement? Search engines tweaking their code to a niche like astronomy, code (DuckDuckGo), fashion, classical music, etc.

Because Google has started to fail as a general search engine. Then again the abovementioned hypothetical search engines would be as much suspect to fail-by-SEO.

Anyway, niche search engines as a replacement to the traditional publishers. Just thinking aloud.

There was talk about this a while back, the need to go back to the curated list idea of the 1990s in order to reduce SEO spam.

It's funny that TechCrunch, a blog turned into a multimillion dollar acquisition from scratch, would assert this. Yet they say, "The fact that the Economist’s North American circulation has just reached its highest ever level tells us that the audience for quality content isn’t going away."

The bar for what used to pass as "quality" is much higher now. You need to bring your A-game to compete with "amateurs" including everyone from armchair pundits to tenured academics. Plus, people have to basically give up on following everything. Gone are the days when you can read a select number of publications to stay updated on the subjects of the day. That's why we're all hanging out here right? We want more filters.

When I make time to read The Economist from cover to cover, it's brilliant but after a while I'm drowning so I need to take a break on the shore and just skim headlines on the various aggregators.

I'd argue that it's not just high quality content but high quality filters that people want as well.

I think the lesson is that no one has implemented a micro-payment platform that is usable / widespread enough to make a go of it. Credit card fees are killing the idea of buying content at the 5 or 10 cent level.

Perhaps there is a market for some kind of service that allows you to make small 5 or 10 cent charges. All of these charges are grouped together and you make a payment at the end of the month in one go so the the fees are reduced.

Or it could work the other way round, you top up your 'account' with amounts from, let's say, $10 upwards.

This could be monetized by charging businesses to integrate your service into their products.

I had an idea for a startup around this, and got pretty far in spec'ing it out and seeing what could be done. But what I found, when reading about previous attempts, was that the technical and business side weren't the barrier to entry, it was the legal problems that arose. Whenever systems like this have popped up, it's a matter of days before organized crime and others game the system to do things like launder money.

It's unfortunate, but it seems as though the only entities with the legal and administrative teams capable of handling that are the credit card companies. And they're not particularly interested in micro-payments, it seems.

I agree that organised crime is the main adversary to such a system, but I believe I have developed a miraculous mix of technology to thwart them that this margin is unfortunately too narrow to contain.

One of my ideas in this space was post-pay micropayments. Instead of asking for money up front and then allowing people to spend that in a trickle on individual articles, you would count views to stories by people (logged to user table or just using a cookie) and then guilt-induce people to donate.

"You've read 46 articles over the last month. Contribute $9.20 now (20c per article) - we'd really appreciate it."

I think skype could do this (and frankly, I'm mystified that they haven't), but I know of few other companies that have such a wide user base who keep their accounts charged up regularly.

Micropayments in general are doomed to fail.

http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html

An article from 2003 - that doesn't mention Readability, Flattr, and other new takes on micropayments - is your final word on why micropayments are doomed to fail?

Sometimes it's useful to revisit an idea and look at it with an open mind. The landscape has changed. Perhaps micropayments as they exist in 2011 are doomed to fail as well but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion based on a single 8 year old article.

From the user's perspective, Readability is a subscription service(one that uses pay-what-you-want, but the default is five dollars per month--far from 'micro') and Flattr is a form of donation(notice that it is completely voluntary, unless I am misreading what flattr actually does). Neither are actually micropayments. Both subscription and donation were mentioned in that very Clay Shirky article.

The closest thing to micropayments that has had any success whatsoever have been pay-what-you-want like Radiohead's In Rainbows and the Humble Indie Bundles and even there they get most of their money from the small segment that pays a lot, effectively as a form of donation that subsidizes the people who wish to only pay $0.01(or in Radiohead's case $0)

I have come to my conclusion in 2011 the same way Clay Shirky did in 2003: the trails of dead micropayment services.

I would actually submit that their has been no true micro-payments service other than some credit systems (e.g. XBox Marketplace). Is there a place to sell documents, audio, or video for 5 to 10 cents a piece and getting 60 - 80%? I believe the paper from 2003 is not a predictor of what would happen in Amazon or Apple would have such a system. Both have excellent UI and easy process in buying higher priced media.

UI isn't the problem. The problem is that free is significantly more attractive than even $0.01 and always will be; this has been shown through studies such as this:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.164...

FWIW Bitcoin lacks processing fees.

Unless you count the chance of losing your money in a Bitcoin-local currency exchange.

Actually this is the end of news papers and any form of newspaper conglomerates on internet. Things like Techcrunch, HuffPost are transitions toward the new model.

It seems the future is that consumers will want to read content written by a particular writer not from some conglomerate site. That writer (blogger, scientist, professor, etc.) will be able to monetize.

You make an excellent point. I used to read Joel Spolsky and Russinovich's blog quite often. I would actually pay to do this.

The main problem (and difference) I see with Blogs vs traditional journals is the editors. The majority of blogs from technologists, scientists and the like do not have an editor at hand. This reduces the writing quality of their articles.

Now may be a good time to setup a business connecting "editors" with writers.

I think you can call wikipedia a "high quality web content experiment" that has done quite well. The catch is one needs to figure out: - How to create high quality on a low budget? - How to make sure it appeals to a larger audience? - How to let that audience find you? - And how to monetize said content?

To me the market is still evolving, but I'm excited about the idea of people paying for eBooks and apps — something that wouldn't have seemed possible in a Napster world before iTunes.

Let me subscribe to an ad-free version of your online magazine for $0.50 to $2 a month, please.

I haven't bought any magazine or newspaper since I bought iPad.

Online content monetization is in a bad state at the moment. Advertising CPMs continue to decline and most users won't pay for content.

Slate & the NYT Magazine are the only mainstream news sources I have in my RSS reader. I certainly don't read everything but I think it's important to at least glance at the headline to every article they publish.

I'm sad Jack Shafer, Timothy Noah and June Thomas are now all gone as they were all wonderful writers :(.

Keeping Paul Carr on staff is a great example of ethically dubious methods online magazines resort to for page views.

Radio fundamentally changed the nature of how we relate to music.

In the same manner, the web is fundamentally changing the way we relate to printed material. Both of these changes took decades to happen. I imagine we've got another decade or two left before it all shakes out.

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