NetJourn Summit: ‘Where’s The Revenue?’

Steve Safran October 10th, 2007

So, you’re all asking the same question: “Where’s the frickin’ money in all this?” The Networked Journalism Summit called, simply, “Revenue” tackled this with Rick Waghorn, a soccer writer with a newspaper background in England who started My Football Writer, Jeff Burkett of WashingtonPost.com, Henry Copeland of BlogAds and Stephen Smyth of Reuters. Jump on for the $$$

Rick Waghorn: My Football Writer (Soccer Site in England) Built his brand as a newspaper sports writer, and as newspaper layoffs started to hit he wondered “is there an opportunity to take my football mini-brand with me” and make a business. “Me and a guy Kev who had 25 years in sales, and was being replaced by and 18-year-old on the telephone, teamed up. He was an old-fashioned newspaper man. He went out to his advertising base. There was customer satisfaction that he knew because he was being replaced by an 18-year-old on the phone who didn’t visit the advertisers.

We sold it on a monthly basis - for a month, for $300, you can be on the site. People would ask where I was, and then that would be the basis for ad sales. We made $70,000 in year one, and that was just from banners. We’re launching niche county sites now so the sites can sell more local ads.

Jeff Burkett, WashingtonPost.com: Selling ads across network of blogs.

We’re representing ads on the blogs themselves, bringing those guys into the fold journalistically, and you’ve got an offering that’s very unique. You get a cycle going of you’re promoting them, you’re getting advertising on their site and back.

The ad part of it has gone well. We haven’t applied the resources to it yet to accept all the applicants and we haven’t done a great job of sending all the traffic back to them. But we’re moving in the right direction.

Stephen Smith, Reuters: It’s still early days. We started testing in this space two years ago with a player pushed by Brightcove in ‘05 and offered that up to any and all properties that wanted it. We had several thousand takers. We had the right to run ads through that network. We learned a couple of things; that we didn’t need to have a player - we needed to have individual clips people could put on their site; and on the advertising front, it’s almost impossible to sell brand advertising on other sites. We didn’t know what the demographics were on the sites that were (embedding our video.) It’s very difficult for anyone to sell that audience.

We’re now getting to a place where we’re exploring the idea of creating an advertising network that can generate value for everybody and that can generate insight about the demographics. That would be insight for the bloggers as well so they could learn about their audience. It’s information that’s necessary to generate brand campaigns. We’re trying lots of things - it’s important to innovate.

Henry Copeland, BlogAds, Since 2002:

It’s been a nice five years, we’ve written tens of millions of dollars in checks to bloggers, but the blogosphere is getting increasingly crowded. The social media space - there’s a heck of a lot of supply out there. We’ve got 1,500 bloggers, sometimes we’re successful, sometimes we fail. How many are making a living? I wouldn’t say hundreds, but I would say dozens.

Rick Waghorn: (Entertaining rant about how many ad forms, including Google, don’t work well.) What we did is built our own text ad solution that allows local advertisers to post. That way the ads are local and they pay per click. If they’re looking for a job in Norfolk, England, they shouldn’t come up with Norfolk, Virginia.

Audience member: If you let Google decide what should go on the page, it doesn’t work that well. But if you go to Google and tell it what to serve, it does pretty well. Sitewide we’re getting about $3 CPM, with $6 CPM on real estate. It’s not as good as a dedicated sales person, but it’s a really good adjunct to the sales force.

Audience member: Launched BlogNation, in July, says it is profitable already: Doing so through advertising and syndication. Resells content to other channels.

Copeland says the kinds of ads that are able to get ads are generally closed to comments. This raises tut-tuts in the audience.

Jay Rosen, in audience: Doc Searls says we’re seeing something more fundamental than “will online advertising checks catch up?” The net is making it possible for advertisers to the public the very inefficiencies that were created by the current system will be boiled out of the process. We’re waiting in vain for this wave of online advertising to catch up, but instead we should be looking for other ways to finance high-quality journalism.

Copeland: Advertising is going up, but not nearly at the same pace as inventory. CPMs may be going down soon.

Burkett: The only way to get the money is to take advantage of the efficiencies that larger networks bring. You need to be a part of what Henry has or what we have.