Picnics
What should be free? Who pays for it? Where does it all go? Should blogging and money be kept far apart from each other? Should blogs have ads? Are all links really paid, as the story goes? How does money impact authenticity? Who should pay for the picnic? Let’s talk about money. Monetization. Loot.
These are questions that we all have opinions about. People and companies have been vilified for their choices. The righteous burn their effigies on the front lawn of any blog that mixes free content with advertising. The very notion that commerce and information exchange be permitted to mix seems incongruous. Never mind the fact that media works that way. Never mind the fact that CHURCH works that way. There has to be a strong distance between the exchanges, or else it seems evil. You’re charging your community, etc.
I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time. Partly because it’s my job to understand how to mix information and money-making. The other part of it is because I like to help people figure out how to do business in the Internet age. I experiment, share the results, and experiment some more.
I also run conferences, both professionally, and for passion. Between media making, conferences, and the other ways that I work in the information-for-money business, I’ve got some ideas, and I’m going to share my perspective. I predict this post will be one of the more polarizing of my last several months. You’ll either get it and agree, or you’ll tell me why the world must all function on what’s free. I can argue both sides of the coin.
The Triangle
In the fall of 2006, I quit my day job and joined the circus. Jeff Pulver, legendary VoIP pioneer and long-time producer of the VON conference series hired me. In the waning months of 2007, I parted ways and joined Stephen Saber’s CrossTech Media. During this same time frame, I also worked with Christopher S. Penn and Whitney Hoffman on PodCamps.
In events, there’s a triangle. I learned this mostly from Jeff. If you can, the best of all worlds goes like this:
* Attract the brilliant people and make them the community.
* Charge the businesses who support this community for the event.
* Make it worth it for those businesses, so that they want to keep supporting the event.
So, if you want your “friends” to come to a conference, make the event such that it will help them do their job better. Then, don’t ask your friends for money. Ask their employers for money (ticket cost). Then, ask exhibitors and sponsors who want the friends as customers for money. Then, you have enough money to run a conference, and make a living trying to build information.
For the content, focus super hard on the people/friends. Don’t look to what the sponsors/exhibitors think the story is. They know more about the today than they do the tomorrow. Unless you make friends with tomorrow-focused companies (my favorite plan).
That’s kind of traditional conferences in a nutshell. It’s WAY not easy. But that’s the rough premise.
Unconferences, like PodCamp and BarCamp and the like, do it differently. The premise is like this: we can all get together for a minimal cost and run something that’s useful, without making it a business unto itself. We can subsist, and everyone will leave better educated.
With PodCamps, we’ve built and built on the experience, such that the ones we run in Boston cost more than a typical *.Camp, but the payload is (hopefully) much more focused. We’ve asked for more money from the community, but we’ve turned that back around into a quality event. We find sponsors who want access to our community, and then we try to matchmake that relationship a little, so that everyone understand’s each other’s potential value. BUT we do it without a lot of heavy-handedness at PodCamps. It’s more organic. That’s the whole unconference thing.
YOU can start an unconference. You don’t need anyone’s permission.
So there are two models.
Content on Websites
The web has crushed a lot of former money makers. Look at newspapers. Look at magazines. We are VERY used to getting our content for free. We love it free. And we are finding more and more ways to get top shelf, quality content for free. It’s a great and wonderful thing. How many of us would pay a few bucks for a blog? Not very many. (Well wait, aren’t Kindle users doing just that?)
So there are all kinds of people churning out quality content, and the basic premise is that they’ll get their money elsewhere. I sure do. Lots of people do. But let’s go deeper for a second.
You learn actionable things from ProBlogger, from CopyBlogger, from Seth Godin, from me, and from others. All that content is free. It’s out there for you to learn from, profit from, build business with, and hopefully succeed. Heck, if we’re not helping you succeed, then why are we doing this daily?
Often discounted in these conversations are blogs about making money online. Those fall into another whole category of the web. And yet, some of those folks, like Ted Murphy are out there just trying to come up with new ways to build better relationships between people who have something to sell and people who want to facilitate that sale. There’s a whole culture out there figuring this stuff out, and I’m getting to know more and more of them. As I do, my mindset on how blogs interact with advertising and marketing has changed a great deal.
My Current Thinking Boiled Down
- Making money isn’t evil. HOW you make money can be. Keeping the whole picture in place helps. (For instance, in my case, I sell certain services and information - like the New Marketing Summit, but then I give others away free/cheap - my blog and PodCamp).
- Disclosure is key. If you’re going to sell something on your site, disclose that you’ve got a relationship with that company/product. ( I show my disclosures on my About page).
- Maintain the triangle. I don’t want YOU to pay for my content. I want people who need my help professionally to pay for my distilled thinking.
- Keep context. My site is about educating you. If it becomes about products to market, that’s a context swap. If I decide to build a site about selling you things, I’ll make that another URL, and you can opt to visit or not.
- Someone has to pay for the picnic. There are some really great bloggers out there who are blogging a bit less lately. I won’t name them. They have jobs that require them to focus down hard on revenues right now. I try my hardest to have the things I’m paid for (like conferences) keep me out here on the blanket giving away delicious snacks. But someone always has to pay for the picnic.
Your Take
It’s your turn to weigh in. Why should everything be free? Why are ads evil? Where do you think this money should be made? If you were running the business, [chrisbrogan.com], or Scobleizer.com , or Annhandley.com , or whoever, what would you do differently? How would YOU make your money?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Photo credit, Timothy Lloyd
Announcing Dad-o-Matic
Parents have lots more choices for reading materials on the web than ever before. There’s Parent Hacks, by the ever-amazing Asha Dornfast. There’s GNM Parents, which I helped start and is now run by Megin. And for dads, I’m a fan of dads.alltop.com, run by Guy Kawasaki.
Well, we’ve launched one more.
Announcing Dad-o-Matic, a blog for dads, written by geeky web dads of all types. The goal of the site is to cover news, views, reviews, and advice, given to you by dads, for parents. What’s up there for posts right now are mostly advice. I think we’re still early into getting our voice, but man, look at who’s writing there:
- Dorian “Paisano” Carta - from Mashable and other places.
- Mike Chapman - from Every Dot Connects.
- Jeremy Toeman - from Stage Two Consulting.
- Grant Griffiths - from Home Office Warrior.
- Scott Kiekbusch - from Adjustafresh.
- Ryan Ozawa - from Hawaii Blog.
Oh, and there’s a very very special guest post by Guy Kawasaki. (I say “guest” because I haven’t yet convinced him that having seven or eight regular blogs to write for is worth it yet.)
We have many more authors contributing to Dad-o-Matic over the next months. Look for folks like Shel Holtz, Darren Rowse, and a few other swell folks who happen to be dads *and* on the web!
Why Do it?
Dad-o-Matic stems from about three things I wanted to do. Number 1: I’m a dad and a very proud one, and I think there’s lots of information that we can provide that’s useful to other parents, including even some more tech information for how parents and kids navigate the digital world together.
Number 2: I wanted to try a content blog with many authors, and try a few things out. For instance, you’ll notice that we have ads. I want to try out the media model of a group blog and see what I learn and can share with you about it. If I’m not eating my own dogfood, why should I expect you to follow my advice? So, there’ll be Dad-o-Matic project updates posted here on [chrisbrogan.com], but more from the “business outside the business” perspective.
Number 3: I wanted a group project. It’s really fun to put together fun things like this, and if the dads involved keep posting, and if we build up even more dads, the work load of writing the occasional dad blog post won’t overwhelm the fun of being part of something fresh and interesting. I’m thrilled that we have some great dads putting out interesting (and often different than their main stuff) from their typical online stuff.
Please Check It Out
I’d love for you to check out Dad-o-Matic and tell me what you think of it. If nothing else, check out some of the great work from Jeremy, Guy, Scott, Ryan, Grant, Mike, and whoever I might’ve just forgot in listing that.
There’s so much more to come.
The Importance of Seeds
When looking at content marketing projects like Digital Nomads, if you get there early, it’s going to look like a bunch of posts by people at Dell. But that’s okay. It’s Dell’s project, and they hope that it grows into something that others will find valuable and build around. They’re planting seeds.
All content projects grow that way. The people who create the project (or those who eventually own the project) must start somewhere with putting something there. Otherwise, it looks horribly empty and barren. If you visit a farm, you don’t want to see a big stretch of brown soil. You want to see lush patches of greenery, promising the harvest that will come next. The same is true of a platform built for content and conversations.
When starting Project Dogfood, I set up several conversation threads, and started the first questions in all of them. I wrote three different topics for each thread, with the hope that people would join up, get involved, and have a conversation. And it worked.
Right now, the project is still heavily tended and seeded by me as community manager. But over time, some of those seeds will take root, will grow, and will become whole, rich crops of delicious information for us to tend, harvest, and celebrate.
Building something from content requires seeds.
What are you doing to help?
Photo credit, starmist1
