First, some guy emailed me excitedly a while back offering to rep me to look for and win good advertising deals for "quality content sites like yours." Unlike generic overtures like for low-end ads (which run $50-$100/mo on high traffic pages) he seemed like a sports-agent type.
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I said sure, I'll take a call. He seemed like a nice guy, with a decent track record doing this for other sites. But when I shared my traffic stats with him (just shy of 0.5 mil visitors/year at that point, same as now) he sounded deflated and I never heard from him again.
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A bit of research revealed that the represented ad sales for blogging by anybody who actually knows how to do the job, requires an incentive structure (commission based) that only works north of about 2 million visitors/year. To get there, I'd have to prioritize viral clickbait.
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Second example. Early on (like 2008) I briefly hired a guy off odesk (now upwork) to do promotion for me -- post comments on other blogs, do some tweeting etc. Nice kid, who tried sincerely, but in 2 weeks it was crystal clear it was the dumbest idea in the world.
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Incidents like these, together with some thinking led me to a conclusion. If you want to hire people to do the boring parts, you need a proper magazine-style business model that can support people with different risk appetites and compensation expectations.
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Writers are the easiest. They'll work for free for exposure (I don't pay people on my editorial board) or for a nominal price (I pay regular contributors $100/post). Good artists always require pay. Anybody else requires non-artist compensation based on market rates.
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It's not the $ equation. That can be solved. The operating budget for ribbonfarm, if I wanted to break even, would be about $3000/year (primary direct income attributed to affiliate sales, the only monetization I run, not counting ebook sales). That's about 1.5-2k after hosting.
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Subtract miscellany like Mailchimp ($90 a month right now), domain registration etc. and basically I'd have maybe enough in budget for 4-5 guest posts at most. Anything more needs capitalization and growth ambitions.
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My idea for ribbonfarm monetization would be to use a text to audio conversion service. Release ribbonfarm posts as podcasts in a subscription service. That gives you two distribution channels one read the other listened to. In the current environment people would pay to listen.
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Hybrid idea, what if guest writers were to record themselves reading their pieces and those were available through a fee gate.
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Replying to
There’s just far easier indirect ways to make money. I just need to make money, not necessarily from blogging.
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As we say around the homestead, "you don't have to". Rememes me of, "when I grow up I want to be a blogger." Mom: "you have to choose, you can't do both".... except when Turns and shakes fist at money tree.
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