HubPages: A Different Kind Of Content Farm - Empowering Writers. Posted by Tom Foremski - February 9, 2011 The second largest privately held web site next to the Huffington Post is San Francisco based HubPages where "Hubbers" publish articles on a wide variety of topics and get paid through Google AdSense. Some of the more popular Hubbers can earn more than a thousand dollars a month and they own their own content -- a different model from Demand Media, which commissions articles from more than 17,000 writers. I recently met with HubPages' CEO Paul Edmondson. Here are some notes from our conversation: - We set up HubPages in 2006 to help writers publish online and monetize their content. . - The founders are from Microsoft. - We have more than 42 million unique visitors every month. - We have had to be very patient. . - We have a ranking system for writers that examines how engaged they are with their readers and on the quality of their work.
. - Content has to be original, we check that it hasn't been copied from somewhere else. - No adult content is allowed. AOL Buys Huffington Post for $315 Million in Cash | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD. In a bold and definitive move, AOL is paying $315 million, mostly in cash, to buy the Huffington Post, one of the Web’s most prominent news and opinion sites. As part of the deal, Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington (pictured here)–who was derided by some when she co-founded the left-leaning site in 2005 with investor and well-known communications exec Kenneth Lerer–will become president and editor in chief of the Huffington Post Media Group within AOL. The deal was signed late this afternoon, and the board of directors of each company and shareholders of the privately held Huffington Post have approved the transaction.
In an exclusive video interview BoomTown conducted earlier today in Dallas, just before Super Bowl XLV, both Armstrong and Huffington were jovial that the whirlwind deal, begun in November, actually worked out so quickly. Perhaps giddy, they hit upon a common motto: “One plus one equals 11.” Get it? Let’s move on, shall we? But, as MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka wrote: AOL and Huffington post – models for big news media in the digital age? « The Equity Kicker. By now you may well have heard that AOL has acquired Huffington Post for $315m. Looking at HuffPo and now AOL there are three elements which show how large news businesses might look in the digital age: HuffPo has achieved revenue scale (forecast $60m this year, up from $31m in 2010) They have combined a low cost journalism model with a reputation for quality – a small core staff complimented by over 3,000 guest bloggers including Barak Obama and Madonna (I don’t have information on their profitability, but the capital raised to date is only $20m) AOL now has a portfolio of sites – HuffPo, Techcrunch, Engadget etc. – which maybe a model for real scale in this industry Regular readers will know that I’m bearish on the prospects for traditional news businesses like News International.
Print media circulations are falling fast, their classifieds revenues have collapsed and they are mostly failing (and will continue to fail) in their attempts to charge on the web. The Atlantic Turns a Profit, With an Eye on the Web. Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times In 2005, The Atlantic relocated its offices to Washington from Boston, its ancestral home. By pretending it was a Silicon Valley start-up that needed to kill itself to survive. The Atlantic, the intellectual’s monthly that always seemed more comfortable as an academic exercise than a business, is on track to turn a tidy profit of $1.8 million this year. That would be the first time in at least a decade that it had not lost money. Getting there took a cultural transfusion, a dose of counterintuition and a lot of digital advertising revenue. “We imagined ourselves as a venture-capital-backed start-up in Silicon Valley whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic,” said Justin B. What that meant more than anything else was forcing one of the nation’s oldest magazines to stop thinking of itself as a printed product.
Separations between the digital and print staffs in both business and editorial operations came down. Mr. Mr. Hold the front page: Financial Times on iPad does a cool £1m in ad revenue. Could it be that the iPad and its ilk are the savior of the newspaper industry? The jury’s still out but today’s news that the Financial Times’ iPad app has generated a cool £1 million in ad revenue since its launch in May does bode quite well, at least in relation to the FT itself.
That figure comes from the paper’s own deputy chief executive Ben Hughes as revealed at the MediaGuardian Changing Advertising Summit (via paidContent). Now clearly Apple’s pricey (and luxury) device and the FT do make for a cosy demographic fit, but nevertheless this is ad revenue alone not income garnered from digital subscriptions, with the paper also sitting behind its own paywall. On that note, according to the report, Hughes told the summit that more than 400,000 subscribers have signed up for the iPad app and that it now accounts for 10% of the paper’s new digital subscriptions. So one in ten new subscribers are touting Apple’s tablet. Aggregators: the good ones vs. the looters. News aggregators have grown into all shapes and forms. Some are truly helping the producers of original content but others simply amount to mere electronic ransack. My daily media routine starts on Techmeme. It is a pure aggregator — actually an aggrefilter, as coined by Dan Farber, at the time editor-in-chief of Cnet, who recommended it.
This little site combines simple concept and sophisticated execution. As shown in its “Leaderboard”, it crawls a hundred sources and applies a clever algorithm using 600 parameters. Techmeme and Mediagazer benefit the news outlets they mention. In fact, in their very own fields, Techmeme are Mediagazer are more useful than Google News. At the other end of the aggregator spectrum, we have The Huffington Post, one of the smartest digital news machine ever and, at the same time, the mother of all news internet impostures. In France, where true journalism is in a state of exhaustion, everybody wants to make “Un Huffington Post à la Française“.
The Way I Work: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. TechCrunch, a San Francisco-based company that publishes the influential blog of the same name, started as a hobby. In 2005, Michael Arrington, a serial entrepreneur and former lawyer, was researching Silicon Valley start-ups and decided to post his findings online. Since then, TechCrunch, which draws about 9.2 million visitors a month and boasts annual revenue of about $10 million, has become the go-to source for breaking news about Internet start-ups and tech companies. Although TechCrunch has 25 full-time employees, Arrington, 40, still spends much of his time reporting and writing. On most days, he works remotely from his home near Seattle, in a cavelike home office. From morning until night, Arrington sits in darkness in front of his computer—blasting music, working his contacts, and focusing on what he loves best: breaking big stories. I wake up in a pissed-off mood. If news is breaking, I want to be on it.
I try to get up at 9 a.m. every day. I moved to the Seattle area in May. MediaWatch Monday: Media Wars Over Conference Coverage Hurts Startups. Posted by Tom Foremski - September 20, 2010 I was at the DEMO Fall conference last week in Santa Clara, which is co-organized by the online news publication VentureBeat and IDG. I noticed that there wasn't much media at the conference -- the press room was nearly deserted for much of the time I was there. (I also looked for media coverage that wasn't from VentureBeat and it was equally sparse.) Usually, DEMO attracts quite a large variety of publications and this is a key reason that companies are willing to pay the $18,500 fee, (if selected) to be at DEMO. There was plenty of coverage from VentureBeat, of course. Every one of the 70 companies at DEMO received coverage from VentureBeat but coverage from other publications was sparse.
For example, Techcrunch, which does a lot of startup coverage had just one story; ReadWriteWeb, which also covers this sector in great detail had 2 stories; while GigaOM had a fairly respectable 7 stories. Did the Web kill journalism, and will the iPad bring it back? Guest Post: Here's Why Google's Paywall Will Work (And The Times' Will Fail) Posted by Guest Writer - July 28, 2010 By Matthew Buckland - memeburn.com Google has been quietly testing a new paywall system for publishers it is calling "Newspass". According to Italian newspaper [1] La Repubblica, Google has been piloting the service with publishers in Italy. The search giant will apparently launch "an integrated payment system" allowing users to buy news content with just "one click". Importantly, La Repubblica reports that consumers will have a single log-in across a multitude of news sites that would be flexible enough to accommodate various kinds of payments, including long-term subscriptions and one-time micropayments.
Paywalling systems on news sites have been controversial for a better part of a decade. Google's new effort is an acute case of Déjà vu. What's different about Newspass Google's new initiative is however significantly different from the failed paywall attempts at the start of the decade. Take the analogy of satellite TV. Business Insider, Turbocharged!
WaPo wades into HuffPo’s unpaid content model » Nieman Journalis. A top news and politics site is packaging content written by unpaid bloggers, hoping to engage its audience, give writers a platform, and make some money selling ads. No, I’m not talking about The Huffington Post. In recent weeks, The Washington Post has launched two new projects following a model closer to HuffPo — where a small number of professionals are paid to curate the work of many more unpaid writers — than its traditional print roots. In the competitive world of Washington news, it’s another example of the Post trying something new to compete with the startups that, not so long ago, weren’t viewed as much of a direct threat.
Thursday, Post Politics launched its political blog network, an offshoot of Chris Cillizza’s politics blog, The Fix. The site posts full items from state-based political blogs that were nominated by readers and approved by Cillizza. I spoke with the Post’s national innovations editor, Paul Volpe, about the new project. On Our Third Birthday, Some Thoughts On Digital Media And The Future Of The Newspaper Business. Henry Blodget's Risky Bet on the Future of News. Henry Blodget is a man who will be neither easily riled nor insulted. When, in March, he learned that a blog had labeled a section of The Business Insider, the gossipy financial website he founded three years ago, "The Hooters of the Internet," Blodget waited a couple hours before tweeting: "The Hooters of the Internet.
I like that. " In May, Blodget predicted on his website that within just a few years, The Huffington Post will take in over $100 million in advertising revenue—more than triple the $30 million the site says it will bring in in 2010—and that by 2015 or so, it would be generating more from advertising than The New York Times. In an endnote, he disclosed that Kenneth Lerer, a co-founder of The Huffington Post, is also an investor in The Business Insider, or TBI as it is known by its readers. "Thank you for the disclosure," someone called The Truth typed in the piece's comments section. He is betting that he knows what the future of business news looks like. The Click Rate. Is Print Media Doomed Worldwide or Just In The US? As I walked in the headquarters of the Jawa Pos—the flagship newspaper of one of South East Asia’s largest print media empires—I was wondering just how screwed my profession is; globally I mean.
Is the death of print a world-wide certainty or merely an American reality? After all a lot of “old economy” businesses are thriving in emerging markets thanks to Greenfield advantages and rising middle class economics. Spoiler alert: I walked out a few hours later not hugely convinced print is the future but willing to believe that in some places the death-blow of digital might be limited to a mere-crippling. How’s that for bullish? Language difference and a preponderance of statues aside, the Jawa Pos felt like any other newsroom of a large daily.
It was almost 9 pm and there was a still a buzzing, frenzied office full of people —some of whom had been there since 5 am, and some of whom would be there until midnight. Or is it? Does experience and seniority have advantages in the work place? Google finally reveals AdSense cut: 68% on content « BuzzMachine. At last, Google is revealing its split on AdSense: 68% to publishers for content ads, 51% for search ads. I had two primary complaints about Google in my otherwise admittedly and obviously wet-kiss book, What Would Google Do? : Google’s policy aiding government censorship in China and its opacity on advertising relationships. The first is pretty much fixed and this morning, Google is addressing teh second. so is the second. (Uh-oh, now I have fewer excuses not to be a fanboy.) At a press meeting with Google execs in Davos in January, I pressed them about the advertising openness, having discussed the issue with publishers at DLD in Munich right before.
Today, in the spirit of greater transparency with AdSense publishers, we’re sharing the revenue shares for our two main AdSense products — AdSense for content and AdSense for search. . . . They’re also not revealing splits for YouTube, a program that just started. How do the splits compare? New Media Business Models. Every company is a media company. How The Mainstream Media Stole Our News Story Without Credit. On Friday, I broke a tasty story about a woman suing Google, claiming bad directions caused her to get hit by a vehicle. Today, I discover our story is everywhere, often with no attribution. Come along and watch how the mainstream media, which often claims bloggers rip it off, does a little stealing of its own. Woman Follows Google Maps “Walking” Directions, Gets Hit, Sues was the story I posted on Friday afternoon, Pacific Time.
I was tipped to the lawsuit by Gary Price of ResourceShelf. Gary hadn’t written about it himself but thought Search Engine Land would be interested in it. He came across it through the regular monitoring of search-related news that he does across a variety of resources (Gary watches many, many things — he’s a research guru extraordinaire). No one had written about the case before I put my article up. I’ll Steal Your Image, But I Won’t Link To You Let’s start with the Daily Mail’s story here.
It’s a screenshot of the route from Google Maps. Maybe. Thanks! Digital Thinkers. Yahoo Wants HuffPo Badly. Yahoo is clearly positioning itself to become a stronger player in the online content game, as evidenced by its recent acquisition of Associated Content. But we are hearing that the real prize they want is the Huffington Post. The two companies are currently in negotiations over a deep content partnership, according to sources close to the situation. There are also rumblings that Yahoo wants to buy the Huffington Post outright, but it may be too expensive.
In any case, the Huffington Post seems to be more interested in doing a content deal than selling. Yahoo needs high quality articles and videos, and the Huffington Post needs more traffic and pageviews. The Huffington Post is killing it right now. If content is once again becoming king, online media companies need a lot of it and they need it to be good. Buying the Huffington Post would not be cheap. Photo credit: Flickr/NeoGaboX.
NSFW: Content Is King! Rest In Peace, Content. The creator of Google News on how journalism will change in the.
Facebook & the media. New media parody. Censorship. Oops, there's Internet & Youtube now. Méchant Internet. Promoted Tweets Are AdSense for the Future of News « Edge Ideas.