Robin Good: If you are looking for an alternative way to look at how your online publishing business could thrive in the future, you may want to take into consideration your local art museum. At east, this is what Assistant Professor Ray Weaver suggests.
Here's why:
From the original article: "...what Groupon is up to is much more sophisticated than just offering 50 percent-off coupons.
Groupon, along with companies like Apple, Facebook, and Progressive Insurance, is a leading example of firms that are thinking about customers in a new way—much like how a museum curator orchestrates the experience of patrons.
Weaver, an assistant professor in the Marketing Unitat HBS, believes that part of Groupon's success is borne of the careful way the company presents wares to its customers: providing a very limited amount of choices at a time, along with a brief, engaging description of each offering.
To that end, Weaver is exploring the idea that many consumer-centric web-based businesses would benefit from acting more like museum curators.
....
Curators don't just put the stuff out there.
They make choices about which pieces to put next to other pieces, and put little plaques next to them explaining why you should care," he explains. "They educate their 'customers' about what they're looking at. And that is the missed opportunity in many for-profit businesses today."
Robin Good: Teacherspayteachers is an online marketplace for guides, tutorials and lesson plans which any educator, trainer, professor and indipendent publishers. Materials can be published and shared freely or for a proce tag.
"Having trouble coming up with a lesson plan for your Language Arts class this semester?
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a website where you could purchase and download such materials at your leisure?
Teachers Pay Teachers, a company devoted to helping educators fill in the proverbial gaps present in their current curriculum offers lesson plans in a wide variety of different subjects to educators around the world for a small price."
Robin Good: If you are looking for a good introductory guide to the use of crowds for the generation of revenue and the extended monetization of existing line of products/services, I definitely recommend giving a good look to this guide prepared by Ross Dawson and Steve Bynghall.
In the guide you can find out why crowdsourced business models are so promising and why they are being adopted rapidly by the major brands around the world.
Robin Good: Here is a useful guide to fifteen online payment systems like PayPal, their management and transaction costs, alongside a simple introduction to basic terminology (ACH payments, payment gateways, payment processors, etc.).
$20: You get one signed advance copy of the printed book. Delivered by Canada Post.
$50: Your name appears in an alphabetized list of "Friends" on the Facebook page and the website. Plus, you get one signed advance copy of the printed book and one advance copy of the ebook.
$1000: Your name appears in an alphabetized list of "Pillars" on a special page at the front of the printed book. You get two signed advance copies of the printed book and two advance copies of the ebook. You get a limited edition hand-printed copy of the book's cover art, by Ben Brush. The author will also make an in-person appearance at a private venue of your choice in the Maritime provinces and do a reading/signing of Roll Up the Rim. Outside the Maritimes, this perk can be claimed over Skype.
These are some of the options laid out on Leo McKay's Indiegogo campaign site.
Indiegogo is a site where entrepreneurs can raise funds to start a project and McKay is an author, trying to drum up business for his next book.
He launched his Indiegogo campaign "Roll Up the Rim" on Monday April 2, with the goal of raising $8,500 to publish his next book -- titled Roll Up the Rim -- in 30 days..."
Robin Good: Is traditional venture capital being disrupted, shifted and slowly modified by new forces?
It looks like so, at least according to Semil Shah writes on Techcrunch, who writes: "...these forces combined, and each individually in their own way, have altered the landscape for traditional venture capital in software.
It is on average significantly more difficult to for traditional firms to find early-stage opportunities because there is more competition for those investments, and once a company does breakout and require more institutional funding, the prices for those rounds may not look like they have in the past."
Robin Good: Accenture’s Video-Over-Internet Consumer Survey 2012 reports that consumers of all ages are ready to pay for online video content as long as it is high-quality and with zero or very little advertising in it.
More than two-thirds of those surveyed said that they are willing to pay a subscription fee to watch quality video over the Internet, while 43 percent said that they are already paying for some of their content.
Jeff Whatcott writes on the Brightcove blog: "Consumers will pay for online video content according to a new study conducted by Accenture, which reveals that more than two-thirds of those surveyed are willing to pay a subscription fee to watch video over the Internet, while 43 percent are already paying for some of their content.
Accenture’s "Video-Over-Internet Consumer Survey 2012" also found that nearly half of the respondents (49 percent) are willing to pay $5 - $10 per month, 10 percent would be open to paying more than $10 per month to access content, and the remaining 41 percent would consider paying less than $5.
The caveats, says Accenture, are that the content must be of high quality and commercial advertising must be minimal.
...
Consumers are at the point where they are willing to pay for good, quality online video content, while content owners are adopting paid business models that are based on blended monetizations strategies."
Robin Good: Flying Cart is a web service which allows you to easily set-up an online store with the minimum fuss and lots of good features.
Key features include:
- Ready-made shop themes
- Upload your logos and graphics or use custom CSS
- Store customers Fan Club feature
- Use High-Quality, Zoomable Photos
- Built-in links for Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and other social networking sites.
- Custom Domain option - Hosting and unlimited bandwidth
- Support for all credit cards through PayPal and Google Checkout
- Coupons
- Inventory tracking
- Orders management
- Customer newsletter service
- No Contracts, No Fees
The basic account (Glider) costs $9.99/month and includes 25 Products, Custom Domain, Theme Editor, SSL Security and Custom CSS. More expensive plans allow for more products, add inventory management and email support among other things.
Robin Good: A useful guide to identify and select the ideal digital good selling service to use if you have an ebook, set of templates, video course or set of tutorials to sell online.
From the article intro: "...selling products or services instead of selling your own time.
A common way to do this is to sell digital goods such as eBooks, PSD templates, WordPress themes, icons, and so on. But how exactly should you sell them?
Although there are lots of marketplaces for selling digital goods, they often take a big cut of the profits.
What’s more, they don’t let you customize the sales page, or let you use your own brand.
This is where digital goods services come in. These services only take care of the payment, file storage, and download, and let you do the rest. This means you can easily sell your products from your own website, or through social networks.
I recently wrote an eBook about UI design and needed to find a way to sell it, so I compared five such services:
- Quixly,
- FetchApp,
- Pulley,
- E-junkie, and
- Gumroad.
I’ll tell you which one I picked at the end… but in the meantime, here are the results of my research."
From Adweek: "Google is rolling out a new product aimed at helping struggling traditional and digital publishers to make money on their Web content.
The new product, Google Customer Surveys, is being billed as an alternative revenue model for publishers weighing whether to erect paywalls on their sites.
Here’s how it works: When users visit the Web sites of partners like the New York Daily News and the Texas Tribune, they’ll find some articles partially blocked.
If they want to continuing reading, they’ll have to answer a question, or microsurvey, courtesy of Google.
What’s in it for publishers? Advertisers pay Google to run the surveys, and Google pays sites 5 cents per response.
For sites with a lot of traffic, that can add up to serious cash. Publishers can implement Google Customer Surveys on as many stories as they’d like."
Robin Good: Matthew Ingram has just published a great article on GigaOM about the news media industry and the increasing realization that the content it produces is more often than not found, discovered, shared and read somewhere else from that content originated.
He writes: "...one other thing that becomes clear from the Pew report is just how big a role aggregators of all kinds — both human and machine-powered — are playing in news consumption.
Despite the growing evidence to the contrary, many newspaper companies and other traditional media outlets still seem to think the vast majority of their audience comes to them directly and prefers to read their content above all other sources.
More than anything else, this is the core philosophy behind the rise of paywalls — which more and more papers are implementing — and also the millions of dollars that media companies have poured into developing iPad apps and other walled-garden-style approaches to news delivery. The assumption is that readers will want only the content that comes from that specific outlet."
But this is not anymore the case.
"What does all of this mean for media companies?
More than anything, it means that trying to recreate the scarcity of content that used to exist in print — when media outlets controlled not only the creation of news but the platforms through which it was distributed — by using paywalls and subscription apps is fundamentally a losing battle.
...One response to that is to shrink your audience down to those who will pay, as some outlets like the Financial Times have done and several of Rupert Murdoch’s British papers are trying to do.
The other approach is to be as open and distributed as possible, to try to take advantage of the democracy of distribution instead of fighting it, and then to find other ways to monetize that audience and their attention, whether it’s e-books or live events or the “reverse paywall” model Jeff Jarvis and others have proposed.
Either way, aggregation and curation are the new reality of media, whether media companies like it or not."
From the official site: Cont3nt.com is a realtime marketplace for entrepreneurial media and video journalism.
From Gigaom: "...a startup called Cont3nt.com is creating a way for publishers to discover and license videos shot by professionals in parts of the world that are difficult to cover.
...
enabling videographers and photographers to license their content to news agencies by giving them full control of the transaction...
One big advantage of the Cont3nt platform is that it gives more money back to the content provider. While other marketplaces command as much as 50 or 60 percent of the license fee for content, Cont3nt takes a maximum of 5 percent per transaction."
Robin Good: Interesting article on the New York Times reporting on the analysis done by Prof. Noam Wasserman, who has been hunting for many years to identify the reasons why startups and those who lead them fail so often.
Having recently published his findings in a book entitled “The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup” he has shared with Jessica Burder of the NYT some interesting insight from his research.
Here a few of interesting thing Prof. Wasserman has discovered:
a) Startup partnerships done with friends, relatives or family are very risky.
b) Dividing equity very early in the game is not a good idea.
c) CEO replacement is organic, especially if you have a good one.
Tremor Video delivers a video income engine for publishers and developers to monetize every ad impression on any screen. Publishers and developers connect with numerous ad sources and partners from a single control center to capture quality brands and the top dollars they command.
For Advertisers:
Tremor Video is hoping to avoid boring old display ads.
With the release of their new platform it could be easier for agencies to create and serve up more interactive mobile video ads and moreover they can avoid the problem of device fragmentation.
Robin Good: Ybuy is a new service which curates a catalog of in-demand products and lets paying subscribers try them at home for 30 days.
-> Get products on the 1st of the month -> Try products for 30 days -> After the trial period, you can return the product at no cost, or you can buy it. -> Skip a month at any time -> Free shipping both ways
"For just a one-time membership fee, plus $24.95 for each product trial, YBuy members can choose a product from their individually curated personal showroom to try in their home for up to 30 days.
To build their curated showroom, members take a short quiz that asks about their preferences."
Robin Good: If you have been wondering how can it ever be that by giving things out for free people will buy more of your products/services, you must check out this great report on consumer adoption of freemium products and services.
“If it can’t ‘sell’ for free, can it ever sell at all?”
From MarketingPilgrim review of the report by Cynthia Boris: "The free sample has been used to tempt grocery shoppers since the invention of the toothpick, yet many of today’s marketers are reluctant to give anything away.
Apps, ebooks, access — you gotta give a little and if you do, you’ll get a lot.
iYogi just released a new study and infographic all about the power of the Freemium model.
Their results show that 100% of the people they surveyed have tried a Freemium product and 42% have gone on to pay for it."
Robin Good: Alex Osterwalder, the author of Business Model Generation and the brain behind the Business Model Canvas Methodology has done it again, and has just released the first (alpha) version of The Strategizer, the business model toolbox that works right on your web desktop.
The Strategizer allows you to map out all of the key elements of a new potential business, allowing you to easily estimate, evaluate and remix different components and ideas, while having a tool that makes it extremely easy to communicate and share with others what you have in mind.
Key features include:
1. Rapidly sketch out business ideas with the business model canvas.
2. Collaborate on business models together with your team, clients, board, or anyone else.
3. Test the numbers and quickly test if the rough estimates indicate an idea worth pursuing.
The Strategyzer offers on your desktop the same functionalities as the Business Model Toolbox for the iPad app for $29.99/year but for an additional monthly fee you can collaborate on different business models with a team of several people ($9.99/month for a team of two, and $39.99/month for a team of five).
(Discount for early adopter of Strategyzer.com Use "bmalchemist" during the sign-up process and you will get a 25% discount on your first yearly fee of $29.99 - limited offer - expires at end of May)
From the article intro: "The slow decline of industrial manufacturing in developed nations and recent failures of financial capitalism across the globe have sent us searching for a new model of economic growth."
From the HBR newsroom: "The essay describes how entrepreneurship is increasingly becoming the world's primary source of socioeconomic value creation and how a new class of entrepreneurship, which the Startup Genome is calling Transformational Entrepreneurship, is taking center stage by synthesizing the scalable tools of Technology Entrepreneurship with the world-centric value system of Social Entrepreneurship.
Transformational Entrepreneurship also represents the guiding philosophy behind the Startup Genome."
From Authorems.com: "Audible hopes to encourage authors to directly market their audio books by offering an honorarium of $1 per audio book sold payable directly to the author.
This is for any of your books in the Audible catalog—self-published or commercially published—and is in addition to your regular royalties.
Obviously, the more audio books you sell, the more money you can earn, so expect to see more audio books mentioned via social media and in blogs.
The program, called Audible Author Services, has set aside $20 million to pay to authors between now and December 31, 2012."
Robin Good: Digioh is a simple web-based service which allows you to upload and sell on your blog or web site any type of downloadable file, including ebooks, guides, tutorials, videos or music.
Key features: -> File protection: Every file purchased is protected so only buyers can download your file. -> Automatic delivery of customers download links, and follow ups. -> Customize user experience. -> Order tracking.
"Embed a "Buy Now" button on your own website. Your customers will be able to click on your website and purchase your products. You can even sell through your Facebook and Twitter profiles.
...All payments from your customer go directly into your PayPal account.."
Digioh does not charge any transaction feeds but charges only a monthly fee for the number of files you want to sell. Selling one file is free, while $9.99 allows you to sell up to 10, $14.99 gives you no limits.
"As developers hunker down and get into the business of trying to work out how to get consumers to buy more of their product on mobile devices, some revealing numbers out from Nielsen on what people are willing to pay for on tablets already."
Magazines - however - stand out as one of the content type likely ot be paid for. Time to address iPads with a new magazine, longer form format?
Robin Good: At GigaOM, Mathew Ingram has a very good article on online newspapers and their rising problem with monetization.
If I had to synthesize its content and re-title it, I would write: "Traffic Is Worth Zero If You Are Looking for New Revenues - Try The Open Journalism Model".
Here a few key excerpts from the original article: "The problem for both the Post and the Guardian is the same as that confronting virtually every other major newspaper: print-advertising revenue, which a majority of papers rely on for the bulk of their income, continues to fall off a very large cliff..."
The alternatives, non-standard solutions, may be using the so-called Open Journalism model.
"Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger described them fairly succinctly...
in a nutshell, readers can contribute by providing their time, their information or their money.
Ideally, a truly interactive digital-media outlet would make use of all three of these, in order to build relationships with readers that are about more than just a cash grab."
"...trying to increase the ways in which its readers can contribute to or become involved in news stories — including opening up its story-assignment schedule to the public for commentary."
"...think of the relationship with readers as being about more than just money, and then let the monetization flow out of that relationship, rather than the reverse."
"...try the “reverse paywall” method suggested by Jeff Jarvis and former Washington Post managing editor Raju Narisetti...
...that encourages readers to “level up” and provide either more information about themselves or more effort in a variety of ways, and then gives them benefits as a result."
Robin Good: A good short article by Felix Salmon at Reuters Blogs, highlights the importance of looking with different eyes at how to keep economically viable an online publishing venture that operates in a vertical niche.
He writes: "Professional-quality nanopublishing has never really worked online, because the ad-supported business model can’t make it work. In a world of micropayments, however, everything changes."
"...a niche long-form science-journalism website is never going to get the kind of scale which advertisers want.
Big-name brand advertisers want to reach lots of people lots of times. They’ll advertise on blogs, which can get audiences in the millions, but they’re not going to advertise on a site which only updates once a month or even once a week.
In general, the amount of inventory online is growing fast, and websites need to be able to keep up with that growth or start seeing their advertisers fall away, one by one.
With subscriptions, though, the math is much more compelling: if you get 20,000 people paying a buck apiece for that story, that’s $20,000, with no sales overhead; most of that money can end up going to editorial."
Robin Good: LeanLaunchLab is a new web-based service which allows a team to develop and track multiple hypothesis for a business model.
The visual approach utilized by Ben Mappen, is similar to that of the Business Model Canvas of Alex Osterwalder, allows the user to easily input business model key variables and to establish task and actions to be taken.
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