Money in the archives

Fol­low­ing a recent arti­cle in Wired News about the via­bil­ity of blog­ging as a rev­enue gen­er­at­ing model, I started think­ing about the value of archival mate­r­ial to a blogger.

As read­ers of this site might have noticed when using the web inter­face, I am using the Google Ad ser­vice called AdSense. As I am not at free­dom to reveal the terms of my con­tract with them or dis­cuss spe­cific, I’ll talk in gen­eral about online adver­tis­ing programs.

The first thing to take into account is that the model on using adver­tis­ing in archives is one largely pred­i­cated on a long tail con­cept, whereas one can make more money from small incre­ment over a long run than try­ing to score the big hit. In my case, this means try­ing to get a few good sto­ries out on a reg­u­lar basis, none of which is going to make lots of money on a sin­gle day but a few cents or a few dol­lars a day can add up to quite a nice pay­off on a yearly basis. I believe that peo­ple who blog and develop a nice audi­ence can see some of those results.

Let’s take a hypo­thet­i­cal story of 1000 words. A long-standing view in the jour­nal­ism word is that a dol­lar per word is the stan­dard (I’ve seen much lower rates as a result of the down­turn in tech­nol­ogy pub­li­ca­tions but more on this later). So a writer would write the stan­dard story and get $1000 back for his or her effort. At that point, the pub­li­ca­tion would print it and/or pub­lish it on their web­site and start gen­er­at­ing rev­enue against it. The model here, is that the pub­li­ca­tion is tak­ing a risk with the writer, fronting the money and will recover the money over time. The other part of the equa­tion is that pub­li­ca­tion has a built in audi­ence and there­fore mar­kets the writer to that audi­ence. Because they mar­ket their own pub­li­ca­tion, there is sup­posed to be a halo effect that shrouds the writer into the great light of being asso­ci­ated with pub­li­ca­tion X.

The truth, how­ever, is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Unless you’re already an estab­lished brand or have a story that is of such import that it will rock the nation or the world, no one will care who the writer is. For a quick test, try to think of who were the writ­ers who wrote the front page story of any given main­stream pub­li­ca­tion this week. Let’s assume you passed that test, what else have you read by them?

By con­trast, blogs offer the writer a sin­gle plat­form. When I visit a par­tic­u­lar blog, I have a rela­tion­ship with the writer. Over time, as I visit it more, I get to know the writer’s brand. This is impor­tant because sev­eral blog­gers have already made the tran­si­tion from the blog­ging world into tra­di­tional media on the strength of their audience.

This, of course, is a role rever­sal as blog writ­ers now estab­lish their own audi­ence, decreas­ing the need for the much vaunted halo effect large pub­li­ca­tions can give them.

Going fur­ther, one has to think about the long term dol­lar (or Yuan, or Euro) value of a story. As I men­tioned above, the tra­di­tional free­lance writer hands over the story and gets paid. That’s where the money stops.

How­ever, on a blog, the story stays online. If the blog is rea­son­ably opti­mized to fig­ure promi­nently in search engines, this is where it starts hav­ing a sec­ond life. Long after a blog post has been made, it still gets traf­fic. I see this here at TNL.net on a few pop­u­lar posts cov­er­ing areas that no one else seems to have both­ered with. And this is where the incre­men­tal rev­enue start to come in.

Once the entry has adver­tis­ing on it, any rev­enue gen­er­ated from that adver­tis­ing goes to the blog writer. Ini­tially, it’s not com­pa­ra­ble to the thou­sand dol­lars the writer got from a main­stream pub­li­ca­tion but, if the entry has legs (ie, it keeps serv­ing an audi­ence), it con­tin­ues to gen­er­ate money, pretty much until one of a few pos­si­ble things happen:

• The writer decides to remove ads from his/her site
• The writer decides to remove the entry from the site
• The story has run its course and is no longer use­ful or superceded by a bet­ter one

If one writes with such a long run view, a story can gen­er­ate sev­eral times what the ini­tial pay­back was from a publication.

Another impor­tant thing, when one writes a weblog, is to ensure you pro­mote your work prop­erly. I read a num­ber of weblogs (over 300 at this time) and have got­ten famil­iar with a few of the writ­ers. If I write an entry that may be of inter­est to them, I have no qualms about drop­ping them a quick email with the link to the story and the con­tent of the full entry in it, along with a short note as to why I thought it might inter­est them. This kind of self pro­mo­tion gen­er­ally helps in dri­ving ini­tial traf­fic to the entry.

But this does not have to be some­thing that is lim­ited to blog­gers. Writ­ers can also take advan­tage of it. As per word rates have been decreas­ing, it has been eas­ier to nego­ti­ate on cer­tain terms in a con­tract. One of the terms a writer should always try to nego­ti­ate is the length of exclu­siv­ity on rights. I gen­er­ally nego­ti­ate for rights on a piece to revert to me after a cer­tain period of time (for exam­ple, exclu­sive rights being given until 90 days after ini­tial pub­li­ca­tion). Writ­ers will find that most edi­tors are more will­ing to nego­ti­ate such terms (as they have some lee­way there) than they are to increase the per word rate. Once a story is pub­lished, I then make an entry in my cal­en­dar (or in the case of the cus­tom pub­lish­ing solu­tion I have run­ning this site, in the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem itself) to pub­lish the story on the site 90 days after the first day the story was pub­lished (I check that either by hav­ing a copy of the print pub­li­ca­tion in hand or see­ing it live on their site). That con­tent then stays online for as long as I want. In some cases, it gets inter­est­ing as sto­ries I wrote years ago are get­ting a lit­tle extra traf­fic and mak­ing some extra money. It’s the fire and for­get approach.

The result is that there is a lot of money to be made in such archival con­tent, small dimes adding up to, hope­fully, full dollars.