Gather.com is touted by Boston Globe as a common blogging playground, which will share its ad revenues with the authors. The compensation formula is still being decided on, and it looks like a few top authors would get a check in the mail, while the mere mortals would just get some “points” applicable towards a purchase in an online store.
The site raised $6 mln of venture capital, and so far its top-rated article is someone’s plan to go to France in the near future. I expected to see a traditional AdSense honeypot scheme, but apparently they rolled their own ad system, and the writers will be rated on the amount of pageviews they produced.
So everything old is new again. Nack in the days Epinions, in an effort to generate some quality content, was paying 10c per visit from a registered member of the site who read your review on the Epinions. Which quickly led to the I-rate-you-you-rate-me circles popping up here and there. There was some guy on Epinions back in 1999-2000 with fairly average reviews (although he’s written thousands and thousands of them for every specific product one could imagine) who claimed to be getting monthly five-digit payout check from Epinions in some related message boards. Any time some monetary incentive is created based on the pageview model, one can expect those automatic visit generation engines to rev up.
Jason Calacanis of WebLogs, Inc. also thinks the good authors will go with existing established networks that have guaranteed traffic and (perhaps) higher initial payout.
Gather.com seems to have the same problem that any other startup that relies on user-generated content has. When you enroll people to write content for your site, the same content that you plan to wrap with those friendly ad blocks, you get two types of authors:
- good ones
- bad ones
Obviously any company would love to go for the first type of audience and have the second one stay pre-moderated in the submission queue somewhere. However, the good authors have two choices, when contemplating the place to publish their stuff:
- their site
- your site
Obviously, the case #2 is in the business plans of almost all user-generated-content startups out there, but frequently there just isn’t enough incentive. Especially when the revenues are “shared”. If good author chooses his own site for publishing, he gets a 100% cut of whatever amount of pageviews/clicks the content generates. If it’s on a site with “shared” revenue model, it’s frequently funded through the same AdSense/YPN/AdBrite ad network that’s accessible to any other author out there, and unless there’s a high amount of guaranteed traffic (rarely a case with startups and those beta sites out there), it’s rarely worth it.
Great piece Alex, you’ve really crystallized what my site, Blogcritics.org, thinks about when it views the playing field. Because we’re grassroots based, we offer no monetary compensation to writers but what we think is even more valuable (because, let’s face it, writers are not going to make much of anything at Gather) in terms of free review materials, a great community, full editing services, guidance in story suggestions, etc. We think this brings value to us as well as member “home sites” (articles most often are published to both the home site and Blogcritics). So we have super low overhead and have built upon knowledge from being around for 3.5 years.
It all goes back to the value proposition you’ve mentioned: how to draw good authors to your (good, hopefully) site while bringing in readers to find them? So the value must be there for both writers and readers. It’s a tough nut to crack, and I very much doubt a model of paying writers straight off will be the key that turns that lock.
Eric Berlin
Executive Producer
Blogcritics.org
I should add, of course, that we offer exposure to a much larger audience than individual writers could expect to attract themselves!