A Personal Blog
Archive for February, 2007
Sensible Background on b5media's New Pay Structure
Feb 28th
After all the recent hoopla around blogger pay (specifically b5media pay), it’s great to hear Shai chime in with the perfect response.
Among her points is our core of focussing on community, running everything through our bloggers for approval first, valuing our bloggers, training and all kinds of other things. She also responds to a great post by Abe with his suggestions on how we could improve our pay structure with the following:
- Better starting payout – b5 now has a flat fee payment that enables new bloggers to make money from the start – and not “when your blog starts to make money”. And, at the same time, rewards blogs/bloggers who’ve been around longer.
- Traffic Bonus – Yep, we’ve now got this in place too, on top of the flat fee payment. It’s a tough one that we had to talk about (there are more issues here than network owners would care to think about!) over and over. But, hopefully, we’ve got a scheme in place at the moment that covers different types of blogs.
- Seniority Bonus – Apart from the “natural” benefit of being around longer (e.g., more links, more content, etc. and therefore, more traffic), we’ve addressed this via our sliding flat fee scale.
- Performance Bonus – This is tougher to quantify, but we’re definitely developing systems within the network to address this. We do believe that bloggers who work harder should get more in return. We’ve even recently conducted surveys network-wide to give us an idea on how to address some of the issues and challenges here.
- Travel & Training – Nope, we’re not paying for people to go to the Bahamas or to send them to Blog Cruises just yet (Hey, I’m a VP/co-owner and I haven’t even been anywhere yet! ). But, we’re a network that actually believe in growth so we even have a specific department for this: Training and Development, headed by no other than Darren Rowse, Mr. Problogger, himself. And, he’s now going full time for b5 too! Can’t reveal everything that’s happening here, but it’s definitely happening.
- Schwag Bags – Again, we’re right at ‘ya. Part of my job as a VP for Community is actually to look at all these non-monetary, non-direct network blogger benefits. We’ve been chatting – and working out plans – about b5 schwags even as I type this. No, we don’t have masses of money alloted to this. But, we’ve definitely looked at our budget seriously enough to make sure that we are on to finding ways to reward our bloggers far beyond than cheques and PayPal payments.
It’s a great read if this is something you’ve been following. Just one of a thousand reasons I’m so proud to work with Shai!
What's the Weirdest Spam You Get?
Feb 27th
Everyone gets spam. Lots of it. Personally, I get about 2000-3000 spam items per day. Disgusting. Thankfully, Outlook 2007 does a stupidly fantastic job at dealing with it.
Still, some gets through.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a disturbring increase in a particular kind of spam. It gets through the filters, which is bad enough. But it’s just so completely out there, I really have to wonder how I got on whatever list this is!
No, it’s not erection stuff. Everone gets those. Nor is it breast enhancements (my man boobs are fine, thank you very much). It’s not even nude midget mud wrestling (or any other kind of porn).
It’s airline industry spam.
And lots of it.
5-10 items a day from the airline industry on new announcements, breakthroughs, airline purchases, etc. It’s crazy! Crazy I tell you!
Today’s latest item was how Atlanta Jet is buying 2 new Cessna’s.
It’s sick! Sick I tell you! ;-)
So, what’s the weirdest spam you get? Can you top airline spam? ;-)
BlogNetworkCamp @ SXSW
Feb 27th
Ahhhh….
A good night sleep can do you wonders. For whatever reason, I spent much of yesterday severely on edge. It happens. Not often to me, but it does happen.
Anyways, there’s some decent discussion happening around the blogging world about how blog networks should pay bloggers. Some good discussion. Hell, it’s great discussion. Stirring up good ideas, which is great for network owners as well as bloggers. All good stuff.
In order to further this, we’ll be doing a blog network get-together at South By Southwest (SXSW: www.sxsw.com) in a few weeks. Some of the b5 crew’ll be there for the Interactive portion (ie: 9-13th). So we’re inviting anyone interested in doing some more brainstorming to join us. I know the 451press guys are coming. I’m hoping some of the 9rules crew will come as well. If you’re a network owner, blogger or just feel you have something valuable to add, you’re invited. We’ll likely do it on the 11th, as that’ll give us some time to scope out a spot. Probably around 7:00pm.
If you’re interested, leave a comment here, as this’ll serve as the RSVP list.
Some potential topics of conversation:
- Better ways to pay bloggers
- Infrastructure requirements of a growing blog network
- How to sell ads in today’s online ad environment
- Challenges of 2007
- Ways to collaborate (or not)
And who knows what else. Feel free to add to the potential subject list (hell, if someone wants to setup a wiki somewhere that’d be cool too). I’m not expecting this to be a big deal. I’d be surprised if more than a dozen folk showed up. It’s just that it’s rare to have so many blog network folk in the same town, and the least we can do is some sharing, whinging and drinking while we’re there ;-)
If it helps, b5′ll pay for a reasonable amount of alcohol and snacks for everyone since we’re hosting :-)
What Powers Your Company?
Feb 26th
Pingdom recently ran a survey of 7 massive sites to see what they used behind the firewall.
I find a lot of this fascinating. For example, that TechCrunch only runs on 2 servers. I’d be scared crapless of running what is effectively a million-dollar/year business on anything less than 5 servers (2 web, 2 DB, 1 other) for fear that it’d go down. I mean, if you’re doing a million dollars a year in revenue, then every hour of downtime costs you about 150$. To me, a handful of servers is worth it to alleviate that risk.
By and large, though, most of these larger sites:
1. Run on Apache, PHP and MySQL 2. Use clustering of the webservers and database servers to avoid downtime 3. Most would seem to prefer to scale the hardware vs tuning extensively
Personally I think it’d be fantastically interesting to see how other blog media companies structure their server infrastructure. Not just blog networks, but companies like 9rules and such as well. Not to say “oh we’re better” (I’m an old school enterprise IT guy, so our server infrastructure is almost overkill), but just because we all face such similar challenges and looking at how everyone solves those challenges would probably mean everyone would learn a bit.
I’ve pinged David Krug at 901am to see if he’s interested in doing this (as I think having an impartial person run it would be better than one of the blog media companies). We’ll see if he answers.
Even if nobody else is game, I might ping Aaron later on this week to see if he wants to effectively do a version of the Pingdom survey based on b5′s infrastructure (to give a view into what runs the network).
Of course the irony of this is that we got absolutely slammed traffic-wise today (a dozen different things happened, and we went 50% over our capacity (which has 50% spare capacity vs what we normally use) and were down for an hour or two. I figure if you’re going to go down, going down because an extra few hundred thousand folk are trying to hit the sites is a pretty good reason ;-)
I’m not sure Aaron found it as entertaining as I did when the network went down. Which is good, since it’s his job to keep it up, heh.
Does Anyone Pay Bloggers Enough? (Or: Yeah, I Take Things Personally Sometimes)
Feb 26th
I’ve had a few people email and IM me saying my post earlier today came across really defensively and that I missed the point.
First, they say that all bloggers deserve to earn more. I completely agree. It’s one of the reasons you’ll be seeing us aggressively phase out AdSense this year (unless AdSense does some kind of major change).
Second, they say most ad programs available to most bloggers don’t pay enough. Again, I completely agree. About the only program out there that I really applaud for raising how much bloggers can earn is Text Link Ads (no affiliate link). These guys took something that was already selling well, and centralized it so bloggers could earn more money with less work. Gotta love that.
Third, they say that most bloggers could make more if they put in more time and used the resources available out there (on sites like Problogger.net). Again, I agree. If a blogger works their butts off, they can easily earn a fantastic income.
Fourth, they say that the criticism of the blog network industry is that things are slow to change. I agree.Gawker and WIN, while both fantastic networks haven’t done a lot to innovate. In fact, most networks generally follow their model of content + bloggers=cash. Instablogs and 9rules are two networks doing some great new things (to be fair, 9rules would say they aren’t a blog network… I’m not saying they are, but they’re in the same neighborhood and not acknowledging the cool stuff they’re doing that blog networks *should* emulate wouldn’t be fair).
Did I get my panties in a twist this week? Sure. Mainly because 1) I believe that the blog media industry is doing a fantastic job growing its reach, revenue and in serving its readers and 2) because while we were slow to innovate last year, we’ve done a tonne this year already to push things forward.
Basically, I got defensive and took things personally when I shouldn’t have.
If your critiques are in the above 4, then you’re right.
Effectively, I’d boil this down to: damnit, bloggers as a whole need to earn more money. And damnit, I wish there was a better way to monetize both smaller blogs (think Text Link Ads, but for display ads – easier to do, more money, less intrusive) as well as for larger blogs (the number of blogs with 500K-2M pageviews/month who are earning less than 1500$ is mind blowing).
Was I defensive? Sure. Are the above 4-5 critiques accurate? Sure. Does b5 deserve to be criticized when we fuck up? Of course. It’s probably just that this hit on 2 of my biggest pet peeves: people who criticize without offering a solution, and people who criticize as fact instead of opinion.
My bad on taking it personally. The discussion on paying bloggers more is an important one. Our new pay structure is a big first step in that direction. But it is just a first step.
