On Friday we publicly reached out the Know More Media bloggers, founders and team with an open letter. We didn’t do this lightly nor did we do it on a whim. After attempting to contact the founders for several days via email, skype and phone we felt there was little other option if we were going to do our best to save the value that had been created.

Over the weekend we received a lot of feedback on this letter. Some of it good, some of it bad, some of it constructive and some of it… well, not so much!

Since then, there have been a lot of comments, and a few misconceptions, but at the end of the day our goal is still the same: to help the bloggers continue doing what they love (blogging) while integrating them into our network with as little fuss or muss as possible.

First, though,  a couple of points of clarification: 

  1. While some bloggers were told certain things about the deal we attempted to broker with KMM, we need to be very clear: we never received accurte traffic or revenue data for any blog. We didn’t need it, so this isn’t a slight against the KMM crew, who have always and still do flat out rock.
  2. Know More Media is *not* offering its bloggers to take over their blogs for free as we were originally told. It is asking its bloggers to pay for their blogs. And not just to pay for them, but to pay Know More Media back the revenue they would have earned over the next year. It wouldn’t be fair for me to comment on whether this is fair or not, but given that KMM is (apparently) setting a value of 2400-3600$ for each blog … when folk ask why we don’t just buy the network outright, the reason is simple: if we wanted to spend 240-360K on the blogs, we’d prefer to invest in making it better vs simply giving the KMM founders cash for a network they are closing down.

So, where does that leave us? Well, since we can’t get an answer from KMM, our only option for taking over the network would be to buy the blogs one at a time (with all the legals and such that accompany that) and then negotiate one at a time with the bloggers. Obviously that solution doesn’t scale very well (5-10 hours per blog x 100 blogs adds up pretty quick!) … and it’s the opposite of “no fuss, no muss”!

Our new proposal is very simple, since bloggers only have 3 options (stay with KMM blogging for free hoping things work out, strike out on their own or start with another network from scratch):

If you buy your blog from KMM (they are apparently giving their bloggers a 20% discount on their blogs, which sure is nice of them) we will:

  1. Fix the Google issue for you. This isn’t an overnight fix, and will take several months to totally fix, but we’ll do the work.
  2. Give you access to our upcoming business ad network. Why is this interesting? Because 1) we let you set the minimum CPM we can sell at and 2) you give us a backup ad tag (like AdSense). This means that you tell us what you’re earning now, and we can only sell above that level. No fuss, no muss… and no risk. We’ll do it at a straight 50/50 revshare to start.
  3. Host the blog for free.
  4. Provide SEO guidance.
  5. Move the blog to WordPress (better SEO).

While we were hoping our letter would prompt the KMM founders to respond to our queries, our goal remains the same: help the KMM bloggers in any way we can (within reason, since our community of b5 bloggers will always be our #1 priority and we can’t get distracted from supporting them!), and do it with as little fuss or muss as possible.

Hopefully this solution is simpler, clearer and more bereft of fussiness and mussiness.

If not, we’re open to other options!

FYI, my email address is jeremy@b5media.com, feel free to reach out privately if you want to chat as well!

Edits: fixed typographical/editing issues in “while we were hoping” paragraph (and removed duplicate paragraph)

Update: I’ve just received a brief note from the KMM senior team basically asking for a few days to get back to us, which is more than fair. It’s possible nothing may come of this, but I did want to note that they have now responded!