The four models for paying journalists
I will try to summarize the three main models of paying journalists for the news they bring to the public:
1. Regular Pay: The safest option. Alas, the print advertising money that paid your salary is shrinking under the onslaught of the internet.
The problem is acute enough so that even journalism teachers are starting to
question this noble profession.
2. Micropayments: Where your readers pay you on each article read basis. Micropayment was once believed to offer reader and the writer a more flexible option than subscriptions. However, so far, no one has found a hassle free method of making micropayments.
3. Public Support: This method is currently in vogue. Web sites such as Newassignment.net have come up, channelizing outside funding to journalists who want to do investigative reporting.
Although, it appears sound (and noble as well) in nature,
the big problem is:
Who gets the money?
Since there can be an indeterminate number of people in any ongoing investigation, proportioning money can be hard. Harder than doing the investigative work itself :-)
4. Advertising: Many journalists (Oma Malik, Rafat Ali) who have left their mainstream media jobs to start their own largely blog-based news sites and blog networks find the ad model appealing.
This is something that they can easily implement - book a domain, set up wordpress, add all the necessary accessories, sign up for Google Adsense, paste the code provided by Google and Voila! You are set.
However, since the ad model is the easiest, it is also the hardest to stand you from the huge crowd.
To succeed using the ad model, you will need to:Find a profitable niche, develop a unique voice and work hours building and nurturing your target audience - commenting on other blogs, participating on forums etc. It is a long slog.
I am sure there are other models to pay journalists. Please share.
{Note: Model No. 1, the Pay Model is thriving here in India, where the print media is projected to make more money as a booming economy and a young, upwardly mobile demographic means that more Indians have access to reading matter than ever before. More on this, later]
Labels: adsense, blogging, citizen journalism, journalism, news, news business, online journalism
There are worse things online than adsense
I have gone through
Nick Carr’s recent takes on the new browser plug in Adblockplus and how it may go nuclear for Google and I can see Microsoft smirking around the corner.
I can detect the dilemma in Nick’s mind, him being a far-seeing thinker and all, who thinks
ad– blocking may be immoral, using the free stuff on web publishers’ sites without any personal overhead, when most online publishers are not in Wikipedia’s position –
Paypal donations are far and few and Micropayments never took off.But, eventually, the so-called
hypocritical purist in Nick takes over and he concludes that even Jesus would abandon the ‘Vegas style’ ad-splattered Net and use Ad block plus.
I bet some ad block plus copycat would be using this tagline in his adwords campaign soon.
If Jesus were to use Ad Block plus, he would be batting for the big online publishers and websites and the old way of 'big site+ display ad deals+ payment only mode' will be back in vogue and that would mean that the old adage of ‘ God works for the rich’ would indeed be still be true.
Besides, the net would be taking a few steps back.
I haven’t tried it, but if Adblockplus is for blocking adsense type ads only, then it is a positive case of
‘wrong product, wrong category’.Granted that there are made for adsense sites and blogs, spam/rewriting blog networks, and many advertisers are conned by spurious publishers but this is taking it too far and commentators ought to get off their high horses.
Try all you can, but the old and pure early 90s type ad-free,WELL-era net is not going to come back.
Jesus would be loving it that information and communication has become more widely and cheaply available to ‘commoners’ instead of some elite user base operating in the United States.
As it is, people who don’t click on adsense can be seen using and evangelizing Adblock plus, to cosmetic effects in this case.
There are worse things online and offline than adsense.
How about Spamblock plus? How about Spamblockplus on social networking sites?
How about Popupblockplus, Keywordpopupadplusplus, telemarketerblockplus…?
Labels: adsense, advertising. online advertising, controversey, trends
The dark side of adsense
The New York Times has done a story on companies that own vacant web sites with generic names, and which are earning obscene amounts of money from advertising including adsense.
Called the
direct navigation market, this maze of
vacant shopfronts with generic names as photography.com (and as many variants possible), did a business of more than $800 million in advertising in 2006 and is slated to earn $1.1 billion through advertising support from Google and Yahoo.
The NYT story says about these domain squatters plan to add content in alliance with relevant sites and I wonder what Google has to say about duplicate content.
Last year, Google’s revenue was $10.604 billion.
One company, NameMedia owns more than 725,000 Web sites.
Moreover, some of these companies may go for IPOs as well - yes indeed, things are that good.
But, this is as serious as spam blogs.
In case of spam blogs, genuine content owners suffer, and with direct navigation advertising, advertisers have to deal with yet another gatekeeper.
Consider these facts about Adsense:
1. Adsense is not effective on quality columns, opinion pieces, and long investigative pieces.
To make adsense work, you will have to have a single focus blog, meaning one blog per topic, making lives of good writers really difficult.
The hugely popular Guy Kawasaki (How to Save the world) blog did not make Guy a rich guy and Guy is a savvy self-promoter.
2. Adsense enriches spammers and rewriters more than anybody else – watch the spread of gadget and gossip blogs.
3.
Clickability is a curse, seducing site owners to create sites tailored for the old, kids and newbies – designing pages in a way that makes it hard for unoriented people to distinguish between content and advertising.
It leads you believe that Google’s ‘Don’t evil’ is a smart PR slogan, and nothing more.
Labels: adsense, advertising. online advertising, google
