Yepic - Another Way for Blogging to Pay?
Yepic launched in beta yesterday as a marketplace for information. Technically it seems fairly complete with categories, tags, reviews, ratings and reviews for content or authors; a system for buyers to request content; a collaboration system; and a payment system. Co-founders Richard Tripp and Corey Davis position the versatile platform as a means for bloggers to get paid for premium content. Will it fly?
They believe blogging promotes writing that is too brief, leaving their readers wanting—and to willing pay for—custom elaboration from their favorite bloggers. Yepic aims to be intermediary for that premium content. In their marketing (see first comment), they cite the examples of Michael Arrington and Guy Kawasaki as bloggers they’d be willing to pay $50 to read more from. With financial enticement and the mediation of their platform, this otherwise unmet consumer demand could be satisfied.
I admire their romantic ideals but I don’t think the Arringtons and Kawasakis of the world will bother. What Yepic proposes is group buy consulting. After all, anybody really wanting a slice of someone else’s writing, time, thinking will propose a consulting arrangement. It may not be on the menu but neither is the invitation to slip the bouncer or maitre’d a bill or two. The guru bloggers make serious coin from creating content for a mass audience--or from other activities, like venture capital, that the blogging merely supports. Do they really want to take nickle and dime engagements that could muck up their profitable throughput? Could they if they wanted to? It’s like asking Sara Lee or Nestle to bake you a cake with your choice of flavors. If you offer them enough money, eg aggregate enough demand, then maybe they’d flinch. But then that’s the $50 K speaking engagement or $10 K consulting contract.
If you break this leg of the marketing stool what does Yepic have? The other legs are pretty well covered by well-positioned sites with healthy activity:
Elance, guru, and Get A Freelancer exist for the (small) business person seeking writing aka custom information and freelancers supplying it; Microsoft QnA, Yahoo! Answers, Google Answers, and WikiHow exist for the average joe; Experts Exchange for IT matters; Craigslist writing gigs for urbanites. There’s always niche boards--you’d probably learn more about SEO from browsing WebmasterWorld or Search Engine Watch forums than a $1 article on SEO from Yepic and they’re free; and boards search engines like BoardTracker. Then of course, there’s Google.
If there is to be a niche for Yepic, it will either sit between elance and QnA; supplement the likes of craigslist writing gigs much as craigslist supplements dedicated real estate or wants ad systems; or join About in serving up info muzak. Maybe just as there is demand - and supply - for free custom info, there might also be such for $1 or $10 info; slightly challenging questions on QnA often receive no or simply unsatisfactory answers. The person in a rush - or too lazy to search - and the inexpensive English thinker overseas might strike a micro-bargain.
With their main leg broken IMHO, they'd better re-aim their message. That's the number one issue. Number two is getting enough content to seed the supply of articles. Yelp's and HowTo's self-seeding is a good example to follow. The best example to follow is eSnips, the new marketplace for arts and crafts who under the guise of digital storage has quietly amassed one million digital dumpers.
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November 11th, 2006 22:01
Hi Minger:
This is great feedback that I need to stew on a bit more. Hope you don’t mind if I ping you offline for some more discussion on our positioning.
I really appreciate the way your post leads with the capabilities of Yepic’s platform. In the end, we designed it to give the users control over the direction of Yepic, and although we think there’s a high level of compatibility between Yepic and the blogging community, we didn’t mean to position it exclusively that way. Our press release–to which Leslie was responding at Fast Company’s blog–admittedly focuses, perhaps overly so, on bloggers.
Regarding Arrington and Kawasaki, I agree with everything you said, given the way you framed it up. If I had their clout and following, I’d have little to no interest in doing one-offs with individuals that netted me just a few bucks (unless, of course, those one-offs yielded insights into broader demand trends I could capitalize on). But framed differently I think there’s a very attractive model for the Arrington’s and Kawasaki’s of the bloggosphere: It’s likely that every question I have for Arrington and Kawasaki is shared by tens of thousands of other readers. The guys over at 37 Signals blogged at Signals vs. Noise for a long time before they decided to start selling a book on their software design principles. The downloadable PDF version of “Getting Real” sells for $19 and has already sold more than 20,000 copies. Readers can read the book online for free (the link to read the free online book is right next to the downloadable $19 PDF, if you can believe that) and they’re still buying that much!
Could Arrington use Yepic’s content request tools to quantify what types of topics his readers are wanting more of and then use that info to craft a rich offering that sold for $19? You bet he could. And publishing with Yepic would be far superior to publishing a PDF. PDFs don’t support audio and video. PDFs go stale and run into versioning problems when you want to update the content. And, perhaps most crucial, PDFs aren’t particularly well suited to gathering user feedback and facilitating collaboration. Yepic is. We knew the moment we conceived of the idea that the marketplace couldn’t be separate from the content-creation tools that Web 2.0 users have gotten used to. We knew we had to blend them so the information people were paying for could be alive in the same way Wikipedia articles are alive. It’s this blend of a marketplace with “living” content-creation and publishing tools that we think constitutes the primary differentiation between Yepic and several of the services you mentioned above.
Arrington noted in a Nov. 3 WSJ article (TechCrunch Makes Arrington A Power Broker) how, in spite of TechCrunch’s current $120,000/month in gross revenues, he’s “never made any real money.”
Your point about “nickle and dime engagements” is compelling. What about $400,000 engagements? I can think of 3 pieces of content Arrington could write and publish on Yepic that I’d pay $19 for. How many of his hundreds of thousands of readers feel the same way I do?
Just as important, how many bloggers are there who have small but loyal audiences who feel the same way about them? How many bloggers could create a mini-publication and sell it to their readers for $2-5?
I think you’re absolutely right that Yepic needs to focus on our Q&A platform, and I’m highly intrigued by your other suggestions (supplemental info or info muzak), but I’m still very convinced that bloggers have an enormous opportunity with the Yepic platform.
November 12th, 2006 15:48
Richard,
Can the masses agree exactly on what they want? Do they say we want to hear more about startup advice, pay $19 and wait for delivery? Unrealistic.
The 37 Signals example you cite goes against your model in many ways. They decided at some point that they had enough experience and writing to put together a comprehensive document and pushed it out to the masses. For free, and for everybody. The reader who liked it then decided if they wanted to pay the $19 for PDF convenience. They did what was natural on their own schedule. Could they publish on demand? More than once a year? Would people pay in advance for idea clouds unseen, unread?
Newspapers and books are published everyday without soliciting explicit reader feedback, yet mechanisms do exist. That’s the leader-follower dualistic dynamic of the editorial process.
PDFs do go stale. That’s why we have blogs and YouTube. If you want to segment your audience, do what Danny Sullivan did with SEW by creating premium subscriptions. People make one decision on whether to subscribe or not. Neither Danny or his readers want to vote on what they read. They cast one vote. Aaron Wall’s SEOBook includes updates if I am not mistaken. It’s not clear to me that the problems you perceive don’t have perfectly good solutions. Why do these gurus need the straitjacket of a middleman? You system could work at the low end as I described at my post. Not at the high end. If you are thinking the speaker’s bureau middleman model, think about why it exists, why those problems don’t exist here.
Remember Chapter Two of Getting Real: Build Less!
November 12th, 2006 18:40
Hi Minger:
Thanks for the great feedback. I just wanted to clarify a couple of points with you: No one pays in advance for anything on Yepic. I’m not sure where you got that idea.
Also, the model you described for 37 Signals is precisely the model we hope bloggers will use with Yepic. Hundreds of thousands of them have well-springs of content they’ve been carefully developing over the years, content their readers would happily pay for. Instead of offering a PDF, however, we hope they’ll create links on their blogs to Yepic articles they’ve authored: articles that can be dynamically updated, contain video and audio, and be sold.
Thanks again for the coverage on your blog.
November 12th, 2006 18:56
Richard:
Yepic has the capability to resell existing content and a mechanism for readers to request new content. I was thinking of the latter, the thousands of readers asking Arrington to write something bespoke. That’s a work for hire agreement, surely Colin Powell would not show up at a convention to give a speech and let the listeners decide afterwards whether he deserves his $50 K or not. The writers demanded of new content will want money upfront before committing their time.
Your site is a Swiss Army knife of many capabilities. I’ll be curious in the coming months how you position the rich feature set.