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.

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.

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!

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.