 |
|
|
eBay for Content: Social Publishing
Models Vie for Community and Profits |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
16 January 2006 |
|
|
|
|
Would-be authors have a myriad of options for publishing on
the Web today, but few are sure-fire roads to a
professional career. In the meantime, a lot of people would
like to have their writing noticed and appreciated by an
audience without having to wrestle with traditional
publishing channels. The Gather.com platform is one new
tool that's helping amateur authors to find some modest
revenues alongside professional content in an easy-to-use
online portal that encourages ratings, feedback and
participation from its online community. It's "eBay for
content" in the minds of some - but there's more required
to make the concept work than just a database and a
friendly interface. |
|
Unless you've been at
Rip Van Winkle's slumber party you're probably aware that
just about anyone can make money writing on the Web. Grab one
free weblogging software account, insert
AdSense ads from Google and boom - instant revenue stream.
That is, if you can get someone to find your stuff on the Web.
Some get to be pretty good at this, which leads to authors like
Robin Good
and Rafat Ali at
paidContent.org being among the top 10,000 or so sites on
the Alexa
rankings - enough to create a pretty good standard of living.
Others get "discovered" by weblog impresarios such as
Jason
Calacanis or
Nick
Denton and folded into growing weblog media empires that
get fed through major portals such as Yahoo! and AOL.
And then there there's everyone else, folks who will
probably never care enough about making a living on their
writing to pay the mortgage but who have the writing bug
nevertheless. This kind of writer probably represents the
majority of the more than twenty million webloggers out there
today. People have social networking tools such as
MySpace to
share their personal life in a community and services such as
Digg and
del.icio.us
to surface popular content on the Web, but where does an
amateur or semi-pro author go to get noticed by a community of
life-minded peers?
This is where the startup
Gather is
trying to fill a gap in online publishing with a portal that is
meant to help would-be authors find their place online. The
Gather concept can be summed up in one simple phrase:
eBay for
content. Give people a place to post and tag content that can
get ratings and comments from a growing social network that
helps people to focus on content from like-minded contributors.
Let user content rub shoulders with content from mainstream
media (in this instance U.S. public radio outlets) in the same
way that eBay's online community of amateur salespeople go toe
to toe with commercial outlets for listings and rankings. Offer
authors popularity ratings that will act as airline-like point
credits towards merchant purchases some time in the Fall. This
has been enough to build a growing online authoring
community at Gather whose favorite topics include politics,
family, humor, fiction, poetry, love, short
stories, relationships and recipes..
Gather is pointing the way towards the opportunities in
creating communities around independent authors that doesn't
leave them out in the cold for Web search engines or "big time"
webloggers and media outlets to find them (or not) eventually.
Gather has some
serious financing and a number of strengths - good use of
user-generated tagging and categorization, simple and effective
tools that make it easy to tune in friends, colleages and
family members - but it seems as if many of its features could be replicated
in a flash elsewhere. What does an "eBay for content" play
need to do in an era in which self-publishing is as easy as
pie? Here are a few quick thoughts:
- Show your community the money. Authors who want an
opportunity to pay some bills around the house via their
creative efforts are going to feel left out of Gather over
time: there's no clear path to graduate from Gather to the
"big leagues" of online publishing while maintaining your
community. That will hold back the growth of both authors and
the potential value of the community as authors grow in
popularity. In eBay itself it's easy to start out very small
and to build up to as large an ecommerce operation as you're
ready to take on. Cold hard cash and sophisticated content
ecommerce schemes will be required to keep the best of the
talent that works its way into a Gather-like framework from
bolting for other venues with wider audiences.
- Show your community the rights. Gather's terms of
service state that people posting content on Gather own the
rights to the content but at the same time registrants sign
up for a perpetual, royalty-free license for Gather to
distribute and syndicate a user's content and to make
derivative works from the content. That's probably okay for
someone chipping in little tidbits to a social networking
tool but for people who consider themselves budding authors
it's a little like signing your rights away to a hit song
before it's ever had a chance to hit the charts. Even
Buddy Holly didn't fall for that one after a short lesson
or two. If you want your community to grow quickly make sure
that intellectual property rights don't cut people off from
the overnight growth in revenues that some of them doubtless
dream of.
- Show your community the openness. The beauty of a
tool such as eBay is that I can post information on the site
if I want to or need to but I can also show pages on my own
Web site within eBay for people to complete a transaction and
to get to know me better as a vendor. By contrast, Gather
tries to keep all its content on its own database. If you
have twenty million self-declared authors on the Web posting
text, audio and video clips on weblogs, wouldn't it make a
little more sense to give those authors a framework in which
they can experience an effective content ecommerce framework
individually as well as collectively? Building an
authoring community in closed technology can allow a concept
to be demoed well, but it may not be the key to fast growth.
With technologies such as
Google Base
available that make it easy for people to database just about
anything - and, soon, to commercialize it - nifty user-friendly
technology on top of a proprietary database may not be enough
to commercialize any content soon, much less that from
user-authors. Unlike the first go-around with the Web mature ad
and ecommerce capabilities will show investors pretty quickly
and clearly what will scale in revenues - or not - for a new
content play. Our best of luck to Gather's growing efforts, but
also a word of caution to anyone who has the "eBay for content"
bug: make sure that you stay wide awake every moment along the
way.
-
John Blossom
To top of
page
 |
