Transitioning from free to pay

So why shouldn’t this work? After all, the move into internet television – or streaming broadcast – seems to have worked out for Hulu and Netflix just fine. I’d say the problem is that those companies aren’t the right comparison. YouTube should instead be studying the example of print publishers, who have to-date struggled and largely failed to transition from longstanding free models to hybrid paid subscription/advertising models. It’s a potentially massive roadblock for YouTube’s plan. How do you get audiences to start paying for the same product that you’ve always given them for free? The decision to allow free access not only went a long way toward effectively killing newspaper subscriptions for the hard copy product, but more than that, also gave newspaper and magazine readers an attitude of entitlement when it came to online content. The entire industry trained readers to expect their product to be free, and so attempting to reverse course is understandably proving difficult. Newspapers have since tried every permutation of bundling free apps and print subscriptions with their online subscriptions, and those efforts have met with largely lukewarm levels of success. So the big question is whether it will be simply too late for YouTube as well.

Little advantage for existing brands

Also dogging YouTube’s paid offering so far is the lack of much in the way of big-name paid-programming. For example, Comcast – the owner of NBC Universal – has yet to sign on for YouTube’s latest venture at all. And while YouTube is wildly popular, content providers are generally not happy with the cut Google takes of revenue, which can be as much as 45 percent. Those same providers are also not thrilled with the obstacles to branding that YouTube imposes, such as claiming rights to its content. And even if you’re one of the lucky few that maintains a popular and established channel, it’s questionable whether YouTube offers the best platform for controlling your content, audience or brand. After all, as the middleman Google has complete control over the relationship with the viewer. As an instructive example of the ineffectiveness of branding on YouTube, just look at the number of  videos that try to explain and teach smaller content creators and advertisers how to use YouTube itself. Even these how-to-brand-on-YouTube videos get lost among themselves in a kind of meta-vortex, their only distinguishing factor being view counts. In short, even videos about branding on YouTube have a problem branding themselves! When it comes to video, YouTube faces much of the same problem that Facebook does for everything else: Just because you are fabulously popular with the public as a free site doesn’t mean you’ll be a slam-dunk source of lead generation, content monetization, or other potential revenue for brands.

Stiff competition for web entertainment dollars

YouTube – heck, even the whole of the internet itself – has thrived in an era where cheap, easy and disposable content has ruled: In the land of Jenna Marbles and MysteryGuitarMan, the free and transient are king. Now that the collective web has unearthed some of these oddities, YouTube is hoping that you’ll actually start paying to watch them. As more serious content creators get more serious about the web as the prime medium of engagement, these stars will have to survive in a new market of truly premium competition for the “web entertainment dollar.” To put it bluntly, the same video that may have once seemed like a great way to waste a minute is not necessarily the same one a viewer would pay a few dollars for. If you’re a company that wants to tightly control your brand, its assets, and the revenue you generate, can you really afford to be YouTube’s Dramatic Guinea Pig? Sean Barger is CEO of Equilibrium, a developer of automated media productions.  Have an idea for a post you’d like to contribute to GigaOm? Click here for our guidelines and contact info.

The world of adtech has become increasingly complex and hard to navigate. The parts of the value chain rendered by the (in)famous Lumascape have been increasingly atomized: There’s ad serving, data/DMP, SSPs, exchanges and then a host of ancillary technologies such as ad formats and viewability. And that’s just for display! Add in media types such as mobile and video and it’s enough to have publishers crying out for help in the form of integrated adtech stacks – one-stop shops that they can do business with. The good news is that such a convenient system exists. The bad, in the eyes of many publishers I’ve dealt with at least, is that there’s only one player in town. And that player, Google, also happens to be a competitor.

Adtech finally merits high-level attention

One development that has been a pleasant surprise is that the topic of adtech strategy has begun to merit board-level discussion at major media companies. While it was often dealt with at the operational, ad ops and revenue ops levels in the past, it has been elevated in importance to the point where major adtech players are invited now to present to boards and discuss partnerships at that level.

But it shouldn’t have surprised me: Digital revenues are now material for most traditional media companies.

The prospect of streamlined adtech stack

Google has systematically assembled an integrated tech stack in digital advertising on both the buy and sell sides, offering publishers the tantalizing prospect of working with just one partner. Google’s army of account managers will then try to cross-sell and up-sell all kinds of solutions as well as bundle in content distribution and monetization on YouTube and their other properties. Yet, perhaps ironically, Google’s early success in building out an integrated stack is driving the industry’s transition.

Agencies and publishers alike rightfully view Google with trepidation thanks to the suspicion that they’re being strategically exposed by having the lifeblood of their media business (and all of the associated data) flow through Google – which also happens to compete with them. After all, imagine the power Google would have over one’s business: from driving traffic via Google Search, news, Android and YouTube to knowing one’s data via Analytics and advertising information via the various DoubeClick and AdX products. (I know, I know: They do no evil. Right.)

One major European publisher told me, in a moment of hyberbole: “We see [Google] as a Death Star and want to have our own weapons against them.” Alas, while there are a plethora of weapons, there aren’t the end-to-end ones that this publisher would like to see to counter the Big G.

Options

The good news for publishers is the market will go their way in terms of having greater convergence of tech stacks and more consolidation, ultimately offering more choice when it comes to adtech solutions. While Microsoft tried this but has pulled back of late, there are others that have been active developing solutions of their own.

For instance, WPP has been very active in putting its own digital marketing stack together via acquisitions that are focused more on the buy side for marketers and publishers. Adobe has also been active in a converged approach, but admittedly with seemingly limited success thus far. There are independent companies waiting in the wings as well, but their current lack of liquidity has been preventing them from doing all but acqi-hire–scale consolidation in recent years.

This will change as some of them go public in the next 12-18 months and get the currency with which they can make their own acquisitions (or grow organically to round out their offering). At that point there will be a frenzied game of  musical chairs, where companies compete for the most prized assets – the prospect of which is already setting the hearts of tech bankers racing.

Back to the person that worried about Google’s Deathstar-like capabilities: He went on to say that they actually have two Deathstars that they need to arm up against – the second one being the Agencies (but we’ll save that for another post).

Rags Gupta is chief commercial officer at Videoplaza, a sell-side video ad management platform based in London; he is also on the board of Rollup Media. Prior to that, he was an early executive at Brightcove and started his career in digital media at Live365.

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It’s important to note that Twitter  is a platform, not a news service, and also that regardless, no one outlet can control the internet anyway: That’s the beauty and curse of the beast. So when news breaks it’s about two things: accuracy and distribution.  Right now we’re stuck with a drunk leaf blower in a flour factory. I’ll be the first to champion these tools as platforms for change, opportunity and knowledge sharing, but it has become clear we – and especially the reeling news media – are in need of a system that helps Twitter et al sort through the haze of breaking news and get the facts straight, faster. The current model and tools are not clearing things up – they are adding to the mess.

A centralized, collaborative evidence table

Sifting through the mountains of analysis on the bombings alone, I couldn’t help but think of the customized Twitter Nascar hashtag page that was put together in 2011, and how it tied in nicely with the New Yorker digital “evidence table” it describes for Reddit users. So one first step I propose is a one-stop place or system in times of important news or mass emergency. Literally just a single agreed upon place to gather the facts, or a system of checks and balances free from speculation. Like a central hub for help to be channeled and extra information provided – a bit like an active Storify stream.

This feels like a simple fix to a complicated problem at the source. Clearly there are huge questions about who administers it, but one thing is clear: It must be solitary and held to a strict code that is pre-agreed upon, possibly among a cross-collaboration of the major newspapers. For instance, each might host the same page so traffic stays where the trust is with the user.  There is no speculation: Simple fact dissemination and information being released – only after  it is verified – so that the news-consuming public has a go-to source that is consistent.

The ability to deal with errors

Imagine if Twitter or Facebook could lower the relevancy of an incorrect tweet or post in real-time so that bad information was less likely to be seen. Reddit and pals is a more difficult kettle of fish because of their very nature.  We will need to help them help themselves by providing clear information in order for them to do what they do best – engage with it.

The Atlantic wrote recently about the need to undo things on Twitter because it is currently a one-way system that, while capable of self-correcting over time, is pretty flawed when it comes to doing so in the moment. And so we need a system that enables users to revoke or modify what has been said so that it is instantly identifiable. Internet fundamentalists find this idea uncomfortable but many I suspect would cherish the ability to be alerted to incorrect information so the continued dissemination of knowingly false info can be minimized.  A technical nightmare sure, but something to work towards.

A need for innovation and cooperation

Right now big data is not being used or harnessed by news organization beyond visualization or longer-form pieces but I imagine a time (and not too far in the future either) when we see news outlets using Twitter and company in a much smarter fashion than simply looking at volume spikes and “first-grabs.”  So for instance, outlets might soon use data to predict, locate and activate “sleeper-unit” journalists (and trained citizen journalists) who are armed with Facetime technology – or simply volunteer individuals streaming through a phone that a news outlet is able to instantly locate via GPS. It’s interesting to note that Twitter has just appointed its first Data Editor who is charged with “explain[ing] how this phenomenon works.”

We have two options when it comes to “fixing” truly crucial news and real-time mass events: 1) Assume that what we’re doing now works but will need a few tweaks, or;  2) Realize that our current system is no longer tenable and so needs a complete overhaul. Any honest appraisal will quickly come to the brutal truth that the current system is failing, and so needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. In the short term, we will need to move toward something like a system of “Flash tweets:” site-wide notifications, that simultaneously tweet, post, alert, offer a donation system, etc to news sites when major events transpire. I’d like to see a system like this fleshed out by the social juggernauts as they further flex their news muscles.

Paul Armstrong is founder of  Digital Orange Consulting. Contact him via paularmstrong.net, or on Twitter @paul__armstrong or @TheMediaIsDying.

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Photo courtesy Edward Meyer.

Community-inspired initiatives, much like journalism, need a sense of purpose, passion and objective urgency – the ability to look unflinchingly at a subject and capture it in a way that’s surprising and insightful. With that in mind, here’s how some of the most popular communities and social networks are experimenting with original content — and what works and doesn’t.

Tumblr

Storyboard sought to surface and report on interesting stories and users within the Tumblr community, applying a kind of branded journalism and marketing mix that’s becoming increasingly commonplace.

The failure of Storyboard was in its inability to find an editorial voice that resonated in the community. Tumblr users communicate with a pidgin lexicon of reaction GIFs, memes, and blog entries, but Storyboard took a more print-oriented approach. The content (and layout) was reminiscent of an in-flight magazine, as if trying to sell the reader on a particular destination.

Of course, Storyboard did produce a variety of laudable content in partnership with esteemed publishers, most notably its Letters from Newtown project with Mother Jones and WNYC’s look inside the New York Times morgue (and the Daily Dot syndicated a significant number of Storyboard articles). But the numbers don’t lie and Storyboard’s most popular posts hover around just 6,000 notes – surely a factor in the decision to shutter it.

Facebook

Like Storyboard, Facebook Stories is a branded editorial effort that relies on publishing partners and user submissions. Last month, former managing editor Dan Fletcher proclaimed the social network “doesn’t need reporters,” because there’s “no more engaging content Facebook could produce than you talking to your family and friends.” To be blunt, it’s almost as if Fletcher hasn’t seen a typical Facebook post. The most talked about pages on the social network are dominated by image spam and mindless posts about “teen swag.”

The greater  problem with Facebook Stories has been one of approach. It publishes monthly, a bizarre strategy that utterly defies the very best characteristics of the site and is obviously in direct conflict with the online ethos. Content on Facebook is instantaneous and reactionary; it’s about celebrating small moments not just milestones, and any editorial effort should mirror that.

Facebook Stories needs to take a cue from Upworthy – a comparable editorial effort centered on inspiring content – and focus less on presentation and more on how content should be packaged and shared. 

YouTube

YouTube made headlines when it invested $200 million in original channels and programming last January. Then, after cutting its losses on 70 percent of those recipients, it promptly dropped another $100 million in November. The few shows that actually succeeded – most notably, Philip DeFranco’s SourceFed, Felicia Day’s Geek and Sundry channel, and the VlogBrothers’ Crash Course – were the ones that understood how to connect specifically with a YouTube audience and what makes content succeed on the platform. Notably, none of them are TV veterans.

The quick lesson is you can’t fake authenticity on YouTube, and celebrity status often doesn’t translate to subscriber counts. The content has to be immediate and impactful. As Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers (SciShow, CrashCourse) noted in a recent Tumblr post:  ”Online video isn’t about how good it looks, it’s about how good it is.”

LinkedIn

The career-oriented network is oddly the rare success story of implementing original content. Even before LinkedIn’s $90 million acquisition of popular news-reader Pulse, the professional network was making all the right moves in terms of content creation and curation with a leadership board in the form of LinkedIn Influencers and a daily news feed that distributes third-party content selected by users.

Where the company has invested in original content, it’s done so by popular demand, tapping proven influencers like Virgin CEO Richard Branson and ex-FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski for exclusive articles that cater specifically to the network’s business-savvy audience. As Jennifer Van Grove noted for CNET, “content is quickly becoming the new connection on LinkedIn.” 

Outliers

The web is becoming one big imageboard, where the emphasis is placed on viral sharing. That can be seen in everything from Facebook’s redesign to LinkedIn’s revamp. A recent study of Reddit found that 86 percent of the posts on the social news site were easily disposable: image macros, photos, and videos.

The challenge facing that site, not to mention communities like Pinterest and Instagram – whose content strategies thus far have been comprised mostly of curated tags – is to create something of permanent value for the community, to offer more than a temporary spotlight.

Simply put, you have to add value. Social networks need to support the native content efforts of their users and accentuate it where they can. But if they are going to provide editorial content themselves, it must be in the spirit of the community, not forced from outside of it.

Austin Powell is assistant managing editor of The Daily Dot, which calls itself the hometown newspaper of the World Wide Web.

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In case you missed it, here’s Flipboard’s explanation and demonstration of its new capabilities:

It’s not if, but when

Now don’t get me wrong, Flipboard is no Facebook. Its 50 million-ish user base isn’t particularly active  (though I estimate only around 4 million are active, based on ratios from previous public statements). Not yet, anyway. And thank God, or the media/publishing industry would likely have a significant crisis on its hands, as opposed to one that’s somewhat in the distance still.

The reality the publishing needs to understand, though, is that Flipboard has (smartly) maneuvered itself into a powerful position. With the flick of a switch, it could deal a serious blow not only to the traditional old media but also to a variety of digital platforms – Tumblr, Flickr, WordPress, among others – as it pivots from purely curation-based interaction to one that offers users full-blown creation abilities. Indeed, this is likely its only future, since without the agreement of the major content creators, Flipboard would be little more than a collection of Tweets and blog posts.

It’s about money

Currently the ad model Flipboard is using is fine, but it’s fair to say it’s not setting anyone’s world on fire. That could change in a heartbeat, though, if the magazines Regular Joes create take off and real readerships are built. Could the next powerhouse of media come from a bedroom in Delaware?

It’s safe to assume then that the company is actively exploring revenue paths behind closed doors right now: micropayments, revenue-share or even subscriptions. Imagine consumers subscribing to read other consumer-curated magazines, or locking down content only to be opened like mag apps are now, or as in-app purchases per gaming, or even geo-location apps (Grindr). At the end of the day, though, it’s crucial to note that Flipboard has what no other publisher does: love from Apple, and quite possibly the credit card numbers that go with that love.

It’s about attention

Bless anyone in the media for not believing that this move hasn’t just made their job far harder. A reminder: You’ve just received yet another huge set of competitors vying for the same eyeballs you covet. If history is anything to go by, most people already feel quite satisfied parsing news (á la Google News) so this shift should be sending chills of terror through professional curators like editors and writers. After all, going big is likely only a creative ad campaign away for Flipboard.

Another major feature that news reports of Flipboard’s update typically neglected to mention is the bookmarklet capability. The idea is that readers don’t even have to be on Flipboard to still add content, from anywhere on the web. Awesome for users, existentially terrifying (and awesome) for the media.

Content creation is coming

So what to do? True, full-featured content creation capabilities are doubtless coming to Flipboard. How aggressive Flipboard moves in that area will be interesting, as the company obviously has to be careful about biting the hand that feeds it. (In fact several publishers have already pulled back from the partnerships, choosing instead to focus on their own apps). The only way for publishers and the media to fight back then will be to remove articles from the system, or cut a deal. However, I have said it before and I’ll say it again: No paywall will ever be truly successful unless all the competition is paywalled, too.

Either way, we have a glimpse of a possible future and it’s both beautiful and terrifying. For those unconvinced of the power and implications of what I’m talking about, take a minute to check out the custom @themediaisdying magazine that I cobbled together in precisely 33 seconds and you’ll see what I mean. Now imagine what happens when tens of millions of people start doing the same.

Paul Armstrong is owner of Digital Orange Consulting; follow him at www.paularmstrong.net or on Twitter @TheMediaIsDying.

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Content that reacts to being read

Around 1952, computer scientist Grace Hopper introduced new thinking about compilers –machine-independent software that would translate code written in human language into computer friendly binary ones. John Von Nuemann took Dr. Hopper’s work to a new level in his unfinished masterpiece “The Computer and the Brain,” which theorized that massive versions of compilers would eventually result in computers so intelligent that no human mind could keep up with them.

In a way, books and magazines of the future will act as sort of human compilers, translating your reading desires into pure machine language that tells the publisher how to present the material for faster and more pleasurable absorption. It’s difficult to comprehend what these experiences will be like once machines themselves begin creating material for humans. The content itself will be designed to gather information about the reader, mash it up with data about others interested in related subjects, authors, or publishers, then decide what content to present to you next. This is what we mean by Intelligent Content

Curation will guide content

Some argue that readers no longer want curated content, however we believe people always have and always will look to trusted sources for guidance, and that’s where books and magazines will continue to add value. In a world where people are already inundated with information, it’s only going to get worse as we get more and more smothered by everyone else’s stream of consciousness, courtesy of Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and whatever is next.

So the short-term impact of the Intelligent Content movement will feel something like the music industry since 2000. MP3′s meant the end of curated CDs. Now, playlists are compiled and shared with the help of Pandora, Spotify or Songza. Thus magazines and books could soon become the Pandora of dynamic content, with artificial intelligence applets that choose and adapt content, then tailor it to the reader’s context and taste. We see the beginnings of this with Flipboard, but it will only get more advanced.

Experimenting outside the print paradigm

Massive waves of disruption always bring opportunity. Publishers like Hearst and Conde Nast continue to experiment with and push the boundaries of enhanced reading experiences on tablets, but many other publishers still obey the rules of printed media, requiring you to “flip” through virtual pages as the primary mode of navigation. WordPress and Tumblr appear to be closest to offering an always-on and continuously updated experience based on analytics about the reader. The flexibility and customization they offer provide a glimpse into how written and visual content will eventually be continuously reconfigured and redesigned by the moment to accommodate data gathered about what you like to read.

Our future might be filled with mash-ups of video, audio, real-time updates, new navigation interfaces and even content that interacts with a reader’s environment (such as augmented reality). Digital publishers can experiment with new hyper-responsive designs as well as back-end databases that mine your other web activities to determine what you’ll like. For example, Quartz (qz.com), a digital only news site launched in September last year, uses WordPress and responsive design to customize the reader’s experience on a device level. Companies such as Gravity, Contextly and Sailthru offer digital publishers new tools to create more personalized experiences based on a visitor’s profile and previous reading behavior.

The algorithm will be the new editor

In the long term, the algorithm will likely replace the editor and curator. Quick and automatic branding and positioning of the book or magazine on a glowing electronic slab will become more important than the most sage human editor. For focused, long-form content, algorithms will sort out content discovery, delivery and presentation. Google already conquered discovery with algorithms, and now content aggregators such as Zite and Prismatic offer readers an elegant, gated magazine-like design using data from the reader’s social networking profiles, past reading habits and current location.

Using big data to create content on demand

Intelligent Content can also help publishers create content in a more cost-efficient way. One of the main challenges publishers face is predicting which content will be popular. Analyzing the big data that comes from reading and search behavior will help them predict which articles will bring in a much-needed audience.

Recently, researchers at MIT developed an algorithm that can predict topics that will be trending on Twitter hours in advance. Similarly, startups such as Content Fleet and Parse.ly use algorithms to identify emerging popular topics on search engines. This way, a publisher will be able to create content with almost a certain return on investment.

Publishers who recognize the design- and data-driven future of Intelligent Content will have a head start. They can experiment now with new ways to deliver content and measure how its readers engage with it. That data in turn can help them deliver even more engaging content experiences, ultimately preparing them for a future of Intelligent Content.

Roger Wood is a product designer and statistician, and founder of the (Art+Data) Institute.  Evelyn Robbrecht is a Content Design Fellow at the Institute; previously she helped launch the mobile and new media department of Sanoma Media Belgium. 

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Great UX, thwarted by walled gardens

Readmill is a great reading environment. That their designers obsess on visceral user experience makes it a true pleasure to use. It may very well be the best “feeling” ereader application out there. This is a critical attribute for an environment in which you can spend hours a day.

But it suffers from the thing that any book-related company or product or startup that is not a Kindle suffers from: It’s a slog to get content into it.

This is a discussion less about DRM (although, it is that, too) and more about seamless user experience. Sure, you can hunt down a copy of “Gone Girl” on a website you’ve never bought a book from before. Enter your credit-card information. Download it. Then upload it to your Readmill account. Or, you can click “Buy now with 1-Click” on Amazon.com and have it on all your devices in 10 seconds, ready to be read in the Kindle reading application. You have to be really persuasive to beat that kind of convenience.

Since Amazon would never allow its library to be accessed by reading applications other than Kindle, this is a non-trivial problem for a startup like Readmill to surmount.

A community to challenge Amazon

Goodreads has always been a bit of an enigma. Truth be told, I’ve never been an avid user. There’s a number of reasons why, but the biggest is simply that the distance between my books — and the activity that happens within them — and Goodreads has always seemed ginormous. That is, updating reading statuses for books on a website always felt odd and forced. It felt odd in 2007 when I was mainly reading physical books, and it feels odder still in 2013, where I’m mainly reading Kindle books. That said, 16 million people clearly don’t agree with me.

So why did Amazon buy Goodreads? Well, the promise of a collaboration between Goodreads and a great reading platform (like Readmill) loomed large. A combination like that had the chance of being the Last Great Stand against Amazon. Goodreads is many things but most defensibly it is a community. A strong community. An engaged community. (And now, a slightly enraged community.) Sixteen million users is nothing to dismiss. It’s not Facebook or Instagram levels, but 16 million excited people is a firehose to be reckoned with. What Goodreads didn’t have was a reading application.

It also should be noted that publishers love Goodreads. No surprise there; it’s just as one would imagine. Goodreads is an amazing platform for promoting books to an avid, core readership. So if Goodreads were to develop a reading application, it doesn’t take much imagination to see them signing up the catalogs of the big five and launching a Goodreads store for the Goodreads reader. And were that reading application to plug seamlessly into the Goodreads ecosystem — the community — then getting those 16 million users to switch from Kindle to Goodreads Reader would have been one of the easier platform sells in publishing.

Goodreads users already want to hang out at Goodreads. If they could read there too — in an app — I suspect many would.

Kindle flaws present opportunity

Despite the maturity of the market, the tablet reading space is still weirdly under-polished. Kindle reading environments have hardly changed in the last three years. The Kindle app has seen some improvement — mainly in support for complex KF8 formatted titles — but the polish around the reading experience, that visceral component, for novels and other mass-market books has remained largely unchanged. Books in the Kindle applications still don’t hyphenate. And page slides still stutter ever so slightly. These are small details that add up.

Certain polish aside, Kindle’s strengths are manifold. It has a vast catalog and transactional trust. It has all our credit-card information, making purchasing seamless. It is also supremely good at cloud data — consistent and reliable storage and retrieval of our books across devices. What it doesn’t have — and no inkling or iota of — is community.

What might have been

So you can see, there was a combo here. A curious matchup. Take one of the most polished, most satisfying digital book reading applications and merge it with one of the most engaged reading-specific communities. A marketplace could have developed that might have been the first real competition against Kindle. Not one built around competing with Kindle toe-to-toe as Barnes & Noble and Kobo have attempted (and failed at), but competing on ground on which Amazon has no footing: community.

It’s a certainty that Amazon, too, saw this. Which is why the sale this week comes as little surprise. I’ve always imagined that secretly, deep down in the murky stacks of Amazon headquarters, they had a crackerjack team making kindle.amazon.com the best social reading network in the world. Maybe they did. Or maybe they just realized it would be easier to buy the one that already existed.

Craig Mod is an independent writer, designer and publisher focused on publishing and storytelling. You can follow him on Twitter @craigmod.

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That said, lest anyone think crowdsourcing is the path to instant publishing fame, dust off your business, promotion, and logistics skills and read on for our experience. The bottom line is that you better prepare to get scrappy.

Step 1: The Business

One of the primary advantages of Kickstarter is that it provides a platform to test the viability of a project with nominal upfront cost – the marketer in me loves this. But more than testing viability, Kickstarter also gives you the freedom to offer intangible rewards that aren’t easily monetized through traditional or self-published avenues. However, it all costs. And unlike a traditionally published project, there is no imprint with deep pockets to cover cost overruns: it all falls on you. So, budget.

To start, determine your rewards. Will you just distribute an ebook? What about a printed edition? Decide what they will cost in dollars and assign a value to your effort (don’t forget your effort!). We chose to do both print and digital to provide additional reward tiers and got a quote from Book Baby for both (we aren’t affiliated with them, and other companies offer similar services). Their digital conversion services were $249, and they agreed to print and fulfill 500 paperback copies for just under $6,000. (Having recently experienced a USPS station in Brooklyn, I’m glad we paid them to send the paperbacks to our backers.)

Kickstarter emphasizes keeping the rewards to the product, and we included a couple of “related” rewards. In retrospect, they didn’t add much value, and they ate margin. The extra rewards sound fancy, but backers aren’t backing the project for the fancy rewards. They are backing the project for the project.

Our project took the form of an anthology, so we had chapters written by multiple people. This required attorneys’ fees to secure the legal rights to what they submitted to the tune of nearly $1,500. And then we paid the people who weren’t employees of Book Riot to write the chapters for another $2,550.

Add to that cover design, video production, promotion, advertising, giveaways and launch party, plus Kickstarter and Amazon’s 9 percent take — and we had only $2,500 left from our $25,ooo Kickstarter campaign to cover the cost of our time. Had we more accurately estimated the amount of time required for the project, we would have set our funding goal higher so we could have paid ourselves more than minimum wage to work on it.

Step 2: The Promotion

You must embrace your inner newsie, and not just repeat “Extra! Extra!” to your friends and family but to ALL the internet. You’ve got to have a plan to reach the largest audience possible. We started plugging in dates and deliverables for promotion on Book Riot and began briefing our biggest fans weeks in advance. We ran contests, promoted it and advertised it through social channels, contacted friendlies with engaged social followings, and asked influencers to write chapters. You have to remind your community about the project every day, and the reminding needs to be creative.

How you promote a project will vary according to your offering, but as you plan, note this: think soldiers, not generals. Don’t get too caught up in trying to attract @BigNameFamousPerson to contribute to the project or share it with their followers. If someone with a million followers tweets about what you’re doing, you won’t get much out of it unless their followers have a reason to care about your project *beyond* the fact that @BigNameFamousPerson tweeted it.

Most of your support (and most of your financial backing) is going to come from your existing fans. Of the 947 people who backed our project, a couple were big names, but the vast majority were Book Riot readers who were already actively participating in our community. They’re the people who help us keep the lights on in the day-to-day, and they’re the most invested in our continued success. Never undervalue that.

Step 3: The Logistics

For 2012, Kickstarter reported that only 29.5% of publishing projects were successful. If you make it to Step 3, drink a celebratory beer, and bid farewell to the longest 30 days in recent memory. Then get ready for the heavy lifting. There is a reason logistics is a multi-billion dollar business. It’s freakin’ hard work.

But let’s not forget the fun part. You did this so you could do what you love – write. So go write.

Now remember that reward someone offered in-kind? How are you going to get it to the backer? Recall all those personalized book recommendations you promised to give? When are you going to have time for that? And all those backers. They are records in spreadsheets now. And you need to move product from both physical and virtual warehouses to each one. You need a plan. (Hear a recurring theme?)

It might sound obvious, but apparently it’s not: create a spreadsheet with all the reward levels and list the tasks required to reach fulfillment readiness for each level. Then, start completing the tasks. Delegate if you can. Outsource where possible.

In the spirit of full disclosure, we were late in delivering our project to backers. A hurricane in Brooklyn that preceded the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays compounded small delays. In our project, we stated an October delivery. The book actually shipped on December 27th. When we do this again, we’ll determine the date we believe we can deliver the project and add three months. Rule to live by: If you are going to be late, communicate.

Epilogue

In addition to fulfillment, we opted to make Start Here available for purchase as an ebook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and iBookstore. This adds a layer of complexity to the fulfillment process. And you’ll want to market it. Which requires a plan (and we don’t have room to go into it here).

Should you try a publishing Kickstarter? For people without an established following, the odds are against you being able to set a goal that lets you exit the experience cash-positive. If this is a concern, I suggest you spend time growing your audience before trying to Kickstart a book. More ominously, most projects were attempting to raise smaller sums than Book Riot, and the failure rate is still a daunting 70 percent. If you do decide to try a publishing Kickstarter, I suggest making a commitment to run three Kickstarters so that you can turn your prior learning into higher margins on successive projects.

Clinton Kabler is COO of Riot New Media Group which operatesBookRiot.com, BookRiot.tv and the soon to launch FoodRiot.com. Follow him on Twitter @clintonk.

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Williams and Stone re-launched Obvious Corp. in June 2012 after they both left Twitter, the company they co-founded with Jack Dorsey. Expectations for both Obvious Corp. and Medium, a collaborative publishing tool and the first product it launched in August, have been high, although the product appears to be growing slowly.

Hansen wrote in his email to friends and family (reported by Mike Isaac of AllThingsD, formerly of Wired) that he would be working specifically on editorial content at Medium, which hired noted literary agent Kate Lee to direct content back in November.

At the moment, Medium is publishing blog posts from a wide variety of writers, technologists, and artists, clearly focusing on quality over quantity and slowly rolling out the ability to contribute. Published stories are divided into “collections” around certain themes, and aims to re-think how writers to publish to the web.

Last year at our Roadmap conference, Williams told attendees “I’d rather be HBO than whoever creates ‘Desperate Housewives,’” perhaps hinting at the type of content strategy that Medium intends to pursue.

This post and its headline were corrected at 4:28pm to after Hansen clarified on Twitter that he wasn’t leading all of editorial at Medium, just science and technology.

For a few years now, I’ve been working in and around “native advertising,” though I’ve only recently (and somewhat grudgingly) started referring to it by that name. There’s a ton of opportunity here on both sides of the fence: new revenue streams for media companies and journalists (especially freelancers), and marketing channels that demand smart, engaging content — as smart and engaging as the “real” editorial content it coexists with — from brands.

My favorite flavor of native advertising involves working with a top-notch media partner and publishing a blend of opinions from established thought leaders as well as a few brilliant people at the client company.  When done well, these campaigns are great for the publisher, the brand and the reader — or at least that’s the goal.

But there are plenty of inherent dangers. On the brand side, it can be very hard for corporate spokespeople to write with a natural voice, and it often falls to me as editor to turn reflexive corporate-speak into something human. This can be a sticky proposition — nearly every piece goes through rounds of client and legal review before publishing, but for it to work, it can’t read like it’s been through the sausage grinder.

But the real challenges in this type of advertising are on the publishers’ and writers’ sides. In the rush for media brands to become platforms and for journalists to become marketers, we’re missing some important considerations — branding considerations.

Journalists: You’re brands, too

Journalists, let’s start with you: You should know that I only want to hire you for your reputation, smarts and objectivity. (And partly for your audience, but if you say something smart, I can find an audience for it.) That’s your brand, and you have to protect it as fiercely as I protect my clients’ brands.

When I reach out to a journalist with an assignment, I always stipulate that he’ll have full editorial control, and I expect him to exercise it. The client gets final approval of the content — but only on a binary “approve/reject” level — and the journalist gets paid either way. That lets you, the journalist, go about your business of telling the truth and saying interesting things, which is what we value journalists for in the first place.

You’re free to push back on my edits, ask tough questions, even tar-and-feather the client, if that’s what you want. It’s my job to figure out a client response to that. I once got a client to approve a somewhat critical piece, with the stipulation that one of their people could write a counterpoint to it. It worked beautifully — a meaningful dialogue between influencer and company. On the other hand, I worked on a project with the editor-in-chief of a popular news site and had to throw out a lot of his work because he was obviously trying to please my client. That’s a ticket to journalistic purgatory.

I work hard to protect the reputation of the writers I commission, partly because screwing over journalists is not a good earned-media strategy, and partly because a compromised journalist is of no use to anyone. But mostly because surprisingly honest writing is a great way to engage the reader and bolster the brand that commissioned it.

Not every advertiser gets that, though, and I see bad examples of native advertising all the time: articles where the final copy clearly either isn’t the writer’s normal work or was passed through a corporate-speak filter. Journalists, that hurts your brand, and you should refuse to participate in that stuff.

Publishers: Are you sure you want to be platforms?

The biggest danger in native advertising is to the publishers and their brands. On Thursday, Andrew Sullivan asked “aren’t we in danger of destroying the village in order to save it?” And in my years of negotiations with media companies, I’ve been shocked at how little some of them value their reputations and brand equity.

The “platform” idea perfectly encapsulates my point: August publishing companies are opening themselves up to the rantings of every amateur and careerist who wants to add “columnist” to a LinkedIn profile. Those companies also let brands publish on their sites with very little to distinguish ad from editorial.

Guys, a trusted brand is better than an open platform, both for your readers and for your advertising customers. The internet is full of amateur ravings and branded swill, and is starved for great content. If you can make the latter, why open yourself up to the former? For new revenue streams? That story is short, and we know how it ends.

I talked with a publisher a couple weeks ago who is taking a stand on native advertising. He was getting too much crap, and his readers were noticing, so he’s going to start rejecting stuff that isn’t up to his publication’s editorial standards.

At the end of the day, he’ll be leaving money on the table by making that decision. But should he even be worried about the quality of the native ads that run in his publication? Should he pick that money up? Many publishers are asking themselves these questions, and you probably are, too. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Kyle Monson, who will be speaking more about native advertising at paidContent Live on April 17, is Chief Creative at Knock Twice, a startup agency that focuses on tech PR and advertising. In a previous life, Kyle was content strategy director at JWT, and spent almost a decade as a journalist and editor.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Dano