About the TeleBlog’s ads
By Robert Nagle
How to keep the TeleBlog sustainable without selling out to advertisers? Until recently, our response has been simple—we haven’t tried to woo them. But both the writing and the behind-the-scenes tech work take time, and if we’re to maintain our quality, we need to get paid. One solution is for us to use TeleBlog material elsewhere, and, in fact, David Rothman is adapting many of his posts here for Publishers Weekly, the bible of the book trade.
But that in itself is not enough. So David and I are experimenting with advertisers. The deal for them will be this. We need to be free to report honestly on the e-book scene, fight for e-book standards, raise questions about DRM and stand up for well-stocked digital libraries. Advertiser hoping to weaken our commitment to such causes are free to go elsewhere. The tone of our posts didn’t change after David began the PW connection, and we don’t intend for it to happen either with advertisers.
The kind of advertiser we especially want
MarketIntellNow, our first advertiser, which is paying us a certain percentage of sales from research reports, should be an especially good fit. The company’s e-book reading survey fell into our lap, and we thought the results were interesting and relevant and timely to TeleRead readers. We couldn’t pass down an opportunity to do an interview with the company while we were at it—it was my idea. I gave them some tough questions which (I hope) challenged them and also allowed the people at MarketIntellNow to expand on their conclusions.
The company is aware of our interest in e-book standards and other causes and appreciates our comprehensive reporting of the e-book scene; also, it strives to be vendor-neutral in evaluating e-book products.
We may also seek advertising from actual hardware and software vendors. If so, however, they will need to understand our determination to remain true to our values. We’re especially interested in drawing advertisers with an open approach toward standards, and we’ll welcome help from our readers.
Priorities beyond the buck
Even now, ads are not at the top of our priorities. I have my storytelling podcast and Nanowrimo novel to write, and David is too busy hyperblogging to focus on the business side, though we both agree it would be a good idea on a small scale. A few months ago I gave a lecture at Barcamp Houston about how to prevent advertising from eroding the overall reading experience. Suffice to say that David and I don’t wish to see the site turn into something that is not useful or easy to read.
Meanwhile, let me mention that TeleRead has plans to expand beyond news and analysis; we’d like to include more creative content and e-book reviews. You may see additions over the next few months (and ultimately our www.teleread.org home page will actually be a URL worth visiting). The news/weblog portion will probably stay the same; we’ll just be adding more things hopefully of interest.
By the way, if you are interested in setting up some sort of advertising arrangement with TeleRead or have some random business opportunity, feel free to drop us a line so we can plat ahead. Try idiotprogrammer at fastmailbox.net .
Technorati Tags: TeleRead , TeleBlog
January 20th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
[...] He means: “We take ads!” [...]