ChasNote

Among RealSimple’s Best Blogs are four of my favorites (and FM partners):

In Parenting: Cool Mom Picks and ParentHacks.

In Cooking: StartCooking.

In Organizing and Personal Productivity: 43Folders.

Congrats!

TechCrunch reports on two advertising networks for independent blog authors, first Sam Sethi’s BlogNation and then BlogCharm, both apparently stiffing their publisher partners. In the case of BlogNation, former US editor Oliver Starr published an open letter in which he includes IM transcripts in which Sam Sethi confirms payments have been wired; Starr says this turned out to be a lie. The situation at BlogCharm is arguably worse. Member sites aren’t being paid, and it’s not even clear who owns and operates the firm (from TechCrunch):

“Ownership of the site isn’t immediately clear. BlogCharm has a powered by Blog Explosion badge on it, there are no contact details aside from an online form located on Blogexplosion and the registration details for the site are hidden by a private proxy service. Blog Explosion on the other hand is registered to West Hollywood based Live Universe and sits on the same server as BlogCharm so it would be reasonable to suggest that Live Universe may well be the owner of both sites. Having said that BlogCharm (along with Blog Explosion) has changed hands at least once, having sold in June 2006 for a reported ’six figure’ sum, then at least according to the BlogExplosion forums, someone called Chris was tasked with ‘fixing’ BlogExplosion (and we’d presume the other related sites) in November this year. Whether Chris is a new owner or simply an employee given management of the site was not detailed, indeed there was no details other than a name and a promise to fix the mess. Live Universe was founded by Brad Greenspan, best known as one of the founders of MySpace and in more recent years for his opposition to News Corps acquisition of MySpace. Live Universe runs sites including LiveVideo.com, a top 1000 site online (according to Alexa), BlinkYou.com, Lyrics Download and acquired Flurl.com in October 2006.”

Eight days ago Graffiti Wall enabled comments for their users, with HP as the launch sponsor. So far 40,000 comments have been submitted (an average of 5,000 per day) under HP’s “What Do You Have to Say?” tagline and logo.

A few years ago, CNET launched an RSS product called Newsburst — partly as a special service to its most loyal news-junkie readers, and partly to convert those readers from search-click-and-leave readers into opt-in subscribers. The downside of creating a deeper relationship with readers is the crow your brand must eat if and when you discontinue the service, as CNET did earlier this week. Here’s an excerpt of the email sent to subscribers.

In my earlier piece on leading paid-content publishers investing in free, ad-supported content, I left out the most successful ad-free publisher of them all: Consumer Reports.

To be clear, there are no plans to change course over there. According to the NY Times, it has 3 million online subscribers at $26 a year, the same rate it charges print subscribers. Annual revenues are $208 million (including a few smaller publications too) with an operating margin of $28 million — not bad, especially considering it’s a non-profit.

Conversational marketing isn’t just for websites anymore! From Reuters:

“A high-priced food fight has erupted in New York, with the owner of a high-end eatery seeking revenge on the city’s top food critic, who dished out a brutal review complaining of rubbery pork and limp lettuce.
The spat is playing out in the newspapers, with restaurant titan Jeffrey Chodorow buying a defensive full-page ad in The New York Times after its food critic, Frank Bruni, trashed Chodorow’s Kobe Club with a rare rating of ‘no stars.’”

Nope! Not for publishers, anyway.

Natali at TechCrunch profiled BlogKits, a start-up “with the goal of helping to monetize the blogosphere. The company matches smaller-potato blogs to advertisers and provides a risk-free way for both to work together.”

As expressed by several readers in comments to the post, BlogKits sounds like a fresh coat of paint on the affiliate marketing programs from the late 1990s. Risk-free to advertisers, certainly. In the affiliate model, advertising exposure on 3rd party sites is free and clicks to the advertiser’s website are free. The advertiser only pays if a customer from that 3rd party site clicks AND buys something from that advertiser, all in a short span of time. (Usually 3rd party sites don’t get credit for customers who click and browse, but come back later the the advertiser’s site to buy.)

Affiliate programs are risk-free to a website publisher only if that publisher doesn’t have other options to monetize that traffic to his or her site. Some ad networks (Tacoda, Tribal Fusion, Advertising.com, ContextWeb, etc.) will pay even “small potato” sites on a cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) basis — a guaranteed fee for every thousand times the publisher displays an ad, whether or not visitors click on the ad. In this model, the publisher gets paid by advertisers who want exposure to a particular audience, even if members of that audience who aren’t in “impulse buy” mode. For other sites, Google’s AdSense program is more lucrative. While Google pays publishers based for clicks (not impressions), the effect of their context-matching algorithms and pool of hundreds of thousands of advertisers is some amount of money for every thousand impressions of their text ads. Google demands that advertisers pay them for every click over to the advertisers’ site, whether or not that visitor buys something on the spot.

In either case, publishers of all sizes can make money through CPM advertising networks or Google’s CPC network. Swapping in BlogKits ad units means giving up revenue from other channels; if it doesn’t work, nothing lost by the advertiser, but the publisher may have left money on the table.

When ValleyWag covers FM, they don’t always get 100% of the facts right. But they almost always tap into a kernel of truth, often before their competitors. In that light, I wonder if there’s something to Friday’s rumor that CNET COO Barry Briggs is resigning his post this week (ValleyWag).

UPDATE: Rumors confirmed. More at PaidContent.

Battelle at Searchblog reports on his Web 2.0 interview with NBC’s Beth Comstock. His paraphrase:

“Certainly all of *us* may want a clarifying metaphor that helps us grok Google’s relentless push into nearly every advertising market on earth, the real question is whether *advertisers* want it as well. And I think in the end, the answer to that question is most likely a qualified no (qualified because they’ll always be happy to push a portion of their budget through automated and efficient channels). But in the end advertisers are not computer programmers, they are marketers, and while it’s true that the approach of AdWords and AdSense pushes remarkable efficiencies and opportunities into the practice of marketing, I posit that the practice of marketing is about more than efficiency. It’s also about emotion, passion, and conversation. And no matter how hard you try, you can’t automate conversations. At least, not until Google (or someone else) pushes computing past the Turing test.”

Fred Wilson at A VC speculates that Yahoo would be a good deal for an acquirer right now:

“Here are the facts. Yahoo! trades at a $34bn market cap. They generate almost $500mm per quarter in cash flow, that’s $2bn per year. So on the face of it, it appears that Yahoo! trades at 17x this year’s cash flow. But that is misleading because Yahoo!’s got a bunch of cash on its balance sheet and also owns a nice chunk of Yahoo! Japan. So after you take out that cash and Yahoo! Japan, Yahoo!’s core business might trade at something like 12-13x EBITDA. You could pay an acquisition premium to the public shareholders and still make a return at that price.”

Fred explores the possible suitors: News Corp, Comcast, Time Warner and — the most likely — Microsoft. But Fred says it’s a longshot that a deal will happen: “I think the chances that Yahoo! actually does get bought is slim, but even the fact that the market is having this discussion is a wake up call for Yahoo!’s board, management, shareholders, employees, and customers.”