Planting Liberally

This is a quick "I told you so" hit. The NYT reports today that Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily blog is having a huge impact on the WGA strike. This reminds me of a post I wrote back in April, arguing that progressives should create a network of industry blogs in order to sway "public opinion" within a given industry. At the time, I wrote that such blogs could help sway industry insiders on internal debates which have political overtones, like the open source vs. proprietary debate within the computer software industry. I also wrote about the need to start progressive workplace blogs, and even suggested that unions could start a fleet of such blogs as a way to identify workplaces where they might find a lot of support. (I since incorporated that idea into a series on using the internet to strengthen labor unions.)

Well, the upshot is that these posts turned out to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. Industry insiders and workers are already creating industry and workplace blogs, and those blogs are already having an impact on labor disputes and internal industry debates. Welcome to 2003. Now, it's time for the progressive movement and labor movement to wise up to these online developments and begin harnessing them for progressive cultural change within the workforce.

Incidentally, unrelated to all of the above, I've recently started using Google Docs to write my blog posts. The resulting HTML is a bit clunky when I copy into MyDD, and I can't figure out how to tag my posts, but otherwise, I'm loving it. Thanks to my former DL co-host Baratunde Thurston (who himself swiped it from Todd Plants, who in an odd twist was a college roommate of mine) for the idea.

Update: And just like that, Devilstower at DailyKos starts blogging about the alternative auto industry. Gosh I love the blogosphere.

A couple of weeks ago, I commented on the Media Matters report on conservative dominance of newspaper op-ed pages. At the time, I wrote that it could be possible for a liberal entrepreneur to establish an op-ed syndicate for progressive writers which competes with the titans of the opinion industry - Washington Post Writers Group, Tribune Media Service, and Creators Syndicate. A progressive opinion syndicate could succeed by offering fresh and diverse voices, integrating social web technology with its offerings, tapping the variety of the blogosphere to package localized and national voices, and offering competitive prices. At the heart of the Media Matters report, and crucial to establishing the viability of a liberal opinion syndicate, is the question of why conservatives dominate op-ed pages. There are a few competing theories. One theory holds that conservative dominance reflects the bias of newspaper owners; another theory suggests that a broad but right-leaning section of the population, like advertisers, newspaper subscribers, or conservative movement activists, pressures the papers to publish conservative writers; another suggests that the large syndicates, who distribute most of the large opinion columns, offer preferential treatment to conservatives. Perhaps the most nuanced explanation I've seen was in the comment threads, where carter1 offered a three-part explanation which encompasses a number of different trends. I recently found a very interesting resource which might help evaluate some of these theories (h/t to John Palfrey at the Berkman Center.) The Center for Public Integrity maintains an online website which cross-references media ownership records with campaign finance records, called MediaTracker. By typing in your zip code or city and state in the search form on the front page, you can discover which companies own the media in area - including TV, radio, cable, broadband and newspapers. What's more, those companies are cross-referenced with campaign finance records, to give us some idea of the ideological bias of the media owners. For example, here's the political influence of Clear Channel - unsurprisingly, employees and PACs of the company contribute much more to Republicans than to Democrats (nearly 70% to Republicans, and 30% to Democrats). Unfortunately, neither Media Matters nor MediaTracker expose their raw data, so it's difficult to evaluate, in a systematic way, whether or not conservative ownership is correlated with conservative opinion pages. Still, it's possible to get a snapshot of some media markets. Regardless of the cause of conservative bias in op-ed pages, I'm still curious about, the possibility of establishing a progressive op-ed syndicate. Such a syndicate could do a great deal to strengthen the progressive movement. With the density of national, regional, and local progressive blogs, it should be easy to find writers who can be syndicated, and to market those voices to newspapers. That kind of business model would not only help distribute liberal opinions into new and larger markets, it would also help sustain some progressive blogs. Furthermore, it would require relatively little start-up capital, and it's something which an enterprising progressive could (it seems) easily get off the ground. This idea is hardly earth-shattering; in fact, it's more or less obvious, and I'm a bit surprised that a blog-based op-ed syndicate doesn't exist. That makes me wonder whether there's an obvious reason why such a business might fail, or whether it's simply never been tried. Could a progressive opinion syndicate be a viable business? What are some of the potential roadblocks, and how could they be overcome? Is this a disastrous idea that could never fly? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Jeff Jarvis wrote a pretty useless piece on the debate over blogger unionization at the Guardian today. I asked him to pretty please stop bloviating and start thinking in the comments on BuzzMachine. I find this subject utterly fascinating, from both a legal and an economic point of view, and the people who are paid to write about it seem to be totally unable to see the complexity. More to come!

This weekend, I'm writing a series on Supporting the Blogosphere. The idea is to discuss, in some detail, what needs to be done to support bloggers, and how it can be done. This idea was spurred, in part, by Mike Lux's piece on connecting donors and bloggers on Open Left, which theorized that bloggers need more supportive organizations in order to have a shot at collecting money from donors. Part 1 of the series focused on services for bloggers - goods, services, know-how, resources, and other things which support bloggers. Part 3 of the series will focus on a variety of organizational models which can be used to deliver blogosphere support. This post will focus on revenue for bloggers: how bloggers can make money through their blogs, and how a blogosphere support organization could assist them in doing so. I've written about making blogging profitable before, and there will be some overlap with that previous post - but today, I'll focus more sharply on how blogosphere support organizations can help bloggers in pursuing these profit opportunities. I'm flying dark a little bit in this post - I've never used my blogging for revenue, so there could be parts of this post that are in error. If you're a blogger with a bit more experience in any of these matters, correct me below, and I'll update accordingly. Advertising The most obvious form of blogger revenue, and the form which is probably most common throughout the blogosphere, is advertising. Putting advertising on your site, like blogging itself, seems easy at first, but is much more difficult in practice. First, there is the question of which advertising provider to use: BlogAds, Google Ads, or some other party? Next comes the question of how much to charge for ads. Finally, there's the question of where to place the ads on the blog, and how many to display at any one time. Bloggers could use help with all of these questions, and a blogosphere support organization can provide assistance along these lines. In particular, there appears to be some enthusiasm among bloggers for creating an organization to fix blogging rates at a certain level, in order to avoid a "race to the bottom". Depending on how that's done, it could very well be an illegal cartel, as a MyDD commenter (sorry, can't find the link) has pointed out. I imagine there are ways to get around that problem, though. For example, progressive bloggers could form a competitor to BlogAds, which provides advertising broker services; the broker could simply set a higher floor for advertising rates, and bloggers would be individually free to join or leave it as they see fit. I've harped on this idea a couple of times, and I certainly think there's room for a progressive competitor to BlogAds to emerge; there are any number of opportunities such a competitor could exploit. Another advertising problem that a blogosphere support organization could tackle is expanding the advertising base, in any number of ways. For example, such an organization could seek to help bloggers solicit ads among local retail businesses; or it could encourage progressive businesses, organizations, and candidates to advertise on progressive blogs. Alternatively, it could provide bloggers with mentorship and how-to guides as they form their own internal "advertising department". Along similar lines, such an organization could help form ties between local newspapers and local bloggers, whereby newspapers act as advertising brokers for local retailers, and bloggers act as low-cost publishers for those ads (I've kicked this concept around before, and there's real money in it - something like $7.5 billion, this year alone). Furthermore, a blogosphere support organization could help bloggers deal with the "drought" problem - that is, the problem that advertising revenues dry up in off-years. This problem is an accute one within the progressive blogosphere, as off-years - that's the time when candidates and organizations are least likely to spend advertising revenue, which means bloggers spend the time in desparate pursuit of revenue. It's also the best time for the blogosphere to strategize, regroup, plan for upcoming challenges, and assist elected allies in governance. The drought problem means that we are regularly losing important opportunities due to an unfortunate turn of economics. Beyond simply expanding the advertising base to eliminate this problem entirely, a blogosphere support organization can play any number of financial games to reduce the problem - e.g., holding some percent of election year blog revenues in escrow; helping bloggers adjust ad rates appropriately during election season to prepare for lean times; etc. Finally, a blogosphere support organization can assist bloggers by expanding the kinds of advertising opportunities available to them. These opportunities include cost per action advertising, which I wrote about in June; user-based advertising; sponsored blog posts (aka "post per pay", which is reviled in some quarters); and so on. Such an organization can also help bloggers put together attractive packge deals, tying together (for example) radio, newspaper, and blog ads, using Google Radio Ads and Google Print Ads. In some cases, expanding these opportunities means developing new software, and/or making that software more easily accessible to bloggers; in other, it's merely a matter of creating an advertising product and targeting it to advertisers appropriately. Speaking engagements and media appearances Popular progressive bloggers are interesting personalities. Almost by definition, they have an interesting, fresh voice; they are outgoing; they have a following; and, contrary to establishment lore, they are usually not trolls who live in their parents' basements, emerging only occasionally for Cheetos and Dr. Pepper. In short, they have the potential to be excellent public speakers and media personalities. Not all bloggers, but certainly quite a few. For the most part, this potential goes largely untapped. Bloggers are rarely invited to speak or appear at high-profile occasions or on widely-circulated TV shows. This potential is changing around the margins, certainly: blogger conferences and progressive conferences regularly feature bloggers as speakers; very popular bloggers do make high-profile public appearances occasionally; and, I would suspect, that statewide progressive bloggers are finding their way onto local news shows (I know that's happening in Massachusetts, for example.) However, there's potential for a much wider range of speaking appearances, including college lectures, campaign or union rallies, TV talk shows, radio talk shows, and progressive business gatherings. In some cases, these missed opportunities which could go to progressive bloggers mean lost revenue, in the form of missed honoraria; in others, they mean indirect lost revenue, in the form of traffic which could be, but is not, generated to the bloggers site. In many cases, these missed opportunities are also problems for the progressive movement as a whole, because they mean missed opportunities to disseminate our ideas. Blogosphere support organizations can work to tap this potential for speaking opportunities in a number of ways. The idea discussed most frequently for attacking this problem is a speaker's bureau, such as the Blue America Speakers Bureau. Such an organization represents speakers, and helps advertise their speaking services to a variety of venues, usually in exchange for a flat fee or commission. While a full-blown speakers bureau might be difficult or costly to establish, there are other angles on this problem: for example, progressives could form alumni networks which assist bloggers in locating speaking positions at their alma mater. Or progressives could establish a general purpose "speaking engagements and media clips library", which helps bloggers (and other progressive leaders, for that matter) to keep track of their previous speaking engagement and recorded media clips; such a library could be invaluable in proving a blogger's bona fides for future appearances. On the other side of the problem, a blogosphere support organization could provide bloggers with speech and media coaching, helping individuals make the most of the appearances that they do find. Blogger-for-Hire Blogger-for-Hire is the way I refer to somewhat rare cases where bloggers solicit donations in order to help them cover the cost of reporting on some event; classic examples include Josh Marshal's reporting on the NH Democratic Presidential primary in 2004, FireDogLake's reporting on the Libby Trial, and Matt Stoller's reporting on the CT Democratic Senate primary in 2006. I actually don't think there's much to do for blogger support organizations in helping bloggers work out blogger-for-hire arrangements; these cases are fairly rare, and bloggers have been able to use makeshift tools like Paypal successfully when they needed them. However, it is possible that a support organization could formalize the situation somewhat, protecting the blogger's liability, for example; or the support organization could assist bloggers in promoting one another's blogger-for-hire efforts. Another, perhaps more fanciful, possibility is that a support organization could support large-scale blogger-for-hire operations. For example, such an organization could help a group of bloggers work together to hire ten or so reporters, with each one assigned to the beat on each of the Republican presidential candidates' campaigns for the duration of the 2008 campaign. The blogs would then have access to the primary reporting materials, and the reporters' daily written accounts of events on the campaign trail. Consulting Consulting is the "gold mine" of progressive blogging - it's the opportunity most likely to help a blogger support herself full-time. Consulting opportunities for progressive bloggers tend to go in one of three directions: paid blogging for a candidate or organization; consulting on a variety of technical issues related to blogging, e.g., launching a new blog, doing design work, etc.; and strategic consulting on reaching out to the blogosphere, engaging with the progressive movement, etc. There are a variety of opportunities for blogosphere support organizations in this arena. Support organizations can encourage bloggers to take up consulting, and can help them find consulting engagements; they can assist bloggers with the myriad mechanical problems of starting and operating a business - legal needs, accounting needs, etc.; they can help bloggers identify and pursue new business opportunities; and they can connect bloggers with one another and with other progressive consultants and entrepreneurs, thereby forming a mentorship network. (My company's entry into the BlogPAC entrepreneur contest was along these lines, for what it's worth - we proposed a matchmaking service for progressive freelancers and local and state house progressive campaigns.) Consulting is an interesting revenue stream, because a successful consultant/blogger doesn't need a particularly large audience in order to build a good consulting business. She just needs a well-targeted audience who trusts her and accepts her authority, and she needs to encourage her audience to engage her services. In fact, bloggers who can dominate a particular niche might be the most likely to capture related consulting opportunities. For example, a blogger who is considered authoritative on bicycle-friendly policies in the Boston area might be the most likely candidate to gain a consulting engagement with a company that wishes to market its products to Boston bicyclists. Such a blogger would not need a particularly large audience, just one large enough to spread the word within the Boston bicyclist community about her expertise. Consequently, a blogosphere support organization which identifies topics where the progressive blogosphere doesn't have particularly good coverage, and which recruits a blogger to cover that area, could be well-suited to help the blogger provide related consulting engagements. For the most part, consulting as a method of supporting full-time bloggers is still a bit of a pipe dream. There are probably a very small number of consulting engagements awarded to bloggers on the basis of their blogging, and most of these are probably reserved for the most popular bloggers. It remains to be seen whether supporting consultant/bloggers is really an idea worthy of major investment. Information stream consulting Information stream consulting is a special case of consulting which I think every good blogger is capable of doing, and doing very well, and which very few bloggers consider a marketable commodity. That's a real shame, and I'd like to see it change, somehow or another. Information streams are both the raw materials, and the products, of blogging. Information streams consist of RSS feeds; email lists; newspaper stories; periodically-published reports by advocacy groups; voterfiles, birth registers, and other sets of public documents; and any number of other occasionally-updated sources of information. Every imaginable topic, no matter how small, has a potentially enormous set of information streams. Good bloggers will locate the information streams relevant to their topic area, separate the good streams from the bad, and will quickly identify those streams which are most likely to be the source of good blog posts. There are a variety of technological tools for doing that, including blog readers and email filtering (which allows a blogger to efficiently subscribe to dozens or hundreds of email lists). New tools, like Yahoo Pipes and Google Trends, are adding entirely new dimensions to this technological toolbox. My guess is that progressive bloggers, as a whole, haven't really grasped the power of these tools yet. Regardless, the point is that good bloggers are experts in information streams, and that this expertise can be put to use in a variety of ways by progressive clients. Information stream consulting can be a good way of doing opposition research, or efficiently discovering weaknesses in an opposition canadidate's campaign. It can be a good way for businesses to find new clients. It can help legislators identify new trends and ideas which are relevant to public policy. In some ways, this idea is very old. Consider the simple example of advertisements that comes in a change of address form booklet from the post office. These advertisements are there because someone realized that the information stream of "people filling out post office change of address forms" was very valuable to certain retail businesses (like hardware stores, furniture stores, etc.), and encouraged those stores to advertise in the booklet. Along similar lines, I once heard a Democratic party activist explain, at a public workshop, how her town committee checks the voterfile every month for new 18-year-old registrants, and sends them a post card encouraging them to join the committee. There has recently been an explosion in the number of information streams available, and I think many companies and non-profits are slow to catch on. I also think bloggers, although they tend to be experts in information streams, don't realize how valuable their expertise potentially is. A blogosphere support organization could set about fixing this problem, on both sides: encouraging bloggers to enlist as information stream consultants, and encouraging progressive businesses, campaigns, organizations, and other entities to hire this new class of consultants. This is a rather abstract idea, and one which is foreign to many organizations, so I imagine that drumming up clients would be the most difficult task. Fortunately, I think there are some information streams whose usefulness is obvious and easily grasped (for example, the case of 18-year-olds in the voterfile), and I imagine that would be a good place to start with the advertising. Coming up next... This post and my previous post, on services for bloggers, have together suggested an enormous laundry list of tasks for blogosphere support organizations. There is no way any one organization could tackle all of these tasks. It's possible that some of these tasks are really bad ideas which don't even deserve to be tackled at all. In the next post, I'll discuss the kinds of institutional resources we will need to tackle some of these tasks, and how such institutions could be created, assuming that there are founders with sufficient interest to do so. I'm under no illusions that most, or event a significant number, of these ideas will be enshrined in sustainable organizations any time soon, but I hope to inspire bloggers and entrepreneurs to think seriously about what their role could be in turning some of these ideas into reality.

This week, there's been a raging conversation on kid oakland's Blogs United group about what can be done to support progressive bloggers. The conversation was begun when I posted a quick email about Mike Lux's post about connecting bloggers and donors on OpenLeft; I think the conversation snowballed from there, partly because of Blogpac's infrastructure contest, and partly because of the excitement around YearlyKos. In any case, this weekend I'd like to bring this conversation to a wider forum, and explore it in a bit more detail. Over the course of three posts, I'll discuss the kinds of things that can be done to support the blogosphere. This post will discuss the kinds of services and benefits that can be provided to progressive bloggers; the next post will discuss the services which bloggers can provide to third parties, in order to make money; and the last post will discuss the various types of organizational structures which can be used to deliver benefits and/or help bloggers sell their services. Along the way, I'd certainly appreciate your thoughts; and if there are any bloggers in the house, I'd like to hear how realistic all of this is, and what can be done to make it happen. Without further ado, I bring you Part 1: Services for Bloggers The Costs of Blogging Writing a blog, on the face of things, is not very difficult. You fire up your web browser, log in, click "Write a new post", type an engaging and ground-breaking missive, click submit, and voila! Reader appreciation in spades. In fact, as any blogger who aspires even to a modest-sized readership knows, life is considerably more complicated. To begin with, there are the technical choices (and associated costs) of which blogging platform to choose, and where and how to install it. Then there are the strategic choices of audience targeting, and where and how to promote your blog (and the costs of promotion). Furthermore, there are ongoing editorial choices - what to write about, how often, how to cover the topic, and on and on. Added to these costs are hidden costs, which grow or shrink depending on the blogger's personal circumstances and chosen topic area. If you don't already own a computer and have Internet access, you need to make some fairly heavy equipment purchases, and pay high Internet subscription costs. If you tend to write about obscure topics, you may need access to Lexis/Nexis or a similar information service. If you play a media watchdog role, you're probably buying a fair number of newspaper or magazine subscriptions, and maybe purchasing a bunch of books. If you liveblog important political events, you're probably paying a cable subscription, travel costs, and/or conference registrations. If you are blogging full-time, or your blogging precludes you from taking a job with benefits, then you're paying your own health insurance, and not receiving benefits like contributions to a pension or 401(k) fund. Finally, there is the most important variable: time. There's time you donate to your own blog and (if you're managing a group blog) the time of your associates, which may or may not be donated. Writing time is the highest cost of writing a blog, and it frequently goes unreimbursed. Blogger and Blogosphere Support The easiest way to provide services for bloggers is to help bloggers pay for some or all of these costs, through direct reimbursement, bulk-purchase discounts, or some other avenue. To give you an idea of how this would work, a very simple blogger support organization could work as follows: bloggers sign up for membership in the organization, and pay a small yearly membership fee. The organization, in turn, purchases a lot of magazine subscriptions, and lets members choose to receive a fixed number of subscriptions. The organization's main role is to be a bulk purchaser, which reduces per-subscription costs for bloggers. A similar model could be used to purchase health insurance, Internet hosting provider services, and so on. The model could be tweaked in various other ways: for example, with sufficient support from big donors, benefits could be provided to bloggers for free, if bloggers meet some criteria. Another mechanism for supporting bloggers is to give them free or reduced-cost professional services, such as web development, graphic design, accounting, legal services, etc. In additional to the usual payment models for professional services (dues from bloggers, donations from big donors), professional services could be provided on a volunteer basis. For example, blog readers could volunteer to provide their professional talents to blog writers on an ad hoc basis. Alternatively, bloggers could trade services with one another, using a barter model. The cottage industry of open source blogging software, content management software, and blogging templates is another good example of an avenue in which professional services (web development or web design) are provided to bloggers on a volunteer basis. Alongside goods and services, bloggers sometimes need advice or mentorship, and this need presents another possible kind of support. A blogger support organization could provide bloggers assistance in making technical, strategic, or editorial choices. A "blogger school", blogger resource guide, or a similar kind of service could help bloggers make technical decisions about their blogs; or it could help them focus on a topic or learn more about that topic, in order to write better posts; or it could help them maximize the revenue from their blogs. Leaving aside goods and services with monetary value, bloggers frequently need access to political events or personalities. Most frequently, this is expressed in blogger circles as the need for press passes to some event or another; and fortunately, there is a slow but steady trend towards extending press passes to bloggers at conventions and other Democratic political events. But access goes deeper than that too - it includes opportunities to interview candidates and officials, solicitations of feedback on strategic plans, etc. It would be nice to think that left-leaning politicians and organizations will eventually come around to granting this kind of access to bloggers. Realistically, though, bloggers will probably need an organization which can advocate for them, and steadily work on finding a seat at the table for bloggers. In a way, this is what BlogPAC is doing, in certain targeted ways (especially with regards to net neutrality.) YearlyKos, by soliciting visits from Democratic luminaries, is also working to give bloggers a seat at the table. Access is a nebulous concept, and there's plenty of room for many different organizations to help bloggers gain it. There is a final category of supporting organizations which would be better described as blogosphere support, rather than blogger support: organizations which work to strengthen the blogosphere as a whole, rather than individual bloggers. Such organizations identify gaps in the progressive blogosphere, and work to fill them. That includes locating individuals who have something to say and encouraging them to blog; finding issues, geographic areas, media institutions, or other niches which aren't well covered by the blogosphere, and recruiting someone to do so; identifying other blogospheres with which the progressive blogosphere should interact, and building bridges between the spheres; and so on. There's tons of work which needs to be done along these lines; unfortunately, it is probably the most difficult work in this area, and the work which is least likely to be self-sustaining. Coming up next... This post has mostly focused on the kinds of things which need to be done to support bloggers and the blogosphere. For the most part, I've intentionally avoided mentioning, from a mechanical/organizational point of view, how this would be done. That discussion will have to wait for the third post in this series. However, rest assured that there's plenty of work to go around; I imagine that there's room for a few dozen blogger/blogosphere support organizations, with a variety of organizational structures, revenue models, and benefit profiles. In the next post, I'll discuss the different kinds of revenue available to bloggers, and the kinds of services bloggers can offer to make money. This is very relevant to blogger support, because one way organizations can support bloggers is to help them find customers, and/or make earning revenue easier. In the meantime, please chime in below and suggest other ways in which blogger/blogosphere support organizations could provide goods and services which would support bloggers. If you are a blogger yourself, perhaps you can answer this question: what are your most pressing needs, and how could a support organization help you meet them?

Today is the Fourth Annual Blogosphere Day, when the progressive blogosphere unites behind a single candidate or cause. This year, we're celebrating ActBlue, one of the most important elements of our electoral machinery. ActBlue helps Democratic candidates raise money, and it helps grassroots activists organize their own small-dollar fundraising campaigns. ActBlue is also an excellent example of what liberal entrepreneurship can do for the progressive movement. Started in 2004 on a shoestring budget, the organization has helped raise $25 million for Democratic candidates in three short years, with a miniscule up-front investment. Drop by ActBlue today and show your appreciation for this wonderful organization!

What Cost Per Action advertising can do for the blogosphere Recently I've been very interested in the concept of cost per action advertising. I believe it could be a mechanism for sustaining the progressive blogosphere. Briefly, cost per action (CPA) is an advertising model whereby advertisers pay publishers (e.g., blog owners) a certain cost for each time readers take some action. In the world of online sales, CPA is extremely advantageous for stores, who can guarantee that their advertising dollars will result in a net profit - a store only needs to take care to set the cost for each sale to be less than the profit that sale yields, and it can guarantee something left over from each sale. The advertising budget is completely self-sustaining. In a highly action-oriented environment like the blogosphere, cost per action seems like an ideal model for both advertisers and bloggers. Progressive bloggers are already exhorting their readers to take some action or another; why not get money for each action the readers take? Of course, there are some limits on what kinds of activities CPA should not reward. CPA shouldn't be used to incentivize people to register to vote or to actually vote, as that kind of activity will probably be considered illegal vote-buying; similarly, CPA shouldn't be used to incentivize any illegal or harmful activity. Beyond those restrictions, there's a wide variety of political activities which cost per action could cover, if the proper mechanisms exist. The most obvious ones are financial political activities, like donating to a campaign, buying something from a progressive company, buying progressive political merchandise, etc. In these cases, the value derived from the action covers the cost of the ad, and the campaign, progressive company, or progressive organization always nets a profit. Moreover, these kinds of transactions are completed online via a credit card transaction, so the advertiser gets immediate gratification. A riskier investment, from the advertiser's point of view, is paying for non-financial actions, like volunteering for a campaign, joining an email list, applying for a job, etc. When these actions result in offline behavior (i.e. upon "conversion"), it can be financially beneficial to the advertiser: an email list subscriber buys a product, a volunteer sign-up shows up to canvass, a job applicant gets the job, etc. However, it's often difficult to measure the value of the offline behavior. More than that, because the online action has to be paired with offline behavior in order to be financially useful, there's always some number of people who don't "convert". To run a non-financial CPA campaign, the advertiser has to know both the monetary value of the offline action, and the likelihood that an online action will convert. Somewhere in the world of cost per action advertising is hidden a great opportunity for an enterprising progressive candidate to quietly but very effectively build a solid campaign from the ground up, while helping out progressive blogs. Besides the obvious (raising money online through CPA), a candidate could do some very interesting things with field using CPA and a fleet of other technologies. For example, an inventive candidate could develop an mobile GOTV program for harvesting cell phone numbers and addresses from supporters; the campaign would send text messages to encourage those voters to register, and then remind them to vote on election day. Candidates aren't the only show in town. Combining CPA with crowdsourcing could provide a compelling way to create a low-cost decentralized newsroom, do legal and other public-interest research, or otherwise gather a wide variety of data quickly and fairly cheaply. (This is particularly true with VPA, i.e. value per action, advertising. In this model, ad revenues are split between the publisher, who displays the ad, and the reader, who takes the action.) Of course, progressive businesses can use CPA to sell things like environmentally-friendly, union-made, or fair-trade products online. There is an opportunity here for liberal entrepreneurs. CPA is an exciting technology, but lack of adoption from the blogosphere or from progressive organizations could hamper the degree to which our movement uses it to become more effective. An enterprising progressive could create a CPA advertising network which makes progressive CPA advertising easier and more effective; such a network could be cooupled with tip sheets, resource guides, and consulting services to help progressive organizations and bloggers both figure out how to use CPA. CPA is about to take a big leap forward. Last year, Google announced that it would start to incorporate CPA into its AdWords program, and announced the CPA beta test in March. Turn.com announced a competitor CPA ad network in November. CPA ads will probably be commonplace in short order. Progressive bloggers should pay attention to this trend, and take a serious look at their current advertising program. Bloggers might benefit tremendously from signing up for a CPA ad network. Bloggers should be aggressive in publishing ads which go well with their content and activities. Progressive candidates and organizations should begin to purchase CPAs, and think about how CPA could be used to drive their core operations. There is a serious possibility that CPA could not only make progressive organizations much more efficient, but could also help sustain the progressive blogosphere and help more progressive bloggers earn more money.

One of the key problems limiting the progressive movement is the difficulty of making blogging profitable and sustainable. The progressive blogosphere is a key component of the movement, but its health relies on the time availability and financial stability of individual bloggers. There are now some fledgling efforts to make blogging pay: grants from Blogpac, fellowships for investigative blogs like Colorado Confidential and Minnesota Monitor, and the Blue America Speakers Bureau. But these are just the tip of the iceberg, and I'd like to hear what other thoughts are floating around for make blogging more lucrative. I have some thoughts of my own, and I've included them in the extended entry. I'd love your own ideas, or comments on my thoughts. If you're interested in really sinking your weekend into reading up on this, check out Cursor, Inc's funding library, which is remarkably comprehensive. I should note that I have a financial stake in this issue. Most obviously, I'm a blogger and would like to earn money for my efforts. More than that, I am also working on a side project to provide banking products to progressive bloggers, and this project will clearly be more successful if bloggers are more profitable. The following is a short description of the kinds of things bloggers can do to make money. Most of these are not really new, just tweaks on existing methods already in circulation. But hopefully they will be a helpful jumping-off point.

• Cost per action ads. For a blogger, Google ads and Blogads are easy to implement, but they don't pay very well, except for top-tier blogs. Even state-level blogs occasionally don't make much this way. There are a couple of ways to get better rates. One is to implement "cost per action" ads, where the blogger gets paid a fairly high amount (measured in dollars) for each action the blog's readers take as a result of an ad. Note that cost per action is different from cost per click - in the case of cost per action, the blogger gets paid when the blog reader completes some action (e.g., completes a purchase transaction), whereas in the case of cost per click, the blogger gets paid when the reader clicks on an ad (and possibly does not complete an action.)
  Cost per action is the basis for bookseller programs from places like Powells, but books aren't sufficiently profitable to justify a very high rate for each action. However, done right, cost per action could apply to many different kinds of products which are relevant to a progressive blog's audience, and could be very lucrative, for the proper combination of blogger and product.
• Expand the advertising base. Until recently, most progressive blog ads were sponsored by organizations with a distinct progressive slant, like candidates and advocacy organizations. That is starting to change, and as blogging becomes more mainstream, more and more nationwide corporations (like Marriott) are beginning to purchase ads on blogs. But really, this is just the beginning. Local retailers should be advertising on local blogs. The problem is that most local retailers are slow to adopt new technology. Even when they are gung-ho about advertising on the Internet, lack of local blogs can be an impediment.
  Theoretically, Google ads at least makes it possible for local retailers to advertise on local blogs, if there are blogs in the area on which the retailer can post. The real problem is that there's a large disconnect between local retailers and retail bloggers, and they should be tied together. I've previously had some thoughts about using local newspapers to bring these two communities together (and to help replace lost newspaper advertising revenues), but may be other ways to achieve this goal.
• Premium content. I know, I know - content wants to be free. But I think in certain targeted cases, premium content could really work. With premium content, the blogger occasionally produces some very high-quality work, such as the results of a survey, report on some public policy topic, polling results, or something else of value. The content is available on a pay-only basis (with the cost determined by the blogger). Right now blogging software doesn't do a good job of supporting premium content, but adding this kind of capability in to a blog platform is a fairly minor software task. Goodies like teasers and user ratings can be appended to premium content to make selling premium content easier.
  An interesting twek on this idea is reader-generated premium content. In this case, readers can publish premium content on the blog, along with the blogger. The reader gets paid for each download, and the blogger takes a small cut. This idea really values the creation of a community of expertise, since bloggers get credit for creating the kind of community where experts who are capable of producing (and willing to consume) premium content gather.
• Solicitations for free content. This idea has certainly been tried before, to great success - the two examples that come to mind are Matt Stoller's reporting on the Connecticut Democratic primary last year, and Josh Marshall's reporting on the New Hampshire primary in 2003. The idea could be expanded; in general, any conference or extended political event is an opportunity for this kind of reader-supported content.
• Pay-to-post. This idea is, in a way, an extended advertising opportunity. And I can only imagine it'll be somewhat controversial, so I hesitate to throw it out there. But in brief, the idea is to allow a candidate (or company, or organization, or whatever) to have restricted front-page posting privileges on the blog for a short while. Such pay-to-post opportunities could be used in a variety of ways. For example, a candidate could release a public policy plan on the blog's front page, in order to garner feedback on the plan. Clearly, pay-to-post opportunities should be fairly limited, perhaps happening no more than a few times a year.
• Paid reader memberships. With this idea, a blogger would charge readers some annual fee for a membership, with certain defined privileges. Dailykos already does this - you can pay to view the site without ads. That's a good first cut at this idea, but there should be many other privileges which could be used to sweeten the pot and charge higher membership rates. A local blogger, for example, could team up with a local newspaper to offer discounted subscriptions with each membership (or other kinds of memberships in community organizations, like the YMCA.) Alternatively, if a blogger tends to get lots of "sneak peek" invitations, (to movie previews, and things like that), those invitations could be turned over to the membership from time to time.
• Consulting opportunities. Consulting is the "gold mine" of blogger profitability - bloggers use their high profile to garner potentially lucrative consulting gigs. This works reasonably well for bloggers with very marketable skills, which are closely related to the subject of the blog. In fact, blogging is a reasonably good way for an independent consultant to generate new business, so this idea works in reverse. What I'd like to see is a bit better support for bloggers to garner these kinds of opportunities: advertising to generate demand for blogger/consultants, tips for bloggers on how to be effective at garnering consulting engagements, etc.

In a way, I'm a rather odd person to be discussing these ideas, since I've never really used my blogging to earn money, at least not directly. I've never used an ad program, bookselling program, merchandising program, or Paypal donation link. So it's possible that some of these ideas have already been tried and failed, or that they're otherwise brainless. So take them with a grain of salt. What I'd ultimately like to see, somewhere, is a "Blogger's guide to profitability", which really studies various profitability mechanisms and provides solid research on which ones are most effective, which blogs tend to profit the most from each mechanism, and how to modify your blog to be more profitable. If anyone knows of a resource like that, send it along!

I don't think he realizes it, but Jeff Jarvis just figured out a way for newspapers to survive and thrive, and a way to support bloggers. In today's post on Google's video/audio/map/classified search extravaganza, Jarvis observes:

If you know that neighbors in Montclair read this blog — and they do — then you have a place to put house and restaurant ads you sell, if you're in a network with that blogger (who can also sell ads on your pages, by the way). But can you afford to start blogs for every town and job description in your state? Of course, not — especially not now. But it’s in your interest for them to exist. So you need to support them. How? Well, for starters, sell ads for them and promote them and figure out what else you can do for them.

Huh. Famous Ray's Original Pizza advertising on blogs? And seeking out local bloggers to form relationships? Good luck with that. Jayme's Hip and Artsy Coffee Co-op, maybe. But there are plenty more Ray's than Jayme's, and by the time that situation changes, the blogosphere will be decades old. But how about Famous Ray's advertising with the Boston Globe, which has a local blog ad network where it can place Ray's ads in a way that Ray could see results (with coupon codes or whatever)? And what about the Boston Globe sponsoring a local blogger training agency, to create bloggers where none exist? It's not hard to see how newspapers are perfectly positioned to create local blogospheres out of whole cloth, and it's not hard to see how newspapers can attract small business ad dollars. It's also not hard to see how this whole enterprise would revolutionize the whole ordeal of running a newspaper, and of running a blog, for that matter. So, ahem, Boston Globe? Let's get it going, shall we?

Every industry has its own cast of characters, its own trends, and its own internal debates about how businesses in the industry should conduct themselves. These industry-specific stories have a tendency to create a kind of political landscape internal to the industry. Liberal entrepreneurs who are familiar with a particular industry can start progressive industry blogs to articulate and distribute a progressive view of their industry. Industry blogs are a wonderful way to discuss the trends and internal debates within an industry. Such blogs are already very popular within some industries, particularly the technology sector. There are also smaller blogospheres in sports coverage, fashion, and celebrity culture. I believe that there is tremendous potential for the establishment of new industry blogospheres in the industry of parenting products, educational products, and health care. Industry debates are frequently apolitical in nature. For example, a latent debate within the web development industry (which is my industry) is whether a lightweight, rapidly-evolving framework like Ruby on Rails is preferable to a heavy-weight, more established framework like Struts or Spring for Java. Many developers have strong opinions one way or the other, and they should; the choice has a major impact on their work environment and the final product. But this debate is value-neutral; the choice depends strongly on a developer's knowledge of each framework, the kind of project being implemented, the budget for the project, and other constraints. Other industry debates are obviously political in nature. A debate similar to the one I've just listed is the debate between open source frameworks (like Ruby on Rails) and proprietary frameworks (like ASP/.NET). As with the other debate, the choice of framework again depends on value-neutral constraints. However, this debate also includes political considerations, such as whether a developer trusts the company which developed a proprietary framework (Microsoft, in the case of ASP/.NET), or whether a developer is comfortable with allowing a company to dictate in non-democratic fashion the terms of the framework. There are obvious similarities between this debate and a number of political debates, like the degree to which political elites should be allowed to control the process of choosing a party's nominee in an election. An industry blog has the opportunity to spread progressive values in the context of these industry debates. As debates evolve, the progressive industry blog has an opportunity to demonstrate what progressive values mean in the context of that industry. For moderates and apolitical individuals within the industry, such a blog might be an entry point into the wider progressive movement. Alternatively, it could simply be a good resource for following the trends and debates within the industry. Consequently, the progressive industry blog could be an excellent way to shape the direction and focus of the industry in a manner which is progressive. Of course, such blogs do not need to toe an imaginary party line on industry debates. A political progressive might make choices which are not progressive in the context of an industry debate for a variety of reasons. For example, a hypothetical progressive web developer might have reason to prefer working with proprietary frameworks rather than open source frameworks. Industry blogging can potentially be extremely lucrative for a liberal entrepreneur, when it is combined with an entrepreneurial venture. Industry blogging can be an excellent way to develop contacts and a community within an industry, and this kind of dynamic network can easily be leveraged into more clients and beneficial partnerships. At a very concrete level, industry blogging can be an excellent way to raise the profile of an entrepreneur's business in search engine results. (In fact, I hope to soon begin using Planting Liberally for exactly this kind of purpose; hopefully I'll have a chance to make that transition real in the near future.) New Blog Friday fans, I'm sorry to give such a great idea such brief attention, but I've got a couple of important things today at work. Hopefully I will have a chance to give this subject more thought in the near future.