"You recently announced a partnership with the Glam Network, which says that select blogs will join their network. How does this work for b5 and the bloggers in terms of ownership and revenue share?
To be fair, the wording of the press release, and the way Glam has operated in the past has probably created a bit of confusion. What’s really going on here is simply a partnership. They sell our ads and get to resyndicate our content on their network, and we get better ad sales than we can currently do while providing some promotional space for their network in return. It’s a real win-win and basically a no-brainer all around. Just over 25 of our blogs now make more money than they did last week and their content gets pushed to a wider audience at the same time. This isn’t like we’re selling the blogs, giving up any control, passing things off, etc.
So, to answer your last question, content ownership doesn’t change (bloggers own their content) and the revenue share doesn’t change as a result of this (though, very soon, we’ll have an announcement on a new blogger pay structure, anyways, heh).
Overall it’s a simple relationship, and one that benefits both parties. They sell ads and sell them really well, while providing some more exposure for our bloggers. We get them more revenue by virtue of having a greater reach, and provide exposure for their network.
What does Glam put in here, besides their enormous reach? Or maybe that’s it?
The point of this deal for us was revenue. I honestly believe b5 has done a pretty kick-ass job at bringing on great writers who write fantastic content. These days they produce somewhere between 150-300 posts per day. Since we launched a year and a bit ago, we really have focused on creating valuable content – and effectively figuring that if you have enough traffic it’s hard not to make money with it.
Now that our costs have increased, though (staff, servers, new pay structure), revenue needs to increase as well. So over the next year you’ll definitely see more deals which help us generate more revenue – basically for doing what we’ve always done: great content, written by great writers, for great niches.
I’m sure people are interested to know how this deal came to be. Who initiated it?
Glam had kicked off the original advertising / content relationship about 6 months ago with eBeautyDaily. At the time, Glam was almost exclusively a fashion and beauty network. Which really meant that only a half dozen or so of our blogs were a potential fit for them. A few months ago they started branching out into anything women were interested in. When that change happened, they pushed for a larger relationship. We haggled over the details and came to an agreement during ad:tech in NYC in November. Since then it’s taken some time for us to redesign those sites, but now that we have we’re rockin and rolling.
So there was actually a deal with Glam prior to this partnership, to work from?
Yeah, they were already selling eBeautyDaily’s ads. This is largely an extension of that – branching out into other channels, selling more ad units per page, higher rates, greater exposure, etc. It’s simply a natural evolution. That’s not to say it isn’t an important deal for us, it’s just that it’s not like we’ve turned over all operations of the blogs to Glam or anything. They’re selling ads and providing more exposure, and we’re increasing their revenues and providing them with content.
Today Glam, what will it be tomorrow? Are you pursuing content partnerships in other niches?
We’re aggressively pursuing quite a few partnerships. FeedBurner was one of our first, Glam is a great second partnership, and we’ll see what’s next. The truth is that I feel a pretty heavy responsibility to help our bloggers find the largest audience they can, so we’re being pretty damned aggressive in finding new partners that can either bring greater visibility to the blogs, the content or the writers themselves."
with this interview. Superior work...
