Memberships and Blogs

by Paul on October 4th, 2005

John Gruber is looking for people to become members of his site during his 2005 Membership drive along with having current members renew their memberships. If you recall, Kottke has the same model, but doesn’t have any ads on his site. The question to ask is how effective is this approach to generating revenue?

Offering Something Different

Kottke simply asked people to donate without offering them anything different. He promised new stuff coming from him besides what you see on his personal site, but we have yet to see anything. Does it matter though? I think it does because the people who donated might feel no need to do so again for the simple fact that they didn’t get anything out of it. Sure many people donated because they were grateful for him maintaining a quality site over the years, but those charity donations have now past and he must look to future donations.

Gruber offers you a t-shirt and access to full entry feeds. Is this any better? Not really, but as he says:

But please, I implore you, do not think of this as paying $20 just to get a full-content RSS feed. Think of it as a small token of my gratitude for supporting my writing at this site. It’s like when you pledge $100 to PBS and they send you a tote bag; no one does it to get the tote bag.

Not every site has the luxury of an audience that is willing to support a writer because he writes great content and for many sites just offering a t-shirt and a full feed will not cut it. With that in mind, what could you offer? Honestly I don’t think that there is that much too offer from a blog. You could offer an ad-free version of your site or an exclusive content section, but that defeats the purpose of blogging since nobody could link to it. You are better off writing for the New York Times.

Who Should Do Memberships?

Again, with regards to blogging I don’t see many sites being able to achieve any success with memberships. I really do think Kottke and Gruber could make so much more money by offering adspace on their sites, but both feel that advertisers will help lead to the deterioration of their content (another post for another day), which baffles me a bit.

Maybe there are other benefits you could offer members on your blogs, but I am still struggling with what those might be. If you have any ideas I am all ears.

Kyle
Oct 4, 2005 at 2:58 am

I definately think blogs have a place in the membership space. Just now how it’s been implemented thus far. Josh has the right idea, he just needs to extend it a bit. Kottke kind of had it as well, but not quite.

The answer is: status.

You shouldn’t be selling anything on a blog, features, news, etc; that’s a useless cause. You should be selling status. Some kind of marker in the comments on the site that says - hey I paid my dues and I get my name in red because of it.

I know it sounds stupid, but people buy status all the time. Why wear a Nike shirt when an off-brand will suit just fine? Why put the Cal Poly sticker on your car? They should be selling stickers, shirts, pins, and most importantly - digital status. If you get your comments approved instantly, and perhaps highlighted or even in a different place than “annonymous” comments that’s status.

Given, I’m not speaking for either one of the blogs mentioned specifically, but more about blogs in general.
Aaron
Oct 4, 2005 at 3:48 am

Kyle, don’t you think that could possibly lead to deterioration of the content? If someone gets kudos just cos they chipped in a couple of bucks, you may end up with rubbish comments taking precedence over good ones.

Then you have to think about what happens if the blog owner wouldn’t normally have approved the comment but feels obliged to because the commenter has paid some moeny…

I definitely agree with your point insofar as people are willing to pay for status, I’m just not sure that blogging is the right place to exploit it.
Paul Watson
Oct 4, 2005 at 5:13 am

When you were doing that series on hyped web brands I kept half-writing an email to you to do one on Kottke. I chickened out every time though. I donated to Kottke at the time but based on the past several months I wouldn’t again. I like the guy, I even still subscribe to his blog and linklog (remainders) but I cannot point out to anyone the difference him going pro-blogger has made. I was happy to donate because as you say it was thanks for the many years of previous quality. But I think I and many others expected something special to come out of Kottke now applying his full-time to blogging.

I’m not sure what happened (or did not happen.) Be interesting if he wrote a post on it.
Sam Sugar
Oct 4, 2005 at 7:37 am

I think that the income debate in the bloggosphere’s amazingly primitive. The real breakthough will come not from ads, but from endorsement. Isn’t trust at the core of blogging?

There are some other good models too. I blogged on that this morning here:
http://www.sugarbank.com/2005/10/finding_blog_bu.html
Tony Summerville
Oct 4, 2005 at 5:42 pm

I can’t see myself paying a membership fee for a blog-type site simply because there are so many other sites I could read for free.

I agree with Sam and believe endorsements could be a viable source of income for a blogger. Money making strategies are in their infancy in the blogosphere - it will be interesting to see which ones succeed.
Solomon Folks
Oct 5, 2005 at 12:34 am

I really believe that the best way to generate revenue from a popular blog/network/etc is to really take advantage of offline opportunities. It can be as simple as having a series of events (speakers, hotels, etc) of the course of the year for blogs that can support that type of interaction. Perhaps a gadget based blog can work with companies and provide their members with the beta/pre-release video ipod or whatever for testing only. They then get to keep the gadget at a discount. The gadget company gets good feedback from early adopters and your gadget members get to be the alpha-geeks…it’s a win win! Look offline Luke, look offline…the force it still strong there.

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