Product Placement for Internet Writers

21 June 2012

There’s been a brouhaha recently about (mostly independent) Internet writers (not) making money from their web sites.

On one side are the read later services like Instapaper and Readability that allow readers to take the content out of its original site, remove all the ads and other extraneous rubbish, and nicely format the text and layout of the page for an enhanced reading experience.

On the other side are the poor independent writers, who live and die by the page-view. What happens if no one clicks their ads because they have been removed by a read later service? Where does their revenue come from?

There are any number of novel business models that independent writers use to bolster their meagre incomes; like selling premium content to subscribers, selling T-shirts and other swag and placing ads into their RSS feed.

But I would like to specifically address the issue of the read-later services. If someone is taking your content, modifying it from its original form and removing the ads, then perhaps a more subtle advertising mechanism is in order.

Movies and TV have been doing this for a long time: It’s called product placement and, if well executed, it can be very effective. I’m far less likely to be offended by well chosen product placement in a movie, than an image (or, horror, Flash) advert on a website.

If your ad is presented in a format consistent with the bulk of your core offering, text, then it’s likely to be better received by your audience, and much less likely to be removed by read later services for distracting from your actual content.

If your site is primarily about images, like Flickr or Instagram, then users will be more sympathetic to, and engaged with, ads that are images. Ditto for movies, ditto for audio.

Writers: if your business model requires ad revenue that’s fine, but make your ads text-based and relevant to your audience.

Ad syndicate networks: make your ads available to writers in well written plain text format, with a single link.

As a reader, I favour the whole-post text ad (a la Daring Fireball’s two sponsored posts per week). But I could tolerate a clearly marked in-line text ad for something relevant to me and the content I’m reading about.

And no, I don’t believe Readability’s shady revenue-redirection business model, which they ditched recently, is an acceptable compromise for readers or writers.