Nice job, Report on Business

Congratulations to Report on Business magazine for its NMA nominations – and for making good use of its website to promote the articles that were nominated. (Sometimes, it’s the little things that matter.)

Have we ever charged enough?

Great quote from “Mr. Magazine” Samir Husni in an interview with mediabistro.com, in light of the constant debate of how to charge readers for online content:

What really bothers me more than anything else: Now you are talking about you want to charge for your magazines online. Well, how about you start charging in print? You know? Since World War II we are giving our magazines away. When I subscribe to Auto magazine for $5.00 for an entire year, or for Elle magazine for 10 bucks, or for Newsweek, which until recently was $10 for an entire year, am I really paying for the magazine?

Q&A with Suite101 CEO Peter Berger

Last year, I posted on SEO-oriented content creation… well, factory is a good word… Demand Media. The goal was to point out what they’re doing right (they are making money, after all) and what we can learn from them.

Today, I’m shifting the focus to another big online content publisher, this one homegrown: Suite101, based out of Vancouver. Their model is quite different from Demand’s: while the former generally pays writers on a fixed (and low) per-article rate and has them write preselected articles based on analysis of real web searches, Suite101 pays in advertising royalties and lets writers choose their titles and topics. I asked Suite101 CEO Peter Berger to answer a few questions about the Suite101 model and what magazine publishers can learn from it.

Q: What is Suite101? How does it work?

Suite101 publishes original, informative, fact-based articles written by freelance contributors. We help non-fiction writers build online profiles and audiences for their expertise. Writers choose the topics they want to cover and work with our team of professional editors to publish them online.

Our editors are mostly from the print journalism world and are based across North America with some Canadian bias: right now approximately 80% of Suite101.com editors are Canadian.

Through our editors and our online training, we work with writers to identify the most attractive angles for making their knowledge accessible online, and then guide them in establishing themselves as authorities in their fields. We would encourage that every writer or topic-expert give it a try, but begin with an open mind and get ready to write at least 20 to 30 evergreen articles. To really begin making money at this, you should also be ready to experiment with tips we provide about things such as how to title articles so they get found online.

Suite101 is Canada’s largest content website and has grown fast over the last few years, recently passing CBC.ca as the top Canadian-owned content site. We get over 28 million unique visitors each month and have published over 10,000 writers. Last year we launched sites in France and Spain, and in 2008 launched a German version. Our English-language site Suite101.com also ranks as one of the top 100 websites, in terms of US traffic. We’re based in Vancouver, and have been publishing online for 13 years.

Q: How does Suite101 make money?

Reading our articles is free – Suite101 generates revenue through online advertising. Given the nature of our articles (non-fiction, mostly evergreen material, lifestyle-focused), the biggest source of income are performance-based ads/text ads.

As for payment and rights, we share advertising revenues with the writers, and writers retain the copyright to their work. We ask for only one year of exclusive electronic publishing rights.

Q: How does Suite101 pay its writers and editors?

Writers participate directly in the revenues generated on the articles they write, for as long as the articles are live on the site and are being read. Depending on the commercial attractiveness of the areas they specialize in and how much they worked with their content and our team, this can be lucrative – our best writers earn north of $3,000 each month in royalties from previously written content. (For example, if they didn’t ever write another article they would still get this amount each month, for as long as their articles are on the site. Quite a few of them talk in our writer forums about paying their mortgages this way.)

However contrary to intuition, there is very little correlation between the number of articles a writer has contributed and the royalties they earn. A lot has to do with the topic and how many readers are seeking that information.

We pay writers each month via PayPal.

Our 45 editors are part of our team and are paid based on section-specific responsibilities and the amount of articles they oversee.

Q: What can magazine publishers learn from the Suite101 model?

Our model is probably most interesting for magazine publishers who want to build up audiences that are independent from the “destination” traffic they typically have built up. This is a step that tends to be very hard for organizations rooted in offline thinking. Having a website does not signify an organization has embraced online. Being an online pioneer, Suite101 has learned and demonstrated that:

• helping people write what they know can be lucrative
• if you want to be successful, you must research potential audiences and the commercial prospect of content prior to creating it (or assigning it)
• in every case, great quality works better than adequate pieces
• royalty-based payment is the fairest combination of rewarding great content while still keeping a scalable system

Success in new online content models is something that has to be grown over time – it takes persistence. We have not yet seen a single example where this was done without effort and patience, but the long term rewards make it very worthwhile for writers and publishers alike.

How to survive – and thrive

I love this quote by Sarah Rich, from a Gizmodo article about the upcoming magazine-in-48-hours:

I don’t think print is going to die but I think the magazines that will really thrive in the future are the ones who figure out how to embrace the tools of the web and use their online presence as a way not only to bolster their print product but also to deepen and diversify their overall identity and cultural role. Integrating the platforms and being willing to experiment and take risks are critical.

What magazine websites are for

From an interview with New Yorker web editor Blake Eskin:

For a 55-year-old reader, the idea that someone might both be interested in reading a 15,000-word piece about a shooting in Zambia and also be an active user of Foursquare is kind of anathema. But there are a lot of 25-year-olds who don’t see a contradiction between those things.

So in some ways we’re trying to cultivate the next generation of New Yorker readers. Some of it is giving people a taste of what they’re missing, some of it is supplementing the magazine experience, and some of it is about reaching a more international audience.

The New Yorker is not a magazine for everybody, but I think we have to make sure to reach the audience it can reach, and the Web is a great way of doing that.