Monetizing the Mommyblog: An ABDPBT Personal Finance Series

This is the fourth in a series of posts on the topic of monetizing mommy blogs featured on ABDPBT Personal Finance. The models I’ll be discussing have not yet been implemented on a large number of blogs, and thus the use of them is still pretty experimental. You can try these at home, but for the love of God, please BE CAREFUL. Read all of the Monetizing the Mommyblog posts here.

Gift suites have been a standard for Hollywood events like the Academy Awards and the Sundance Film Festival for years now. The gift baskets handed out at the Oscars are supposedly so valuable that people will agree to host the awards show just to get their hands on one of them. To an outsider, this might seem like just another opportunity for ostentatious gift-giving by rich people to other rich people, but the truth is that getting your product into a gift basket is a pretty smart marketing strategy, particularly if you’re a brand that’s trying to get its foot in the door.

Sponsors love the idea of a gift suite because it gives them an opportunity to get a highly visible star to wear their products or be seen patronizing their establishments. Celebrities like them because, hey! free stuff — and if you think celebrities are above getting freebies because they make a lot of money, guess again. Everybody likes free stuff, particularly when it’s not being handed out to just anyone. Being able to get into a gift suite or being invited to host something and get a gift basket is a symbol of status among celebrities in some cases to a greater degree than money alone, precisely because money cannot buy it.

But more to the point: what if I told you that some smart mommybloggers are experimenting with this kind of monetization in the mommyblogging world? Well, they are, and you can, too, if you know how to go about it. Read more below.

How It Works

In a nutshell, here’s how it works: a blogger approaches a brand to host an event at a blogging conference, either in the context of a gift suite, or as a sponsor to a party. The sponsor may or may not already be affiliated with the blogging conference or event; if they are already affiliated, the bloggers’ offer gives the brand an opportunity to have more control over the circumstance in which their brand is presented (i.e. in a nicely decorated suite rather than a booth in an Expo Hall), and it also gives them closer to a guarantee of getting good interaction between the brand and particular bloggers, because bloggers will be invited to attend the event specifically, and are more likely to make a point of visiting the suite to support their blogging friends and to see what kind of swag they can get, whereas with an expo hall, it’s kind of a crapshoot who will show up and why.

The terms of the agreement between the blogger and the brand depend upon the deal; however, there are certain constants. The blogger promises to promote the suite on their blog. When Allison Czarnecki (Petit Elefant) and Marie Le Baron (Make And Takes) hosted the Cambria Cove Suite last month at Mom 2.0, they promoted the suite on both of their blogs during the weeks preceding the event, and then sent out tweets inviting people to come to the suite during the actual event. The suite was hosted in their hotel room at the Four Seasons Houston, and both Marie and Allison were on hand in the suite all day on that Friday to host the people who came by. They also arranged for food and refreshments, and promoted the suite in various other ways, e.g. by telling their friends about it, and encouraging people to come to the suite via word-of-mouth.

The inclusion of a means of gathering business cards is standard for these kinds of PR events. At the Cambria Cove suite at Mom 2.0, Allison and Marie provided a nicer atmosphere for the PR business that takes place on an Expo floor by collecting the cards in a silver dish, right next to artfully displayed premium chocolates, a generous coupon offer, and lovely candle scents. Beats the giant goldfish bowl that Walmart had at BlogHer last year, is all I’m saying.

On the corporate side, the sponsors of a gift suite are expected to provide some kind of incentive to come to the suite (aka swag). In return, they are allowed to showcase their wares at the suite, and have a public relations representative on-hand to answer questions about the products, as well as other opportunities for brand partnerships, presumably. The terms of the deal worked out between Cambria Cove and Allison and Marie were not disclosed to me (yes, I tried), but I do know that the hotel room at the Four Seasons used for the Cambria Cove Suite was also the one in which Allison and Marie were staying (this is key: it lends a private party atmosphere to the event, and is a nice touch), so I am presuming that Cambria Cove might have footed the bill for the room, though I do not know for sure. Another unsubstantiated piece of conjecture: I think that Allison and Marie probably procured some kind of flat fee for throwing this party, but I can’t confirm or give you an idea for how much this kind of thing goes for, because nobody’s letting me in on the inside terms of the deal.

Everybody at the party was given the choice of two favors (while supplies lasted). I chose these cameo drop earrings by Extasia (similar ones retail at Cambria Cove for $85; the originals retail on the Extasia site for $64) over the mini ceramic candle by Voluspa (retails for $15). The idea behind the gifts is that it provides a positive brand experience for the corporate sponsors that cannot be achieved on the Expo floor. And, depending upon the conference, it might even be a much cheaper means of achieving it: a booth at an Expo hall at one of these conferences is a very expensive affair . . . why not spend a little bit of that money on giving gifts, rather than giving the conference organizers more money?

Corporations and Blogging Sponsorships

One aspect of the gift suite that is not immediately clear to me is the relationship between the larger conference and these kinds of gift suites. Though I’m sure you don’t have to have the blessing of the conference organizers to throw your own suite, you won’t get any promotion without their blessing. However, in the case of Mom 2.0, it appears that there was an agreement between the sponsors of the conference, the bloggers, and Cambria Cove: the speakers gifts at Mom 2.0 were also supplied by Cambria Cove, and Cambria Cove is listed as an official sponsor of the entire Mom 2.0 event. I am not clear on whether Cambria Cove was approached first by Allison and Marie, or first by Mom 2.0; but in any case it appears to have been a partnership that pleased everyone in this case, and as a conference attendee, I can say that this kind of gift suite is far more effective than an exposition booth. The other people with booths at the exposition got barely any of my time, and no mention from me in my blog, and here I am writing a full-lenth post about the Cambria Cove Suite. And I’m not the only one: there were at least two other mentions after Mom 2.0 about the Cambria Cove Suite (Lookiloos and Pure Amber Blog), all in rave reviews. I have yet to see anything written about the other expo people.

How To Organize A Gift Suite

If I were to go about organizing a gift suite, I’d start by determining how much an exposition hall booth costs at the conference event I was planning to attend, in order to get an idea for how much sponsors are willing to spend on this kind of thing. Then, I’d check with the conference organizers to see if they had any kind of rules about this sort of thing, because it’s probably better to be on the up and up as much as possible. Then I’d seek out a sponsor that fit my brand as well as the brands of bloggers I knew would be at the conference, and pitch a deal based on that. These kinds of deals are where having your blog’s media kit really comes in handy, and being able to point them to this post for an explanation of how things work is also something you might consider. Beyond that, I think it’s kind of an inexact science — when you pitch it, emphasize the idea that what the sponsor is buying is a positive brand association that really cannot take place in any other way, and that association is to be made with a bunch of people who also have their own blogs, so the possibilities for sales leads are really endless.

"The Gift Suite Model: Building A Positive Brand Association For Cambria Cove" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Personal Finance and was originally posted on March 17, 2010. Copyright ®2010 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

I recently hired Laurie Smithwick of Leap Design (aka @upsideup, and one of the founders of Kirtsy) to design a logo for ABDPBT. Laurie is the person who designed the logos for Cool Mom Picks and Kirtsy, among many others. I was excited to get a chance to discuss the possibilities for an ABDPBT logo with a designer who knows this industry and already has a good idea of what works in this particular space while we were at Mom 2.0 last month.

Here’s why I decided to pay a professional graphic designer to design a logo for me: in case you have not noticed, the aesthetics of my site are always changing. I have four different sections of my blog, and I design a new masthead every month. I have been known to switch up my web design whenever it suits my fancy. I chose a difficult site name that nobody can remember, much less pronounce or type into their browsers correctly, and even if I’ve devised a means of working around that complication with creative URL redirects (e.g. see what happens if you type in “abdtpbt.com” into your address bar), I lack a visual design element that is able to remain constant throughout all this changing content and cross-platform appearances. I like to experiment with design, but frankly, coming up with an iconic image to represent myself and my work non-verbally or quasi-verbally is beyond my talents at present.

What I told Laurie was: I want something that functions like the Playboy Bunny, or Alfred Hitchcock’s profile, for lack of better examples. I want something that can appear on my Twitter page, my business cards, and in every masthead — so that there’s always something that tells you exactly what you’re looking at. Right now, Laurie’s working on figuring out just what the hell that thing might be, but I thought in the meantime I’d list some reasons for why you might want to consider a professional logo design as well.

Really great logos can be incorporated into the fabric of your work. (in some cases, literally).


Take the Lululemon logo. Not only is the lululemon logo flexible enough to appear in all of the different incarnations of a constantly changing clothing brand, the “stylized ‘a’ logo” (that’s what they call it, I always think of it as looking like a flip hairdo) is something that Lululemon has taken to stitching directly into their clothing. My running shirts all have seams that are in the shape of the logo, and just today I saw somebody carrying a workout bag that was quilted by using a pattern of interlaced lululemon “A”s all across its bottom. The shape itself comes to stand for the brand, and that offers a lot more flexibility and subtlety with branding across different mediums. A blogger can really benefit from that kind of thing, as he or she moves from blogging, to Twitter, to Facebook, to speaking, to book deals, and beyond, because the logo can grow with you.

Good logos paired with good brands can inspire people, create new opportunities.


The Apple logo is not only immediately recognizable, it is also something that is so well-incorporated into the identity of the brand that it can actually inspire the production of new products that showcase it. The Snow White apple laptop skin/decal above is an example of this — people love Apple so much they want to call attention to their branded products, and create new business opportunities and products around that desire. These decals are sold on Etsy for die-hard Apple fanboys, and have spawned a whole host of other ideas about how to use the apple on the outside of the computer. I’m not quite at the point where I’m going to be buying a decal for my computer, but that does not change the fact that I wouldn’t mind having a logo people liked so much that they wanted to help me do the work of branding for free.

Product placement is so much easier with a good logo.


Now clearly this issue is not going to come up right off the bat for the average blog owner, but whenever you have a good logo that’s easily recognizable, you can then incorporate it into product placement opportunities with ease. Sometimes, people will actually have to take steps to keep your product placement from appearing, in fact. For example, The Awl recently claimed that Apple should get an Oscar for how many product placement appearances it has made in movies this year. In some cases, as in the picture above (from the movie, The Killers) the producers actually had to take steps to conceal the fact that people are using an Apple computer. As a big business, what you want are situations in which people see a movie or a TV show and have to actually wonder whether or not the placement was paid or accidental. And when Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs started Apple, I doubt they could have had any idea that their Apple logo would one day reach that kind of ubiquity. Who is to say yours won’t either?

"3 Reasons Your Blog Needs A Logo" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Personal Finance and was originally posted on March 15, 2010. Copyright ®2010 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Monetizing the Mommyblog: An ABDPBT Personal Finance Series

This is the third in a series of posts on the topic of monetizing mommy blogs featured on ABDPBT Personal Finance. The models I’ll be discussing have not yet been implemented on a large number of blogs, and thus the use of them is still pretty experimental. You can try these at home, but for the love of God, please BE CAREFUL.

As part of the keynote panel for Mom 2.0, Maggie Mason (Mighty Girl) offered an overview of her experiments in monetizing her blog through using sponsors for her Mighty Life List, as well as with creating content for third party microsites. A microsite, in case you’re not already familiar with the term, is a small blog set up by a company for the specific purpose of promoting a particular product or service. Microsites have been popping up more frequently in recent years, and have started to use well-known bloggers as highly specialized copywriters of sorts to promote their work. The idea with the Microsite Model is that you hire a well-known blogger to create high quality content centered on a consumer product, and then the blogger will direct their audience to the material on another site. As such, there is a monetization of the content column of the blog, but the location of material on a third party site allows the reader to still give his or her permission for the marketing (by being willing to click on a link).

"The Life List And The Microsite Model: Mighty Girl On How To Price Out A Content Column" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Personal Finance and was originally posted on March 11, 2010. Copyright ®2010 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Last week, I wrote a post in which I made an offhanded reference to the mistaken(?) impression I had that MamaPop did not pay its staff writers. It caused a bit of a stir.

The post on daddybloggers was satirical, meant to poke fun at a pattern of behavior I have recognized in the parenting blogosphere. It was not meant to serve as any kind of in-depth, earnest commentary on the morality of building a blogging business. But as it turns out, some interesting issues were raised in the ensuing shitstorm it caused, and I thought some of these were worthy of further discussion here.

Stumbling Over A Landmine

Why did I make a joke about MamaPop writers being unpaid? Because I have been operating under the impression for several years now that MamaPop could not yet afford to pay its writers a salary from its advertising income. As recently as last July, I know this to have been the case, and I made a note of it when I heard it back then because I found it peculiar that so many writers would be willing to regularly work for free, no matter how great the website for which they were writing.

And yes, I am aware that other websites (most notably The Huffington Post) have relied upon unpaid writers for a significant amount of their content. I find it dumb when people write for those sites for free as well. It’s just not something I’d personally be willing to do absent an ownership stake in the website. I can see a guest post here or there in exchange for the increased publicity a post on a more heavily trafficked website might offer, but I couldn’t (and cannot) see the rationale behind working on a regular basis without being paid for it.

But people can do what they want to do, right? Who cares? And more importantly, who cares what I think about it? I’m just one person with an opinion and you know what they say about opinions and assholes. &c.

This was my prevailing thought on the matter when I made the joke about MamaPop writers being unpaid. Go ahead and work for free, guys, if you want, but I’m going to poke fun at it maybe once in a while, because I think it’s kind of dumb. Please feel free to educate me as to why it is not dumb, in fact.

This one comment caused a lot of commotion. And so what started out as an offhanded remark all of a sudden became very interesting. And I think it’s strange, so I think, “Hey, holy overreaction, Batman, what is going on over there? What the hell do they care if I think of writing for free is dumb?” And then I’m led to believe that it’s because MamaPop writers are, in fact, paid, and thus my jab at them is based on a totally false assumption. Well, no wonder they’re annoyed.

So then I say, “OK, sorry about that, my bad! When I’m wrong, all you need to do is tell me.” But that makes people even more pissed off at me.

So then I start thinking, what the fuck? What the fuck is going on over there? And, more importantly, what are they hiding? Because when you get an overreaction like that over one line in a throwaway satirical post . . . well, it suggests there must be a backstory to which I’m not privy.

How Much Does MamaPop Bring In Per Year?

Well, around the same time as all of this, I received a piece of information from a credible source regarding the possible earnings of MamaPop which suggested the site could be grossing as much as $175,000 per year or more from advertising sales. So then my brain really starts working, because if there’s any smidgen of truth to this allegation, then (after hosting fees and other assorted overhead), where is the rest of that money going?

So I decided to start running some numbers of my own.

Let me be clear: the question of how much MamaPop, LLC brings in per year is still very much a mystery to me. I don’t have access to financial records of the LLC, and the only reason I looked into this at all was on the basis of a tip that was purely conjecture based on comparing similar hypotheticals. When I’ve gone about getting ballpark estimates for blogging revenues in the past, I’ve used a cross-section of posted advertising rates and inventories filled to come up with a projected possible income per annum, and for kicks I decided to do this with MamaPop after receiving this information. Based on my own calculations of MamaPop’s current advertising inventory, I have come up with a more conservative estimate of between $64,925 and $108,209 in annual revenue for the MamaPop site.

Are The Writers Paid, Or Not?

I have been getting conflicting reports on whether or not the writers at MamaPop are paid. I continue to get conflicting reports, and at some point yesterday, I stopped knowing what to believe. So I decided to contact the owners of MamaPop to clear up the mystery. Here’s the email I sent them:

I wanted to give you a heads up that I’m going to be posting about MamaPop in the next few days. The gist of the post questions the practice of building a blog business with the help of unpaid staff writers, something I’m aware many new media outlets do, but which may be of particular concern to you, based on the events of last week.

Here’s what I wanted to let you know: I’ve received some information from a credible source that alleges the income for a site like MamaPop could be as much as $175,000.00 or more per year. I have run my own estimates based on your publicly posted advertising rates and current ad inventory sales that projects a more conservative estimate of as much as about $100,000 in annual gross income to the LLC. I wanted to give you a chance to comment on these numbers before I post.

If you would like to comment in any way, I’d be happy to include your response in my post. Specifically, I have these questions:

How much gross revenue does MamaPop bring in per year?
Does MamaPop pay its writers?
And if so, are all of the writers for MamaPop paid?
And if not, what percentage of the site’s content is produced by unpaid writers?
Can you please explain the recent absence of Catherine Connors from MamaPop’s list of writers and/or staff members (as well as her reinstatement)?

Thanks for your time.

Anna

[Please note: after I sent the email, I realized that Catherine Connors is actually no longer working for MamaPop; apparently, her reinstatement was temporary, and I didn't realize this until looking at the list of staff members on the MamaPop site, which had been updated again to reflect this change.]

Here is the response I received to my email:

I hate to take the wind out of your sails, but 1) Your numbers are ridiculously inflated, and you are being badly misinformed by your “sources,” and 2) every writer for MamaPop is paid for every post they write, plus incentive/holiday bonuses (though, indeed, I think most if not all of the writers would write for the site for no money, were that the case. You can feel free to ask them whether that’s true or not (though I can’t guarantee you’d receive a response, as your reputation precedes you)). We’ve *always* had a core group of paid writers, plus volunteers. 2010 marks the first year we’ve been able to afford to pay everybody, and we’re really proud of that — and them.

The rest of your questions are beyond galling and no one’s business, period.

That’s the extent to which we care to comment. Thanks for your interest in MamaPop.

Then I decided to follow the suggestion of contacting the 18 people listed on the writing staff for comment. Here are the responses I received from 4 of those people:

I have no comment other than to verify what Amy and Tracey have told you: I am compensated for my writing at MamaPop. Best of luck.
— Amber

I actually do have more to say.

I have been a writer at MamaPop for almost two years. Before coming to MamaPop as a contributing writer, I was a reader. In fact, I was asked to write for the site based on my reader comments and my acquaintance with one of the writers—I was not then nor have I ever been a high-profile blogger in any capacity. While I am of course pleased to make any money for my writing, money has never been a motivation for my participation with MamaPop. I enjoy writing and I have a great love for the site’s content and our community of readers. Most importantly, I have made, during my tenure at MamaPop, some of the most cherished friendships of my adult life with many of our past and present writers. I consider Tracey and Amy not only my editors and employers, but my friends, and while I am grateful to be paid for the writing I produce for them, I would do it for free, because I love it.
— Amber

Here’s the truth of the matter. Years ago, I helped my best friend steal my dad’s car and go out on a road trip. We were young and innocent. We thought we ruled the world. Well, the car got wrecked, everything went wrong, and my life turned to shambles. My “best friend” skated clear, and still talks about that day as his big “Day OFf.” Fuck you, Ferris, I’m stuck here, writing for Mamapop. Sure, they pay me, but does it make up for not having Sloan? No, sir, it does not!

[All deconstructing aside, those MamaPop writers really are terribly droll. OK, back on topic.]

I am a paid writer for MamaPop. That’s none of anyone’s business and why you think it’s yours is beyond me. I think it’s interesting that because you’re curious, you think you have some right to know proprietary information that is absolutely no concern of yours. Where I grew up, it’s impolite to ask people how much money they make. Good luck on your rude and petty venture.
— MayoPie

Anna? I find all of this in extremely poor taste and do not see how our compensation (and yes, we are monetarily compensated) is any of your business. Your lack of manners is astounding. — Miss Banshee

You may certainly quote me. Also? I consider the staff of MamaPop, past and present, to be very precious friends. I would write for free without a moment’s hesitation. It’s called having love for what you do, and I have it for my contributions for MamaPop. This entire situation you have created is incredibly distasteful and insulting to my friends.
– Miss Banshee

Those are all of the responses I’ve received before this posting. As more come in, I will include them here for your reference.

[Edit: here are responses from 3 more of the writers, making a total of 7 responses out of 18:]

Anna:

While this “material” with which you mention working is little more than rumour and conjecture, and you have not been at all clear about the reason for your interest in whether or not I get paid for how I voluntarily choose to use my talents, I will honour your query with a short response: yes, I am paid for my writing at MamaPop.

Schmutzie.

On or off “the record,” I really don’t care:

Anna, here we are again, just like when I disagreed with you about the MamaPop party: you, making grandiose sweeping assumptions and me, disappointed in humanity because of your distasteful attitude toward other bloggers and unbelievable rudeness.

You can continue to be this link-baiting taint-face (LBTF for short since you love random consonants strung together) and I’ll continue to laugh at your efforts to be the blog world’s Fox News Undercover Reporter OMGWTFBBQ!!1!

Give it up, Geraldo.

— Karen Sugarpants

It is clear you are on a witch hunt against a site that you have a demonstrated grudge against. Your claims are baseless, pointless, and immature, and I refuse to be a part of them. The writers of mamapop are my friends and coworkers and I am thrilled to write for the site. Why I choose to do so is frankly, none of your business.

Please quote me in the entirety or not at all as I am saving this correspondence. If you bother to read mamapop at all, you know I am a lawyer. — Jodifur

"Joking About Unpaid Writers At MamaPop Is Serious Bidness" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Personal Finance and was originally posted on March 09, 2010. Copyright ®2010 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

In order to progress further on the Great ABDPBT Product Placement Experiment, I’m going to need a media kit to give to potential sponsors when I approach them about a partnership. A media kit is basically just an informational packet (a pdf, or a section of your website) that gives sponsors an idea of what a site is about, what kind of mission you have for your business, who your readers are, and (in short) why they would want to partner with you. Here are the sections I’m including in the media kit I’m creating for ABDPBT, which I’ve created using the highly scientific method of looking at what other people have done and adapting it to my own purposes. Once I’ve completed my own media kit, I’ll share it here with you guys for critique, and I’m hoping that any of you who have already done this will chime in with thoughts or suggestions in the comments.

1. An ABOUT page.
   
   This is similar to, but not exactly the same as, the About page from your blog. It should mention the general philosophy of your site, and a general mission statement for your site. You can think about this section as trying to answer, in really general terms, why you write, and why people are interested in reading what you have to say.
2. An EDITORIAL page.
   
   This page gives a rough idea of what kinds of material you write, on what topics, how often, and the format in which they usually appear (i.e. blog posts, ebooks, newsletters, consults, et cetera). This will give the reader of the media kit an idea of how their brand might hope to interact, i.e. if there is an opportunity for them to fit seamlessly into your content in a manner befitting product placement, or if they will have to depend on more traditional ad placements.
3. AUDIENCE PROFILE page.
   
   This page dresses up the stats about your readership you get from Quantcast into terms that can appeal to a company (the above example is from the Daily Candy Media Kit. For example you might say, “the ABDPBT reader is: . . . . well-educated (over 67% of the readership has a graduate degree” or ” . . . . urban (over 20% live in major metropolitan areas.” How you arrange this section has a lot to do with what your most significant and attractive stats are. Think about what things are most important to advertisers, particularly the brands you intend to approach, and emphasize those.
4. A SPECS page. This page tells the brand all of the various different options available to them in terms of advertising, product placement, partnerships, what have you. The more established your blog is, the more details you will be able to provide here; for example, for ABDPBT, I can say that I have one 160 x 900 skyscraper ad per regular blog page available, one 300 x 250 ad slot available on the landing page, and a leaderboard on the crossword page. You will want to include any restrictions you have on advertising here as well, e.g. no flash, no roll-overs, no special sizes or what have you.
5. A RATES page.
   
   This last suggestion is optional: some media outlets will include an information sheet listing the going rates for ad placements and the like. This is probably going to work best on well-established sites that have a track record of private advertising sales; because of this, you might consider leaving it off your first draft of a media kit — it’s tough to tell people your going rates when you don’t know how much people are willing to pay yet. Once you’ve established yourself as a media outlet with various successful placements and advertising sales, you can amend your media kit to include this page in greater detail.

"Five Things To Include In Your Blog’s Media Kit" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Personal Finance and was originally posted on March 08, 2010. Copyright ®2010 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Monetizing The Mommyblog: An ABDPBT Personal Finance Series

This is the second in a series of posts on the topic of monetizing mommy blogs that I’ll be featuring on ABDPBT Personal Finance. The models I’ll be discussing have not yet been implemented on a large number of blogs, and thus the use of them is still pretty experimental. You might be able to try these at home, but for the love of God, please BE CAREFUL.

Most frequenters of the mommyblogosphere are familiar by now with Momversation, the video blogging series that features well-known mommy bloggers in a regular discussion of mommy-related topics. Sponsored by Target, Momversation is the brainchild of Rob Morhaim of Deca TV, who started from the premise that there were certain issues that came up repeatedly for mothers blogging on the internet, and that if you could somehow aggregate and combine those conversations in on central hub, then you could create a new kind of content that presented a multiplicity of different voices at once. Since Morhaim’s background was in television, it made sense to use video content as a means of facilitating that discussion, with the thought that the videos could appear on the sites of each of its participant bloggers, thereby providing promotion for the project as well as a “value-add” for the blogs of the panelists who participate in the project.

In terms of generating traffic for the Momversation website, this strategy appears to have worked. Though the exact web traffic to Momversation.com is not quantified, Momversation.com has an Alexa traffic ranking in the top 100,000 (currently at 43,899). It stands to reason that they have a decent number of page views per month, given that ranking and the fact that they have developed a reasonably active community and forums. But the fact that Momversation has embedded videos all over the web — including some heavily trafficked areas on the blogs of its member panelists — might serve to inflate those traffic ranks, since it seems that whenever an embedded video is loaded, this counts as a pageview on the main site.

I’m not big on video content, so I had to do some fishing around in order to understand the nitty gritty on Momversation’s video stats. At Mom 2.0, Rob Morhaim was asked about the reality of the video statistics for Momversation during a panel about using alternative forms of media in blogging. It seems that the video technology used for Momversation (as well as many other video sites) usually has some means of tracking views embedded in the player itself, but for some reason the Momversation numbers do not have these numbers readily available. To clear things up, Morhaim said that those embedded numbers are not used for Momversation because of its multi-seat promotion techniques — in short, that the numbers of views tracked by any one Momversation viewer would be inaccurate because it appears so many different places on the web, all at once. Morhaim did say that the Momversation oeuvre has easily topped twenty million views since its beginning in late 2008.

Twenty million views sounds like a lot to me, and it sounded like a lot to most of the people in the room at Mom 2.0. But as it turns out, twenty million views for a set of over two hundred videos spread out over a year and a half, while still respectable, is not as fantastic as it initially sounds. To give perspective, a video posted on a typical Dooce post (like one of her husband in the bath, say) can get anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 views tracked on its host video site (Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube). Make two hundred of those videos, and you’ve already got four million views, with no post-production, soundtracks or other big name bloggers contributing to the conversation or pimping it out on their blogs.

Still, Momversation makes money, and presumably generates a decent return on investment for its long-term corporate sponsor, Target. DECA TV also sells ads on the main site. Opportunities to advertise with Momversation, according to the DECA TV site, include “product placement, title sponsorship, micro-sites and reskins, display and interactive media, newsletters, content licensing, and revenue shares.” It’s not clear to what degree that these methods have been deployed within Momversation itself, since DECA TV also has replicated the Momversation model in various other sectors of the blogosphere including the “properties” Parents Ask (Momversation, only with actual parenting experts, psychologists, and pediatricians), Project Lore (Momversation for Gamers), Smosh (Momversation for Teens), Good Bite (Momversation for Food Bloggers), and Dog & Pony (Momversation for Start-ups, Tech Gurus, and Entertainment people).

DECA’s website states that their company’s purpose is to locate “pre-existing online communities or ‘tribes’ along with ‘tribal leaders’ . . . people who have emerged from the online rabble to become recognized leading voices in their vertical space” and then put together “properties that have video at their core, but capitalize on all the publishing and interactive capabilities the web has to offer.” They put out a high quality product, and have a smart approach to creating unusual content for the mommy blogosphere, even if I’m still not convinced that video is the right medium through which to communicate with this particular market sector. There are a lot of questions about Momversation in the blogosphere, though, concerning the way Momversation is produced, how the panelists are chosen, what kind of compensation is involved, and — particularly with the recent launch of BlissTV — the viability of video blogging as a means of commercializing blogs. Here’s my stab at delving into the issue further, for what it’s worth.

Where Does Momversation Appear And How Much Does It Cost?

Momversation has its own website, but the peculiar level of its success is due to its exposure across a ton of different platforms, including the personal blogs of all the panel members, as well as various placements in Hearst publications and on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Momversation appears in the content column of the panelists’ blogs — which in some cases is very valuable web real estate — as well as in the sidebars of some of the blogs of panelists. It is a safe assumption that Dooce (who featured the Momversation video as a fixture in her sidebar for several months) would have been paid a fee specifically for that purpose, since that amount of space on Dooce.com would have been selling for as much as $15,000 per week at that time. Dooce’s contract would have to include the fee for her appearance as well as some kind of clause for the space on her blog, though it appears that Momversation has since removed its ad on Dooce’s site. By contrast, the space on Giyen Kim’s sidebar is probably not billed out at the same rate, and I don’t know if the appearance of Momversation there is by contract or just the free choice of the blogger.

Because nobody is talking at Momversation. Not about salaries, not about anything.

That’s right, I was tacky and asked about money. I do these things for you guys. Because that’s what we want to know — how much are they getting paid for this gig, right?

I wrote to all of the Momversation panelists to see if they could give me ballpark numbers for the salaries they get for participating in Momversation. Several panelists wrote back, but they all explained that they had signed what one person referred to as a “pretty air-tight confidentiality and nondisclosure clause” that prevented them from talking about the specifics of their contracts. This is not surprising, since the people behind Momversation are Hollywood types who are used to the sensitivities surrounding discrepancies in talent salaries. Jessica Gottleib, a current Momversation panelist, did confide in me that she doesn’t “work cheap or silly,” and that she’s “very happy with [her] deal with Momversation.” This sentiment was echoed by another panelist, who said she loved working with them (DECA TV).

They have covered their bases, because nobody is willing to talk, even people who don’t work for them regularly, which means they must be getting paid a shit ton to participate in this deal. Of course, I had figured they must be well compensated, and I had still hoped to get some kind of ballpark numbers, but to no avail. I do have reason to believe that there is a flat fee paid to the participants, either by month or by week, per contract, and that each panelist has a set number of required appearances in the videos. I’m not sure that these requirements are the same across contracts, though, and besides, I cannot substantiate these claims, despite my best efforts at getting some more information. Here’s what Rob Morhaim had to say on the matter of salaries yesterday:

I’m sure it’s no surprise that all compensation questions are completely confidential. I cannot even give you a ballpark. I can tell you that everyone has agreed to and lives up to the terms of the same talent agreement.

TOTALLY UNSUBSTANTIATED CONJECTURE: Putting that statement through the lens of my highly specialized and scientific measuring tool, I surmise that, not only is there a discrepancy in the salaries paid to Momversation panelists, but the discrepancy must needs be so large that even a hypothetical ballpark number would betray the egregiousness of it all, viz. it’s got to be a crazy range, like a few hundred bucks per month for the lowest paid to like several thousand or even tens of thousands per month for the highest. Because if not, a ballpark wouldn’t matter much, right? Of course, sometimes these deals are so crazy careful that they just don’t ever tell you anything unless you’re on a need-to-know basis. But in my mind, the lack of a ballpark is telling. I’m just saying. End of totally unsubstantiated conjecture.

Here’s what I can tell you about hypothetical revenues associated with Momversation, though. When the Momversation project initially launched, it was running ads across the entirety of the BlogHer Ad Network, and spots for Momversation appeared several times here on ABDPBT before I eventually opted out of the campaign (only because they did not offer an option for having the video play only on demand, and I cannot countenance auto-play video — particularly with sound — no matter how high the CPM, it’s just too annoying). The CPM for those Momversation ads on BlogHer Ads at that point was about $12, which is on the higher end of rates for CPM on BlogHer Ads. To be pimping out a site at that rate — blanketing the network in spots at the time, in fact, if I recall correctly — there has to be some serious venture capital involved. Since Momversation is still going strong after a year and a half, I would guess that all parties, corporate and bloggers, are happy with the deal as it stands now. And that’s also probably why it’s so hard to find out anything about the nature of their deals.

How Do You Get On Momversation?

Rob Morhaim, the producer of Momversation and the guy that Heather Armstrong refers to as “our Bosley,” is a smart guy, and if you want to be on Momversation, it appears that the best way of doing so is to impress yourself upon him in some manner. Initially, the panelists for Momversation were chosen in a variety of ways: first, the project’s sponsor, Target, submitted a list of its “wants” for bloggers. At Mom 2.0, Morhaim told me this list was based mostly on traffic, but that Target also had required that the panelists meet certain demographics. After lining up some of the ideal bloggers on Target’s list, Morhaim went out himself and “found the voices” who would fill the other slots.

Strangely enough, most of those voices seem to have been listed on the pages of the Federated Media Parenting Federation page. Of the original panel of Momversation bloggers, there are three bloggers who were not represented by Federated Media at the time of their inclusion in Momversation; one of whom was Daphne Brogden, who is involved in another DECA-affiliated endeavor of undisclosed specifics (her blog, Cool Mom, is listed as one of DECA’s “properties.”). Giyen Kim, of Bacon Is My Enemy, uses BlogHerAds, but was featured on Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop page for Mommy Bloggers at the time she was picked for Momversation and appeared on CNN.com several times for her weight loss video blogging, and this is presumably how she came to Morhaim’s attention.

The third non-Federated Media represented blogger is Rebecca Woolf, the inclusion of whom on the panel really doesn’t require explanation: she is a beloved blogger, a gifted writer, a glamour queen and a best-selling author, and much has been made of her ability to mix high fashion with stuff she finds at Target: my guess is that she was among the few bloggers on Target’s original wishlist of ideal bloggers for Momversation. Somebody else who was likely on that ideal list of bloggers is Ree Drummond of The Pioneer Woman, who confirmed that she declined the offer to participate in Momversation mostly due to the demands of her schedule at the time (she was trying to complete what would become her best-selling cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl, Harper Collins, 2009), as well as some some uncertainty that the project would be the right fit for her.

The short answer to how you can get involved in Momversation is: you can’t. At least not for pay. Panelists are chosen by traffic and by their ability to meet demographics, and this appears unlikely to change. However, as more video experiments enter the blogosphere, there may be more opportunities to become part of this kind of gig, presuming this method of monetization is really generating the return on investment that is suggested by the scant statistics available for analysis.

How Much Control Does Target Have?

One of the big questions with Momversation has been how the various bloggers were chosen, and to what degree Target, the (seemingly permanent) sponsor of Momversation influenced these choices. I asked Rob Morhaim about the initial choice of bloggers for Momversation (see panelist roster and updates here), and he told me that Target had some bloggers in mind, and that these names had been generated based mostly on traffic numbers. In addition to their traffic-based wishlist, Target wanted to have certain demographics covered by the panelists, including different races and marital statuses. At Mom 2.0, I asked, if this “need to cover certain demographics” meant that they required certain specific races to be represented, and Morhaim said, “I would find a blog, and it wasn’t a highly trafficked-blog, but it represented Asian-Americans,” to which I interjected, “Or single mothers?” and he said, “Yes.”

Other than specifics of salaries, which nobody is giving me, the one thing I wanted to know about with Momversation was how much input Target had over the choice of discussion topics. This is mostly because the inclusion of Momversation as a blogging award contender in this year’s Bloggies seemed strange to me, even if various participants have claimed that yes — Momversation is a blog, rather than a commercial for Target, and no — Target does not have editorial control over it. So I asked Morhaim about the role of Target in the choice of bloggers and content, and because our conversation became so difficult to splice into quotes that fit standard conventions of English usage, I’m just going to put a transcript of it here and you can draw your own conclusions:

Anna: “But did [Target] ever go around to the individual blogs, and look at content, and then say, ‘We don’t want this person, because of XYZ, because they use bad language or something?”
Morhaim: “No. Never.”
Anna: “So, what is [Target's] relationship to the content of Momversation, then?”
Morhaim: “They’ve been wonderful.” [Coupled with emphatic nodding.]
Anna: “Yes, but do they give you topics? Or do topics have to be run by them for approval first?”
Morhaim: “They’ve been wonderful.”
Anna: “Are there certain topics that they won’t let you do?”
Morhaim: “Well, there have been times when we’ve gone to them and have said, ‘How about we do a topic on holiday shopping, but not holiday shopping at Target? Just shopping in general,’ and they’ll say ‘Yes.’”

Now, before you go saying that he didn’t answer my question there, reflect on the fact that he DID kind of answer it, because the fact that they went to Target with a topic at all, in any event, suggests that he is in the practice of going to Target to get a topic OK’d. See what I did there? There’s no way of knowing if the topics are micromanaged by Target on a regular basis, but there is a suggestion here that there may be some degree of editorial control over content made by a corporate entity, rather than the topics being an organic result of all these dynamic moms just chatting it up.

Conclusions: I Don’t Really Have Any Yet

The article I wanted to write about Momversation was going to tell you exactly how much people are being paid to participate, how much revenue it generates for the parent company, and how Target feels about its experience with the project. But my friends, I have failed in this. So the only question remaining for me is: how do you guys feel about Momversation? Do you think it works in our community? I have my own thoughts, but I think a more valuable way of discussing this method of monetiziation is to try to explore its efficacy in this market through the comment section here. I haven’t bought stuff more often at Target as a result of Momversation, personally — I already bought a ton of stuff there to begin with, for one thing, and also, I don’t think I’ve ever watched a Momversation video from start to finish myself (except the one played at the panel at Mom 2.0) because personally, I don’t have any patience for video when I’m reading blogs. I like to read blogs, and I cannot stand the extra noise created by a video. When I want to watch TV, I watch TV. When I want to read blogs, I read blogs. Am I alone in this? What do you guys think?

"The Momversation Model: Corporate-Sponsored Video Content" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Personal Finance and was originally posted on March 03, 2010. Copyright ®2010 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

The mommyblogosphere can be a magical place, full of parties, sponsorships, and bags stuffed with coupons for mass-marketed foods laden with high fructose corn syrup. It’s easy to get caught up in the glamour of it all, particularly if you are one of the few daddies in our midst. As a daddy blogger, you stand out — whether you like it or not (and it appears that most daddies have no problem with it) — and this works in your favor. At first, anyway. As a beginning blogger, it is so much of an advantage to be a daddy blogger, in fact, that your fellow traveler mommy blogger colleagues might become jealous of your astoundingly quick ascent up the ranks. They will say things like, “You’ve been blogging for six months and already have a picture of yourself with Dooce? Do you know how long it took me to get one of those?” or “How do I get over five thousand followers on Twitter? Grow a penis?” But fear not, daddies: I’ve got a list of what you can expect in the next year or two of your life, as well as a set of tips for how to survive the mercurial experience of blogging as a man among mommies.

Stage One: The ‘It’ Boy.

As a daddy blogger, you have a good chance of being welcomed with open arms by the vast majority of the mommy blogosphere. Where other comments on blogs by mere mommies are glossed over, neglected, your comments are far more likely to be reciprocated, you will be followed back on Twitter, and if there’s some kind of special event to which you need an invitation, well — you can probably sweet-talk your way in on the arm of one of the blessed invitees. Now, if in addition to your maleness, you are also blessed with social savoir-faire of any kind, unusual writing talent, or better-than-average looks (by blogger standards or otherwise), then there is no limit to the heights to which you might ascend in your first foray into the mommy blogosphere. Indeed, you have a chance to quickly reach a level that is well beyond where most mommy bloggers ever dare to hope — collecting subscribers, followers, coveted back links from the most elite of web real estate, and the like. Enjoy it, boys, while you can.

Stage Two: DadCentric Regular.

Soon after you have been recognized on a mass scale by the mommies with power, you will start to wonder why, though your traffic is higher than most of your peers, you still don’t seem to be courted by corporations in a manner befitting your stature. You will question the wisdom of associating yourself with a blog network called “BlogHer,” given the fact that you are a “Him,” but ultimately decide that you can deal with it, because if you weren’t man enough for this gig, then you wouldn’t have signed up to be a mommy blogger. Er, daddy blogger. Still, your heart will yearn for more publicity, and your brain will craves the challenge that only a change of venue can provide. You will start to want to reach out to others of your own kind, and will seek solace and community in the form of DadCentric, where you will occasionally write posts for an audience smaller than that of your own blog, but earn the credibility that only Federated Media ad sponsorship can provide. At Dadcentric, you will become a regular and get something back of that male camaraderie that you lost when you sold yourself out to the group of chicks looking at nursing blankets outside the ballroom at the last blogging conference.

Stage Three: MamaPop Staff Writer [EDIT:](Paid).*

But writing about daddy stuff will start to get old, and you will resist the feeling of being pigeonholed. You will look for another outlet for your writing, perhaps something that offers a chance to discuss — well, if not sports, then at least something close to it. “Popular culture?” you’ll think, “That sounds close enough.” And you will find yourself as a MamaPop staff writer, waxing philosophical about the underwear choices of Lindsay Lohan and the relationship between Tiger’s latest infedelity and Immanuel Kant. You will wonder why you still aren’t getting endorsement deals from Quaker Oats, or why the PR rep from Bounce won’t return your calls. Let me explain it to you: you’re a dude. Corporate sponsorship of blogs is one of only two areas in life where this is not an advantage. The other one is getting into bars.

Stage Four: Seasoned Veteran Or Disillusioned Curmudgeon.

At some point, your subscriber numbers will start to fall, and you will think that you have done something wrong. But really, all that is happening is the leveling out of the too-quick ascent to the top. Whereas you once had over a thousand subscribers in Google Reader, you’re now down below 500, and though this will seem like a slap in the face, you should take comfort in the fact that it ordinarily takes a mommy blogger three years or more to build up a number like that, that even with this setback you are way ahead of most people. If you’re not careful, though, the changes in how people look at you, the dwindling down of DMs and link love, can turn you bitter. You will start to question the sense of it all, and begin writing vague philosophical posts in which you question the wisdom of going “meta,” and then decide to do it anyway. If you are a truly talented writer, your true fans will stay with you at this point, cheering you on from the sidelines, and hoping that you pull yourself out of the rut that the shifting spotlight always seems to cause. This period of your career as a daddy blogger can last indefinitely, and is mostly contingent upon the desire of the daddy blogger himself.

Stage Five: Irrelevance, Book Deal, Or Both.

The good news is that the single most factor leading to commercial success as a blogger — mommy, daddy, or otherwise — is just continuing to do it, rain or shine, for years and years at a time. If you manage to stick through the ups and downs of your success, you will end up with a decent sized following of your greatest, truest fans, and with that comes bragging rights, and sometimes other, bigger opportunities. This has held true for bloggers in all niches, regardless of the talent or connections for a book deal. So hang in there, daddy, you’re in for a wild ride!

___________________
*It has come to my attention that, apparently, all MamaPop writers are, in fact, paid. My bad. I did not know this, good for you/them. Carry on.

"The 5 Stages In The Life Of A Daddy Blogger" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Personal Finance and was originally posted on March 01, 2010. Copyright ®2010 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

At Mom 2.0, I asked Heather Armstrong if she saw the kind of multimedia expansion she’s currently doing with HGTV as being the future of blogging. Her response was to say that she felt that her move to HGTV was an “expansion of the platform,” and she did not elaborate beyond that on whether she thought that this was the kind of thing that would be happening with more and more bloggers as time passed.

As much as I would have liked a more in-depth answer to work with, I think that this is probably the smartest way of answering that question, because the truth is, asking if other bloggers will be able to build their own brands to the extent that she has is like asking if any extra in a film is going to be able to pull off building an A-list acting career, as well as a production company on the scale of Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment.

Or something like that.

Because who the hell knows? Nobody on the web at present has the kind of crossover opportunity that Dooce does, except perhaps Ree Drummond (of Pioneer Woman). That includes all the big male web celebrities like Seth Godin, Jason Kottke, John Gruber, Merlin Mann, and whatever other SXSW regulars you feel like including in that mix. In terms of media appearances, they are small potatoes when compared to Dooce: they don’t get put on Time’s lists, they don’t get on Oprah, they don’t have multi-billion dollar conglomerates banking on building their web presence around their popularity. Even within the mommyblogosphere, where there is decidedly less hero-worship of Dooce, the number one search term on blogs with search widgets is Dooce. And while I’m sure this annoys people beyond belief, it also gives them traffic.

It would be impossible to say if expansion to TV is where bloggers are going, because, well — are any other bloggers going to where Dooce is going?

Context Happens

As part of her deal for content collaboration with HGTV, Heather Armstrong is writing weekly on the Design Happens blog at HGTV. Her first post went up on the evening of February 25, 2010. In short, the post documents how Dooce’s design choices are not always practical, using her choice of putting decorative butterflies (projectile butterflies) on the wall of her newborn’s room did not turn out to be the best of choices, because her second daughter, Marlo, is far more fidgety than her first child, who would never have grabbed something off the wall in this manner. In short, she ended up having to remove all of the butterflies because having projectile butterflies around a changing table is not a practical choice for a newborn’s room.

The post is pretty typical Dooce fare — take an everyday dilemma and make it funny by juxtaposing Heather Armstrong’s legendary perfectionist tendencies with the chaos of a life with young children, mix in a pinch of hyperbole, season with a few expertly processed pictures and a well-placed reference to the enduring practicality of Jon (her husband) and bake for 1000 words. The post deliberately begins with a design dilemma, which is of course part of the effort to meet the constraints of the Design Happens blog on HGTV.com, and presumably, the post is free from any kind of expletives as a result of its context on HGTV.com as well, though the title of the blog itself, Design Happens, is a pretty decent fit to the Dooce brand, even if it’s cleaned up, because by reference to a well-worn phrase, “shit happens,” HGTV has managed to capture the kind of edginess for which Dooce is known, even without the explicit use of a word that might be objectionable to the middle Americans in their audience.

The Design Happens Dooce might be cleaned up and more restrained, but there’s no question that it is Dooce. And, as far as I can tell, her post matches HGTV’s intention for the blog, which is to “[not] let bad design happen to your home!” by allowing “The HGTV team [to share] design inspiration to help you on your way to design victory.”

But what is fascinating about the post is not so much its content, but the different feeling one gets from reading it — the overall experience of reading it, that is — when removed from the experience of Dooce.com. The Design Happens blog is smaller than Dooce, more corporate, less visually appealing. And while they might be allowing Dooce to use some (corporately approved) pictures, they don’t let her present them in the full glory as they appear on Dooce.com, where even pictures that appear smaller are linked to huge, glossy versions of their originals — the kinds of pictures that make your mouth water, or want to crawl up inside of them with a good book, and buy all of the products depicted within them immediately.

On Design Happens, these are pictures of any old house, or any old newborn’s room with ill-advised wall projectiles. I suppose this blog is meant to funnel people to HGTV for the more deluxe content, but if Dooce is in charge of “convergence,” I have to wonder why they aren’t letting her do what she does best?

But I haven’t even got to the most interesting part yet.

The community engagement is the astonishing part. Bear in mind that Dooce gets hundreds, sometimes thousands of comments on her posts at Dooce.com. As of the time that I started writing this post this morning, Heather Armstrong’s post at Design Happens had 21 comments, which is not too shabby of a number of comments for a typical blogger like, say, oh, me. But I would imagine it felt a little strange for Dooce to have so few comments. And more disturbing was that, after the first few supportive or “I’ve been there!” kind of comments, the chorus of Dooce detractors take over the comment section, as they often do, whenever Dooce does anything on the internet. But what’s odd here is that the smaller number of comments make these Dooce detractors appear to be far more powerful and significant here than they do on Dooce.com — possibly far more significant and powerful than they actually are, actually. And to a certain extent, it doesn’t matter how powerful they actually are, because so much of what happens on the web and how power and money is allotted has to do with illusion.

The illusion, after twenty one comments, was that Dooce was not a good choice for HGTV. In fact, it was so overwhelming that I — of all people — felt compelled to leave a comment about the design technique depicted in the post. My comment, if not explicitly supportive of Dooce, was at least constructive and not detracting from the message of her post, and served to further the conversation (I thought) and downplay the significance of the other comments like

So is your point, hi I’m Heather, I have no common sense myself so let me tell you how to make dumb parenting design choices too? I just doing get it.

or

Is this point of this post supposed to be, “Be ye not so silly or stupid?” If it’s not, I can’t really figure out what the point is. Although, with some certainty in my opinion, I can tell you that it is not funny nor remotely interesting. Epic Fail HGTV. [by Kristen.]

or

WHO are you?

or

Heather you had like 400+ comments telling you what a bad idea this was. Oh but you knew better! We don’t have a design show, but it didn’t take much common sense just good parenting to know, that the flowers above her changing table were a horrible idea. Just like the pictures above her crib.

HGTV this is not your voice, this is just awkward This entry should have been something Heather put on her website, because no where in here is decoration advice. Just Dooce doing what she does…whine and defect.

I’m not sure why I felt compelled to do this, but I think it has something to do with this: on Dooce.com, I don’t really pay attention to the people who detract, because there are so many supporters, and the whole Dooce brand appears so powerful, there’s no reason to feel bad for her. But in a new context, Dooce is a beginner of sorts — she’s got a new set of people to contend with, and yet she’s still getting beaten up like she’s the pro that everyone wants to bring back down to their level.

It’s funny what context can do.

As I kept writing, I noticed that Dooce came in and commented on the Design Happens blog, something she rarely (if ever) does on the comments for her own posts on Dooce.com. So my guess is the effect was not lost on her, either — bloggers who are starting out always comment back and forth in their comment section, and they find it hard not to comment when somebody shows up to say something negative. In a way, Dooce is back to her roots.

I cannot wait to see what happens next.

"More On Dooce And HGTV: Is The Future of Mommy Blogging An Expansion of Platforms?" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Personal Finance and was originally posted on February 26, 2010. Copyright ®2010 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Earlier this week, I wrote about The Mayflower Model for monetizing blogs through careful, highly specialized product placement. In the discussion that ensued, it became clear that, not only are people impressed and intrigued by this model for monetizing blogs, there is also a lot of confusion about how to go about trying to do the same thing on your blog as Gabrielle Blair managed to do with Design Mom. So I thought, let’s see if we can figure it out for ourselves? Because if we succeed, then we will have recorded a step-by-step process through which a blogger wanting to arrange this kind of thing for themselves might be able to implement it. And if we fail, then not only will that provide lots of free entertainment and schadenfreunde to go around, it will also no doubt spark lots of conversations about how we might improve the model going forward.

So here’s my idea: we (me, Mini, and Mr. Right-Click) are planning on going to New York this summer for BlogHer, and for a family vacation during the week before or after the conference (we haven’t decided yet). Since this is a trip we’ve decided to take no matter what, and for which we will have to buy various things like plane tickets and hotel rooms and transporation and what not, I thought this would be a good time to try to experiment with product placement and test the waters for how companies feel about this kind of thing. We are going to approach the product placement experiment and try to break up the process into steps that people might replicate at home, if they want to try to do it themselves. In other words, we are going to throw stuff up against the wall and see what sticks.

Sound good? Let’s get started.

Step One: Figure Out Who Your Audience Is

OK, before we get into creating a media kit or providing statistics to sponsors, we have to figure out what my audience consists of. First we’ll see what Quantcast has to say about it.

According to Quantcast, the audience for abdpbt.com is made up of an overwhelmingly caucasian audience, with slightly more women than men (but almost exactly the same), most of whom are in the 35-49 age group. Most of you have no kids (!), and a third of the audience has a household income of over $100,000 per year. I have an unusually high number of readers with graduate school educations (not really surprising, given the title of the blog), and people who visit this blog are likely to also like blogs that talk about politics and commentary, science and nature (really?!) and fashion and cosmetics (booyah).

These generalizations fit, mostly, with what my impression of you guys would be, though I’m a little surprised that there are as many men as women, and a little surprised there aren’t more people with kids. But here’s the problem: my stats are skewed by a couple of things, most notably, the fact that I have the New York Times Crossword Puzzle on this site. This gets a number of visitors, regular visitors, who don’t read the rest of the blog. Those people are included in my stats through Quantcast, but they are not necessarily people who would be reading a content campaign. So if I can, I have to try to exclude them from my results. One way of doing this would be to put a different Quantcast tag on the pages with the puzzle, and I will do that to make the future results more accurate. But for now, I’d like to hear from you guys: how would you profile the ABDPBT reader? Do you think the different sections have different readerships? What kinds of brands do you think would appeal to the ABDPBT readership, and why? I don’t want this to turn into something like a quiz, but I thought it’s always enlightening when we talk about ourselves, and it might be the best way to shape a (hypothetical) content campaign that doesn’t make all of our skin crawl, so please chime in with your thoughts below.

"Announcing The Great ABDPBT Product Placement Experiment" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Personal Finance and was originally posted on February 25, 2010. Copyright ®2010 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Monetizing the Mommyblog: An ABDPBT Personal Finance Series

This is the first in a series of posts on the topic of monetizing mommy blogs that I’ll be featuring on ABDPBT Personal Finance. The models I’ll be discussing have not yet been implemented on a large number of blogs, and thus the use of them is still pretty experimental. You can try these at home, but for the love of God, please BE CAREFUL.

Design Mom’s Big Move

The Mayflower Model for monetizing the mommy blog was first developed by Gabrielle Blair of Design Mom in the Spring of 2009, when she managed to match a brand to her readership and the circumstances of her life at the time. Blair pitched a deal to the moving company Mayflower that would exchange their sponsorship of a cross-country move for a certain number of placements within the content column of the Design Mom blog. These placements would be made via a series of posts documenting the Blair family’s move across the country, which was expected to figure heavily into the content of the blog, regardless of which moving company was ultimately used. This was a particularly elegant use of product placement, and if you go through the various posts documenting the move, you can see that the placement is woven pretty expertly into the tapestry of the blog, with little change to the typical, expected content.

Blair says that the deal she ended up brokering with Mayflower was “purely a trade” for services rendered based on “what a cross-country move would cost for a family of my size,” rather than an exchange of a flat fee. I asked Gabrielle for specifics of the deal, and she said that she researched the price of a move, and then came up with a social media plan valued at that same amount. The plan “included specific instances I would write about or mention Mayflower (either in posts or tweets).” The key to this arrangement working, both for Mayflower and for the integrity of the Design Mom brand, was that Gabrielle made sure to specify only those instances where she knew she could refer to Mayflower without altering the site’s content: “For example, when they came to take measurements. When they came to box things. When they were on the road and called to check in on progress.” I asked if Mayflower requested any type of graphical ad or sidebar placement in exchange, and she told me that, as part of the trade, she had also offered Mayflower, “some ad space in my sidebar for a specific amount of time.”

Blair approached Mayflower for various reasons, not the least of which was the fact that Mayflower has the best logo and most aesthetically appealing look to them, which made it a natural choice for her blog (which deals with aesthetically pleasing presentation and design). Also, Mayflower had a wholesome reputation that fit the demographics of the Design Mom readership, and they had made themselves accessible by including a number for the company’s public relations representative on their website. Mayflower was able to move fast — the announcement of the move was at the end of March, and the move was to take place at the end of April, so Mayflower’s prompt response to Blair’s inquiries facilitated the choice.

The whole move, from the initial consultation, the progress of her packing to the final day in her old home to the day that all the furniture arrived was documented in the content column of Gabrielle’s blog, and Mayflower was mentioned in each of these instances, because of course they were part of her life at that point in time, so references to the brand were not forced, but rather the natural result of her experience with the brand.

This Is A Placement, Not A Sponsored Post

The thing that makes the Mayflower Model different from a garden variety sponsored post is that Design Mom’s content was not altered in any way in order to accommodate the inclusion of a brand. She was moving, and whatever moving company she hired was going to end up within the text of the blog. So getting Mayflower to sponsor just meant that there would be a brand name attached to references to the movers, as opposed to just generic mentions of “moving guys” or whatever.

With a sponsored post, a company is paying to have a post written specifically about their product, which is more awkward and really a lot less valuable, because it usually results in content that readers do not have much interest in reading. To see the difference, juxtapose the comments on this sponsored post about Crystal Light with the comments on the posts at Design Mom — the comments on the sponsored post is devoid of intelligent reflections about the brand, or any kind of positive reflection on the brand beyond, “Yes! I’m going to drink more water!”, whereas the other is filled with heartfelt sentiments and readers reminiscing about their own moving experiences, saying that they love Mayflower or that they plan to use Mayflower when they have to move. It’s tough to argue that this isn’t very successful advertising.

Most important to note here is that This deal was brokered by Gabrielle herself. She went to Mayflower’s PR department with information about her blog and the people who read it, and showed them why it would be worthwhile for them to deal with her, and how her readership was already a good fit the brand. She did not wait for a brand to approach her, and this is an essential thing to note because the brands that are good for you are not probably going to come to you. Because they are not going to know your readership, and they are not going to know where you are. Nobody knows your readership better than you do, so you have to make the placement opportunity happen, rather than wait for it to come to you.

What About Disclosure?

Does having a sponsor like this require that we tell people we are being paid in these instances? This situation reminds me a lot of a product placement within a television show or a movie in that, even without a direct statement of the relationship between the blogger and the brand, it seems like we might get to a point where we understand that any placement is a paid endorsement. Then again, I mention brands on my blog all the time, and I’ve never been paid to do so. Design Mom’s deal with Mayflower took place long before the FTC policy went into effect, anyway, but it seems to me that if movies don’t have to advertise to you that a product is featured because of a monetary deal, why should a blogger?

And does it matter, really, if a brand pays? Would we feel better to know, up front, that the brand name is going to be mentioned because it’s a sponsored move? In theory, I want to know this, but in reality, I’m not sure I care, as long as I’m still able to buy the idea that the product placement is coming from a genuine place — like, this is a company I would have used anyway, and I’m genuinely happy with their service. Gabrielle told me that, were she to do it again, and given the new FTC regulations, she would be more explicit about the nature of the relationship between herself and the sponsor: “I would probably build the disclosure around a campaign idea (something like: Moving is hard. Moving with kids is even harder. Mayflower is helping making it easier . . . ) and then include that with each post.”

Still, even without an explicit, up front disclosure, the reception of the Mayflower campaign seems to have been overwhelmingly positive — there was only one negative comment throughout the whole campaign from an (of course) anonymous commenter, and many of the Design Mom readers were forthcoming in their praise of Mayflower in the comments. This is no doubt due to the seamlessness of the placement, the quality of the brand, and the fact that, as Gabrielle noted, “I’ve built my blog (Design Mom) to be very positive, G-rated site. I don’t write things that encourage controversy. So readers don’t arrive at my site ready to argue.”

I have to imagine that Mayflower was happy with the placement, given the fact that they feature links to all of Gabrielle’s posts on the social media section of their website. They also asked Gabrielle to be a part of their Moving Tips podcast to give readers tips on moving across the country. UPDATE: I spoke to Carl Walter, Mayflower’s in-house PR representative, and he gave me a statement about Mayflower’s experience working on this campaign. It’s definitely positive, and here’s the sound bite takeaway:

It’s often difficult for the Mayflower brand to communicate the raw feelings that people face when moving. Gabrielle and her readers beautifully captured these dynamics in the blog posts and comments. The most exciting part of this endeavor was seeing a community of people come together to share their moving experiences, and Gabrielle helped facilitate that conversation.

In other words, the blog placement accomplished something that could not be accomplished in any other medium. Pretty high praise. You can click here to read the statement from Mayflower in its entirety.

Where Is This Mayflower Model Likely To Work?

This all took place between April and July of 2009, and at the time, Design Mom had between 170 and 200K pageviews per month (according to quantcast). That’s with a readership of about 35K people per month, which means that each visitor is staying on her site for about five page views. At present, there are about 8,000 subscribed readers of Design Mom in Google Reader alone, so she clearly has not only a substantially sized readership, but also an engaged readership. People are not just reading Design Mom, they are subscribing, they are going to multiple pages, either to read more content or to comment, and then they check back to see the comments of other people. These kind of stats suggest not only popularity, but also the presence of a community, and this is an important distinction, because what is really valuable when it comes to online monetization is influence, and influence is not always directly translated into number of page views. For example, if you get a bunch of search engine traffic, you might have a ton of both people and pageviews on your site, but these are all people who are just passing through — they are not going to take your recommendation on things, necessarily. You have virtually no influence. Design Mom has healthy traffic on her site, but she also has a lot of influence with her readers, and that is why she was attractive to a large company for a deal like this.

But you don’t necessarily have to have that amount of traffic to be attractive to a sponsor in this capacity. When thinking about how to match your blog’s readership to a brand, you also want to take into account the size of a company. There might be a smaller business that is interested in working out a placement deal with you, or a barter exchange of some kind. If your blog has some kind of local focus, then you might want to look at businesses and services that thrive on a local customer base. The main way to pitch yourself to any of these businesses is to draw up a picture of your readership, including not only stats but also what kind of people it includes — are they married? do they have kids? are they college educated? what do they like to do in their free time? what kinds of movies or tv shows do they watch? etc. This is the best way to show a brand that you’ve got an audience that shares some ground with their ideal customer. It’s not always about numbers, it might also be about being a good fit.

I think the main thing you want to take into account in any attempt at using the Mayflower Model is that the integrity of your own brand must not be compromised by the deal. You need to think about things from the perspective of your readers: will they be interested in this brand? Is the nature of the brand engagement going to annoy them? Or is it going to be something that sort of fades into the background and kind of whispers at them, without drawing too much attention to itself? And, don’t forget, you’ve got to ask for what you’re worth — don’t agree to do this for a can of air freshener.

"The Mayflower Model: Design Mom Pitches A Deal To A Brand That Already Appeals To Her Readership" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Personal Finance and was originally posted on February 23, 2010. Copyright ®2010 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.